Sarah E. Silverman

Ever since I read it for the first time, I have been endlessly fascinated by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s statement (2006) that educators are among the “controlling professions”: those that define, oversee, and often surveil disability. Educators join doctors, psychiatrists, and agents of mental health services in this group. The idea is not that these professionals necessarily exert control over individuals (though they absolutely sometimes do), but that they control the narrative around pathology and normalcy. This is a hard legacy to confront (for me at least), and the first time I read it I was stung. As a disabled and neurodivergent teacher who advocates for inclusion and designs my courses to be maximally accessible to disabled students, I bristled at being labeled as one of the “bad actors.” But after pushing past this initial reaction, I have come to understand this theory of teachers as one we need to understand and unravel in order to become anti-ableist educators.

The much maligned “medical model of disability” is often interpreted as a feature of the medical profession, but is actually present in many different realms, including education. Snyder and Mitchell (2019) explain that disabled activists’ opposition to medical understandings of disability are not just critiques of doctors and their work but also “the insatiable appetite that medicine generates in nearly all other social institutions” for control. They quote Foucault’s statement in Discipline and Punish that, “The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the ‘social-worker’ judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based…” Even without referring to the “medical model” by name, Foucault argues that this perspective is not upheld exclusively by doctors, and gives educators two separate spots in his list of four “judges.”

I think it very important to consider how teachers perpetuate a medicalized and pathological understanding of disability, and how we may hold ourselves accountable given this tendency. I only just made the connection that teachers’ colleges used to literally be called “normal schools,” in that they train teachers to be overseers of norms around learning, behavior, sociality, and work. While training for teachers is not as explicitly about “norming” anymore (and the names of normal schools were mostly changed), I think this is a legacy that lives on, and I have listed some ways I have observed it below. I write using “we” even when I may not directly engage in these behaviors. I am borrowing this style from the Yom Kippur liturgy, in which we name our wrongdoings in the plural, demonstrating a sense of collective responsibility.

We may not make diagnoses, but we often require them for students to receive support, flexibility, and accommodations (often asking students to spend their own precious time and money on appointments and evaluations). According this system, it is normal to proceed though the class without any negotiation, and abnormal to need flexibility and adjustment.

We create arbitrary rules surrounding the use of technologies and assistive devices, such that students who need these must reveal a diagnosis (not just to the teacher, but to the whole class). These rules “out” and marginalize disabled students, who are so “abnormal” that they need to break a rule other students are required to follow.

We assume students are non-disabled unless we know otherwise, furthering the fiction that disability is a fringe rather than common experience. Similarly, we cut and paste a legalistic and cold disability statement onto our syllabi which offloads the management of disability to another office.

We search for tips on managing disability in our classrooms but rarely reflect on the ableism and norming tendencies of teaching as a profession.

Even though it is painful to confront, an understanding of teaching as a “controlling profession” (historically and today) helps me orient my practice and activism, with a better understanding of what we are working against and working toward. I have worked with instructors who were so thoroughly immersed in the paradigm of “teaching as control and management” that they barely knew what teaching would look like outside this paradigm. What we are “working toward” may look very different in different contexts, but I think it will begin with the space that is created by abandoning our place in the “controlling professions.”

Photo by Rohan Makhecha on Unsplash

References:

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish : The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

Mitchell D., Snyder S. L. (2006). Afterword: regulated bodies-disability studies and the controlling professions. In: Turner D, Stagg K (eds) Social Histories of Disability and Deformity: Bodies, Images and Experiences.

Mitchell, D., & Snyder, S. L. (2019). Minority model: From liberal to neoliberal futures of disability. In Routledge handbook of disability studies (pp. 45-54). Routledge.