Bridging the Gap Between Two Divergent Special Education Fields

Quick Take

• The subfields of Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education have their own unique and divergent perspectives about how to educate students with disabilities.

• Erica Mason and a colleague are proposing a framework that provides a middle ground for the divergent entities.

• That framework, called Critical Special Education, can benefit researchers, teachers, and teacher educators in special education as people from both subfields look to create more just and humanizing education for students with disabilities.

If Erica Mason hadn’t chosen to go into the field of special education, she likely could have carved out a solid career as a mediator, negotiator, or diplomat.

That’s the role that Mason, an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education, is playing in trying to bring together two sides with divergent views in special education.

“Traditional Special Education was formalized in 1975, when the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was conceptualized,” Mason says. “Disability Studies in Education broke off from Traditional Special Education, and that’s how we ended up where we are today.”

Bridging the Gap

The two fields have been in a bit of a standoff. But Mason and her coauthor, Katherine Lewis from the University of Washington, are trying to bridge the gap that has formed between the two sides. Mason and Lewis recently published a paper, “Critical Special Education: Navigating Special Education Realities and Working Toward the Ideals of Disability Studies in Education,” in the journal Exceptional Children. The article explores the two perspectives and proposes an alternative Critical Special Education framework that bridges the gap between the two subfields, leveraging the best of both existing special education structures to reduce harm, and creating more just and humanizing education for students with disabilities.

Part of their efforts also resulted in a chapter in a forthcoming handbook on Critical Special Education, a viewpoint the two scholars are espousing to help people from both subfields best serve special education teachers, teacher educators, and researchers—and ultimately, of course, students with disabilities.

“There’s always been this divide between these two entities,” Mason says. “Traditional Special Education almost always houses the teacher licensure side of things, whereas Disability Studies in Education deals with the more conceptual or theoretical landscape.”

That has resulted in the two subfields “not really talking well to each other,” Mason notes.

The division has also made it difficult for people who conceptually or epistemologically exist between the two spaces to occupy a middle ground, she adds.

“We wrote this paper to say that it doesn’t have to be an either-or thing; it can be both-and,” she says. “It’s not that the two entities can’t coexist, but there are some real tensions around that coexistence. In our paper, we lay out what each group considers knowledge, the theoretical stances they often take, and their relationship to teacher education and research.”

Despite those differences, Mason says, the two fields have the same ultimate goals and concerns about the education of children with disabilities. “The question is how to start the dialogue, because that’s where people’s different points of view come into play.”

Occupying the Middle Ground

That’s also where Critical Special Education comes into play.

“Critical Special Education is a really delightful occupation of the middle ground,” Mason says. “Katie and I see ourselves as situated clearly between Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education. We’ve grounded our work in the idea of harm reduction,” which comes from Public Health and focuses on minimizing the negative consequences associated with risky behaviors in the short term.

Mason and Lewis didn’t invent the term “Critical Special Education,” but they are reviving it, Mason says. “We have given it a little different meaning, because before it was on a more personal or individual level,” she explains. “We are offering some language around who we are and helping identify each other in this space. We’re saying if you find yourself in a very practical space, be it as a teacher educator or as a person in a department, and you’re looking for a way to coexist both in the institutional spaces you’re in and in looking outside of the system towards change, then Critical Special Education gives you a language to do that, a way to find other people doing similar work.”

The Role of Critical Special Education

Critical Special Education, Mason says, has many functions:

• “It helps people to think about holding that tension between the two fields. The fields are in tension with one another, but that tension can be navigated.”
• “It encourages people to consider the kind of incremental steps they can take to be within their structure but to also be making progress. We make no secret of the idea that this framework is very much on the incremental side of change.”
• “It can generate conversations and help people who feel stuck find other people who are trying to navigate the same waters as they are.”
• “It helps people realize you don’t have to be either a traditional special education researcher or a disability studies scholar; you can be both.”
• “It softens the divisions, or perceived divisions, between the fields.”
• “It helps people find creative solutions to those really complex problems that we’re all trying to address.”

"A Useful Tool"

“We’re not being critical of special education; we’re being critical in special education,” Mason notes. “If you’re institutionally affiliated with Traditional Special Education, what does it mean to look inward and say, ‘Okay, if this is the structure we have today, I can acknowledge that. Now, how can I grow in that structure?’”

It’s important, Mason says, to examine the structures that can harm students and teachers. She points to the idea that to qualify for services in special education, a student needs to be given a disability label, which can be stigmatizing. Yet, without the label, they don’t get the services.

“We’re not saying there’s a right way to think about this,” she notes. “We’re bringing nuance and complexity to issues that are nuanced and complex and giving people some language or an idea about how to go about this.”

To that end, Mason and Lewis have proposed some tenets of Critical Special Education, modeled after the tenets of Disability Studies in Education.

“Critical Special Education helps people think about educational change through a more incrementalist lens as opposed to a radical or transformative lens,” Mason says. “I really believe it can be a useful tool for preservice teachers, teacher educators, and researchers.”

Link to Lewis and Mason's recently published paper here...