Performing (Dis)Ability in the Classroom: Pedagogy and (Con)Tensions

Abstract

Disability has become a pervasive and contested issue on college campuses, and instructors and students find themselves occupying physical and discursive spaces that hold great pedagogical potential. This essay pursues such a consideration. It examines one physically disabled student's staged performances of a personal narrative, her ethnography of a university's disabled student services office, an in-depth interview with the student, and the author's family experiences with disability to illustrate the ways a performative pedagogy offers insight into (dis)ability in the classroom. The analysis illuminates the classroom as a site for identity negotiation, performance as a tool to deconstruct and reconstruct notions of ability, and family relationships as an integral part of a critical communication pedagogy.