New Book Explores Culturally Diverse Families Experiences of Special Education
New Book Explores Culturally Diverse Families Experiences of Special Education
Zachary Rossetti, associate professor in BU Wheelock’s special education program, is the co-author of a new book, Affirming Disability: Strengths-Based Portraits of Culturally Diverse Families, published by Teacher’s College Press this winter.
The book features narrative portraits of six immigrant families and their children with disabilities, discussing their cultural histories and personal perspectives on their engagement with the special education process.
In it, Rossetti and co-author, Lesley University’s Janet Story Sauer, offer strategies for challenging a system that has been implicated in the overrepresentation of minorities in special education, reflections and feedback from preservice teachers, questions for classroom discussion, and a personal action plan framework meant to guide improvements in cultural competence and inclusive special education practices.
Rossetti recently shared his thoughts on the research and writing process that went into the book’s creation, as well as his hopes for how educators might use the work in their own practice.
Why did you and your co-author decide to create a book specifically focused on immigrant families that include one or more children with disabilities?
Parent involvement in their children’s education leads to positive student outcomes in general education and special education. Additionally, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has mandated parent participation for over 40 years. (By parent, I refer inclusively to parents, legal guardians, and other primary caregivers.) Yet, most parents experience challenges in trying to achieve this level of participation. Specifically, parents often feel as if they must fight with school personnel for appropriate services for their children. Because of the antagonistic and often hierarchical nature of relationships and interactions with school personnel, parents often engage in advocacy rather than collaborating as equal members of Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams.
My co-author and I decided to write a book focused on Immigrant families because they face additional barriers to participating on their children’s IEP teams and advocating for appropriate services for their children. In addition to facing the challenges most families of children with disabilities face, immigrant families also experience linguistic barriers (e.g., lack of translated materials, lack of professional interpreter at meetings), cultural differences (e.g., different education policies in home country and US, different views of disability), and systemic barriers (e.g., institutional racism).
My co-author and I were also impressed by the fierce advocacy and determination of immigrant families—mostly mothers—in overcoming these barriers. We were compelled to share their stories to document both the barriers they were facing and the ways in which they advocated for their children.
What are some of the key strategies for developing understanding and empathy that you hope service providers take away from this book?
Our qualitative research project—and this book—grew out of our initial focus on inviting immigrant mothers of children with disabilities to our courses to share their experiences and expertise with our students. We did this for two reasons. First, we felt that our students needed to hear directly from immigrant mothers themselves—with opportunities to ask them questions and interact with them—in order to develop empathy (i.e., feeling similarly to another person) rather than sympathy (i.e., feeling sorry for another person). Second, we aimed to support development of empathy by disrupting traditional hierarchies (e.g., researcher-researched, education professionals-families) through collaboration and repositioning ourselves as learning from the expertise of immigrant families.
How did you and your co-author conduct the research, or source the material, that makes up this book?
The book emerged from an ongoing, multiyear (five-and-a-half years at the time of publication) qualitative research project with immigrant families. We documented the presentations in our courses (audio recordings, slides, and artifacts such as photos and copies of IEPs), conducted formal interviews with all of the mothers, engaged in ongoing informal conversations and interactions with the mothers (e.g., before and after their presentations, at professional conferences, socially in the community), and collected our students’ (over 100 students) assignments written in response to the mothers’ presentations as data. We have lots of data!!
Notably, rather than analyzing the data and writing the book ourselves (as the experts), we aimed to continue disrupting traditional hierarchies of the researcher and the researched by co-constructing the narrative portraits that make up the book. Thus, data collection also included sharing our notes and the student assignments with the mothers so they could respond to them. Then, each chapter was co-constructed in an iterative and individualized process by one of the mothers with Janet or me.
How did the process of writing this book—from material collection to actual manuscript creation—connect with your role as a teacher educator? In other words, are there connections between what you teach in your classes at BU Wheelock, and the knowledge you share in this book?
Yes, there are important connections between my instructional role in teacher education and the process of writing this book. In fact, the book is designed for preservice and in-service teachers with an explicit goal of developing a stance of cultural humility in order to better support and collaborate with immigrant families of children with disabilities in their professional work. We specifically prefer to emphasize cultural humility rather than cultural competence because it emphasizes the ongoing process of learning rather than suggesting that we can learn a limited set of facts that make us competent.
Within educational fields, we have long known about the importance of family engagement and culturally responsive practices, yet barriers persist. By emphasizing cultural humility and writing this book in the manner we did, we hope to move preservice and in-service education professionals from a deficit-oriented perspective to an asset- or strength-based approach for the immigrant families and their children with disabilities they serve.
Your book includes unique “talk back” sections that feature reflections on these family narratives from pre-service teachers. Why was it important to include their perspectives in your book?
The “Student Reflection” sections of the book offer readers opportunities to ask critical questions and to reflect on how these family portrait narratives might be similar to and different from other resources or personal experiences. In this way, we hope that the Student Reflection sections facilitate deeper engagement with the book in ways that result in changes in perspectives and practice. The Student Reflection sections may prompt a discussion, articulate differing points of view, and many times, model the ongoing process of developing cultural humility.
You are your co-author are both based in Boston, a city with a growing number of families who are culturally and linguistically diverse. How can a large school district—from individual counselors and teachers all the way up through leadership—better serve those families when one or more of their children have disabilities?
First, some of the barriers reflect specific and discrete problems (e.g., lack of skilled interpreter, lack of translated materials, rushed IEP meetings, school personnel leaving IEP meeting early, services on IEP not being delivered) with known solutions. These can and should be addressed immediately, especially because many of them reflect lack of compliance with federal mandates. These problems largely center on language access and parent participation in IEP meetings, or school accountability for implementing the IEP.
The larger issues involved in better serving immigrant families of children with disabilities include possible improvements in teacher preparation and retention, administrator preparation and retention, and home/school/community collaboration. One concrete strategy that we feel addresses these issues is supporting educational professionals to move from a deficit-oriented perspective to an asset- or strength-based approach for the immigrant families and their children with disabilities they serve, as I stated earlier. We attempt to do this in our book by presenting the narrative portraits instead of traditional case study reports of children with disabilities and their families. The traditional case study report usually begins with descriptions of the child’s disability diagnosis and related characteristics, and thus is categorical rather than individualized.
Additionally, case study reports tend to take a deficit-oriented approach, highlighting the child’s challenges and identifying them as innate; they often do not include mention of the child’s interests, strengths, familial context, linguistic preferences, or cultural background. Alternately, the portraits foster holistic descriptions of children with disabilities that emphasize who they are, what they can do (i.e., strengths, skills, and interests in addition to their areas of need), what supports they need, and what strategies or approaches work best to provide those individualized supports. The portraits also include the children’s familial contexts, linguistic preferences, and cultural backgrounds.