DSE and Teacher Preparation

Abstract Disability Studies in Education (DSE) is examined as a critical framework for reimagining teacher preparation, tracing its emergence from critiques of special education and highlighting its central commitments: challenging ableism, situating disability within sociopolitical contexts, valuing lived experience, and presuming competence. The discussion addresses how teacher education programs integrate DSE through curriculum and pedagogy, with attention to themes such as deconstructing intelligence, engaging family and community knowledge, and designing inclusive classrooms. It further considers the role of reflective practice in surfacing ideologies of ableism and preparing teachers for the complex dilemmas of inclusion. Structural constraints, including licensure systems and accountability policies, are analyzed for how they both shape and limit the enactment of DSE-informed practice. Teacher education is emphasized as a site for cultivating critical dispositions, ethical responsibility, and political agency, positioning inclusion not as a technical requirement but as a shared social and justice-oriented project.