How can we centre disabled people and their family members as knowledge-bearers, enriching classrooms with their perspectives and knowledge in non-traditional ways?

Through testimonies and critical ethnography, and bell hooks’ centering of love as transformative praxis, this book explores the lived experiences of disabled young adults and family members. The testimonies reposition people with disability as knowledge-bearers whose ways of knowing have typically been discounted by professionals. The stories are raw, sometimes painful, enlightening, and filled with hope. The chapters feature stories from both emerging and former educators, the voices of authors with disabilities with and without experience of intersectionality, former practitioners who have supported children with disabilities and their families, family members who have navigated systems, and life through a local and global context. Each story shows the value of disabled people and their families as educators who teach others both informally and formally.

This book is ideal reading for teachers, emerging teachers, curriculum designers, and education policy makers, as well as students of Education, Social Work, Special Education, and Disability Studies.

Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg PhD is Assistant Professor of Special Education at the Pennsylvania State University whose research centers on the lived experiences of people with disabilities and their families, especially people experiencing intersectionality. She is also the mother to a disabled child and lifelong advocate.