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In special education classrooms, students find ways to care without correction.
During the four minutes of “passing time,” when other middle school students charged through the halls, calling out and dapping up their friends before stopping by their lockers and scrambling to get to their next classes, Justin and Laura would stand in the hall by their classroom door, waiting until the bell rang and they were allowed to return inside. Mikayla, on the other hand, would step out into the hallway, moving her body in a dancing step down and back. She would call out to other students as they passed, even when they were unlikely to reply. With her hoarse voice, a dime-sized scar near her left eye, and slightly off-kilter gait, she appeared disabled and was viewed with suspicion by some other students. Justin, who wore thick glasses but did not appear disabled, kept an eye on Mikayla as she moved up and down the hallway. If she said or did anything too strange, or if he sensed other students starting to snicker, he would call her back. He understood that attention from other students could spiral into social danger, including denigration and bullying. Yet he never corrected Mikayla, never telling her, for example, “Don’t say hi to kids you don’t know.” His protectiveness toward Mikalya was a form of care that did not intend to remediate.
Caring for Each Other
Justin, Laura, Mikayla, and seven other students were classmates and participants in my study, a school-based ethnography examining disability and personhood. They were placed in a self-contained special education classroom where they were educated separately from their non-disabled peers. Even though they had no need to change classrooms, their teacher nonetheless insisted that they take their break in the hallway, shooing them out of their seats. In American public schools, disabled youth with significant support and academic needs are often educated in separate programs. In my study location, a racially and ethnically diverse, working-class, suburban middle school, the effect was to exclude them from the social life of the school, making friendships and connections with other peers difficult. Teachers and administrators primarily viewed these students as needing remediation in academic and practical abilities so that one day they might be able to hold a low-skilled job. “These kids, they’ll never be able to care for themselves,” I often heard teachers say.
How could these students be competent at caring for each other and yet be considered by their teachers to be incompetent at caring for themselves? The disconnect emerges from different notions of care. Caring for oneself under contemporary capitalism means being independent, functionally and financially. Predicting the future, teachers imagined that these students would have difficulty holding a job, struggle to remember to pay their bills, and lack the responsibility to live on their own. Like many special educators, they worked from a stance of epistemic transparency, as if they knew the extent of their students’ potential, even though predicting the future is impossible. At the same time, students’ current abilities and future potential, both in academics and caregiving, were overlooked.
I observed these students participate in caring social relations, affirming each other as valuable, and more foundationally, as legible within the social environment of their school that tended to treat them as wrong, strange, or invisible. Care helps to constitute the shared moral status of personhood, and through acts of care, these students co-created each other as persons. This care was, in some ways, unexpected. Despite creative forms of mutual aid in disabled communities, disabled people are almost always seen as recipients rather than providers of care, and disability is often considered to interfere with relational capacities such as empathy and understanding of others.
The care that circulated between youth was affirmative and empathetic, accounting for each other’s preferences, affective responses, and sensory needs. Students were protective of each other and supplemented each other’s gaps in understanding. This kind of care engendered a stance towards personhood that accepted disabled bodyminds and did not require normative standards of interpersonal interaction. These care relationships created and sustained personhood within disability worlds and showed that caring without correction or rehabilitation was possible. The kind of person-affirming care that circulated among these students is desperately needed yet in short supply in educational and therapeutic spaces.
Affirmative Care in the Classroom
The relationship between Mikayla and Justin was just one of many relations in the classroom through which care circulated. The carework of another student, James, was central. At the beginning of the year James was frequently absent and seemed not to like school. He rarely engaged with me as the other students did. I saw him sitting with general education boys during lunch and playing basketball on open gyms days, the two periods of the day in which he had the opportunity to be in general educational spaces. I also saw him, in a marked display of maturity, ignore another boy who was trying to goad him into a fistfight. In the self-contained classroom, students looked up to him. Disconnected from teachers and the demands of school, he seemed to be able to intuit what other students needed. Even though they were both eighth graders, James would treat Mikayla like a kid sister, sometimes murmuring, “What are we gonna do with this girl…” when she exasperated the rest of the class with frequent hellos and requests for hugs.
James’ caring capacity emerged clearly during the end-of-year celebration. The three special education teachers had organized a water fight as a part of the festivities. As the students got ready to go outside, they discussed who would “get” whom. Jamal, who tended to avoid engaging with others, asked James to team up with him and go after Laura. “Oh, with me? Okay boy,” James responded. Their teacher, Mrs. Rettig, pressed him: “You’re going to get Laura? What about Chris? What about Jhene?” Mrs. Rettig sought to draw Jamal into more social relations, attempting to normalize his social relations by extending them. James responded differently. He was game for exactly what Jamal proposed, and nothing more. “Okay, we gonna get her. I got you, boy,” he told Jamal. A team of Jamal, James, and Treveon coalesced and the water fight commenced.
It was glorious. In the lawn that stretched between the school and a stand of trees, remnants of the woodlands that once blanketed this area, students grabbed buckets, water balloons, and hoses. Under the saturated blue of the June sky and the heat of the sun, they dumped buckets of water on each other, shrieking and dashing away only to slip on the bright green of newly cut grass. The challenge and collaboration issued by Jamal, taken up by James and Treveon, and accepted by Laura provided the foundation for the playful delight of the water fight. James and Treveon chased Laura down, holding her by the shoulders while Jamal dumped a bucket of water on her, dousing James in the process. Other students found ways to join in, splashing each other and their teachers.
Empathic Water Fighting
Lest this seem aggressive or misogynistic, be assured that in this water fight none of the students were angry or vindictive and there was no roughness or force. Even Laura, Jamal’s target, showed deep familiarity and acceptance of Jamal’s emotion. She could have escaped or evaded if she had wanted to, but it was as if in accepting Jamal’s buckets of water, she signaled that she understood and accepted his sentiment. Like James and unlike Mrs. Rettig, Laura’s empathy towards Jamal was a form of care that accepted his preferences instead of attempting to shift them in a more normative direction. Laura recognized and accepted that she had caused Jamal consternation when she started eating lunch with him in the office instead of in the cafeteria.
The cafeteria was a wild place: large, chaotic, echoing with shouting and friendly and not-so-friendly mockery that makes up middle school sociality. Neither Laura nor Jamal was comfortable there. Laura had been able to stand it as long as she was with her best friend Justin, but Justin was out for the last month of school for a medical procedure. Unable to bear the cafeteria on her own, she had been given permission to eat lunch in the office. Jamal, however, had been eating lunch in the office since the beginning of the school year. Laura’s emergent need for a lunch space pressed up against Jamal’s ongoing arrangement for a separate space, and the two were forced to eat together. Placed together thus by their teacher, who may have seen an opportunity to encourage both of them to socialize more normatively, Laura understood that Jamal did not want to eat with her just as she understood that, like her, he could not tolerate the cafeteria.
Without the political language of disability justice, inclusion, or pride, James, Treveon, Justin and Laura practiced deeply affirmative care for nonnormative modes of being. Their care for their classmates was a form of resistance to school and therapeutic systems that enforce normative modes of relating in speech (only one greeting, only to certain people), activity (walking, not dancing down the hall) and physical closeness (eating together). Justin’s care affirmed Mikayla’s way of being and moving in the world, while also recognizing the risks she faced. Enacting the water fight together, James and Laura accepted Jamal’s emotion and preferences and facilitated their expression. In the process they enacted relationships of mutual affirmation, becoming caregivers and strengthening the relations that create moral personhood. Justin’s care for Mikayla sought to protect but not correct, James’ care for Jamal sought to facilitate but not extend, and Laura’s care for Jamal sought to empathize but not apologize. All of these forms of care emphasized the present moment and, for their duration, constituted all parties as persons legible to each other. Their daily caring labor of creating persons left aside questions of future potential, which remains unknowable anyway, for the immediacy of the present.
Tricia Niesz is the section contributing editor for the Council on Anthropology and Education.