With the support of the work of scholars in critical disability studies, crip theory, and poststructuralism, my intention in this paper is to explore some narrative fragments of my experiences teaching ‘Leonard’ and the ways we both accepted and resisted each other. Judith Butler’s question: “What does it mean to require what breaks you?”, will be central to investigating our mutual dependency on each other in ways that emphasize the tensions between my ‘authority’ as a teacher and his ‘resistance’ as a student. The first part of this paper will apply the work of critical disability studies scholars such as Erevelles (2011, 2013), Titchkosky (2008) and Gabel et al (2013), as a way to contextualize and orient my relation to Leonard within an educational landscape that reads Leonard as a problem that needed fixing (presumably by me as the teacher). The second part of this paper will seek to ‘crip’ the image of the teacher ‘fixing’ the ‘problem’ child and demonstrate the ways this story is perpetually, always and already disrupted and failing. In applying the work of McRuer (2006) among others, the intent in this section is to explore how resistance in both its passive and active forms is necessary in both the (re)forming and breaking of the distinct yet linked subject positions that Leonard and I inhabit. The final section of this paper will turn to the work of Mitchell et al (2014) and their conceptualization of cripistemologies as desiring failure as resistance to success, alongside a retelling of my persistence in the face of Leonard’s resistance. Ultimately the intention of this paper is to make a contribution to critical disability studies and crip theory by exploring both the limits and potential of the intertwining ‘matrix of relations’ Butler (2015) offers as hopeful possibility.

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By situating this article within disability studies, decolonial studies and postcolonial studies, my purpose is to explore orientations towards independence within public school practices and show how this serves to reinforce hierarchies of exclusion. As feminist, queer and postcolonial scholar Ahmed (2006, p. 3) contends, “Orientations shape not only how we inhabit, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy toward” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 3). I wonder how the policies and practices that I am oriented towards as a public school teacher limit the possibilities of encountering teaching and learning as a mode of reckoning and apprehending “this world of shared inhabitance?” I also wonder how remaining oriented towards independence as the goal of learning simultaneously sustains an adherence to colonial western logics under the current neoliberal ethos. Through Ahmed’s provocation I explore how the gaze of both teachers and students in public schools remains oriented towards independent learning in a manner that sustains conditions of exclusion, marginalization and oppression.

What does it mean to teach and learn about becoming human amidst disability and race in the elementary school classroom? This broad question guides my conceptual paper here in a manner that focuses on the fruitful possibilities at the intersections between the fields of disability studies and decolonial studies. The first part of this paper intends to explore how the concepts of “dysconscious racism” (King, 1991, p. 133) and “dysconscious ableism” (Broderick and Lalvani, 2017, p. 894) are useful tools through which to conduct an analysis of how our education system remains rooted in the practices of exclusion and/or conditional inclusion that continue to valorize a subjective self steeped in western colonial logics. Through decolonial studies and Global South disability studies, the second portion of this paper seeks to question the limits of strategies of resistance that reinforce western-centric conceptions of the self while also making a case for interdependence.

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