DisCrit at the margins of teacher education: informing curriculum, visibilization, and disciplinary integration

Teacher education is polarized. Traditionalists tend to center core practices, while justice-oriented scholars center ideologies embedded within our practices. Both, however, must consider how practices and ideologies can operate interdependently to disrupt inequity and cultivate agency among all students. Drawing on an intersectionally-aligned theory, DisCrit, we argue that practices andthe ideologies they embody can be problematized vis-à-vis how racism and ableism operate to support hegemony bound in, and represented by, the normative center of schooling. In this paper, we unpack what DisCrit affords critical teacher education, how individuals with complex support needs are located within DisCrit’s tenets, if at all, and the application of DisCrit in the disciplinary case of science education. By considering possibilities not yet explored within the literature, we further critical conversations about the relationship between DisCrit, silenced perspectives of populations unaddressed in teacher education for equity, and new disciplinary possibilities of what we mean by justice-oriented applications of theory and practice.