Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Educational Equity and Difference

Abstract

The author argues for an interdisciplinary perspective to study the complexities of educational equity and transcend the limits of previous research. He focuses on the racialization of disability as a case in point; specifically, he reviews the visions of justice that inform the scholarship on racial and ability differences and situates their interlocking in a historical perspective to illustrate how race and ability differences have elicited paradoxical educational responses. The author also examines how the convergence of contemporary reforms is creating fluid markers of difference that change meanings across contexts, thus having distinct consequences for students’ identities and schools’ responses. He concludes with an outline of guiding ideas for interdisciplinary research on inequities that emerge at the intersections of race and ability differences.