Molly Baustien Siuty Teaching Statement

Teaching Statement
The educator has the duty of not being neutral. Paulo Freire
The act of teaching is never a neutral or nonpolitical practice- nor should it be (CochranSmith, Shakman, Jong, Terrell, Barnatt, & McQuillan, 2009). Teachers and teacher educators
function as a bridge between their students and the larger political and social context. Behind
every facet of education, there are issues of power and privilege that inform educational
decisions from who gets retained to the organization of desks in a classroom (Picower, 2013).
However, these power structures often operate invisibly to educators. Teaching for social justice
necessitates (re)conceptualizing1 of the role of teacher to one that contributes to the broader
political project of identifying, exposing and eliminating oppression as it functions in educational
institutions. As a teacher educator, I believe that I have the opportunity and the responsibility to
model social justice through my own teaching. My teaching statement will provide background
and context for how I have come to situate myself as a critical inclusive teacher educator.
Background
Before attending the University of Kansas, I taught for five years in New York City
Public Schools in the Bronx and East Harlem. Due to my own privilege as growing up without a
disability label, I was astounded to see my students with disabilities being segregated from their
classmates and excluded from activities such as science fairs, field trips and specials such as
music or art. Even though this school embraced progressive and so-called evidenced-based
teaching techniques such as Response to Intervention, students with disabilities still existed on
the margins of the school community. When they failed to demonstrate academic growth over
time, administrators directed students with disabilities to outside specialized schools that were
supposedly better suited for their needs. I often felt caught in the middle of what parents who
wanted their children to remain at their community school and the agenda of my school
administration. Even an organization seemingly committed to promoting social justice through
education, those with power wielded it to segregate the very students and families it was
supposed to serve. Moreover, the ways in which a mostly white teaching force making
educational decisions about a population of majority black and brown families caused me to
question my original intentions for going into the education field. To be honest, I wanted to teach
in urban schools in order to fix what I considered a broken educational system. Social
narratives that perpetuate the achievement gap, Eurocentric values, and neoliberal reforms
cultivated my white savior mentality. Even though I did not have the knowledge or language
of critical theory at the time to fully recognize the inner workings of systemic oppression and my
role within it, I understood that I needed to grapple with these issues in order to fulfill my
commitments to social justice. The following section describes how my teaching philosophy has
shifted to embrace critical inclusion as a result of my doctoral studies.
Towards Critical Inclusive Teacher Education
Mainstream views of inclusive education in the United States define inclusion as the
placement of students with disabilities into classrooms with nondisabled peers (Artiles &
Kozleski, 2007). This overly simplistic approach to inclusion as a place limits the promotion of
social justice for two reasons. First, it does not explicitly recognize the social construction of
disability (Connor, Gabel, Gallagher, & Morton, 2008) by maintaining that disability is a deficit

1
I use parentheses to denote the ongoing and iterative nature of developing my teaching
philosophy.

Molly Baustien Siuty Teaching Statement

located within the person and needs to be remediated. Secondly, it does not take an intersectional
approach in understanding how other social markers such as race, gender, or socioeconomic
status influence the social processes through which students are referred and identified into
special education (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013; Artiles, 2013; Collins, 2013; Harry &
Klingner, 2006). For these reasons, I use the term critical inclusion to describe my pedagogical
orientation and set it a part from mainstream definitions of inclusion that are insufficient to
promote social justice.
As a critical inclusive educator, I take a sociocultural perspective on disability that is
informed by critical theory. A sociocultural perspective invites the examination of how the
environment and person interact to mutually construct ones abilities (Collins, 2013). In this way,
educators reconsider how the context, such as general curriculum and classroom organization,
limit students potential rather than remediating the individual person. Moreover, it connects
understandings of disability to larger cultural practices and sociopolitical interests. Critical
theory, particularly approaches with an emphasis on intersectionality (e.g., Annamma, Connor,
& Ferri, 2013), explicate how other historically marginalized identities such as race, gender, and
class are intertwined with disability to promote particular forms of educational oppression.
Exposing and interrogating this oppression is crucial for increased social justice in teaching.
Transforming Ourselves
Indeed, critical inclusive education is not just a noun but also a verb, meaning that is an
ongoing project to resist oppression and transform school sites. Critical inclusion will challenge
the business as usual approach (Slee, 2013) and require fundamental changes to schooling
practices (Narian, 2016). Artiles and Kozleski (2007) describe a transformative agenda for
inclusion as an intellectual, moral and political act. It means making visible the ways in which
schools systems have ignored, silenced, and excluded certain groups of students and privileged
others. They describe this work as praxis (p. 362) or the pairing of critical reflection with
action. Praxis for inclusion requires ongoing attention in order to ensure that students and
families on the margins are continually brought back into the community and resist reverting
back to the status quo. In order to bring about transformation, teachers must understand how
inclusion is tied to a larger agenda for social change. Teachers will need to take an active and
deliberate role in the transformation of schooling as a whole (Broderick et al., 2012). As a
teacher educator, I hope to foster teacher activist communities that can extend beyond
preparation and into teachers careers.
Conclusion
Allan (2005) writes, Inclusive education is not a project to be applied to a discrete
population of children, but rather something we must do to ourselves. As opposed to the
educator I once was, I now understand that teaching for social justice cannot be reduced to a set
of technical skills nor applied in only select contexts to certain groups of people. Rather, it
involves continuous critical reflexivity of ones own practice. We must be able to position our
own identities and personal histories in relation to power and privilege, while understanding the
affordances and constraints that our social identities, institutional context, and positioning
provide. This work is political. This work is challenging. Yet, it is a necessary part of socially
just teaching and teacher preparation.