Conceptualising disability: a critical discourse analysis of a teacher education textbook

This study examined the conceptualisation of disability in a teacher education textbook. Drawing on Norman Fairclough's post-structurally informed approach to critical discourse analysis, I deconstructed the language used in a science teacher education textbook to portray disability, and examined relationships to broader socio-political contexts in pre-K-12 education and teacher education. The medical and social models of disability served as conceptual lenses for this analysis because they represent the principal paradigms in the fields of special education and disability studies in education respectively. The analysis showed the textbook's conceptualisation of disability was imbued with the medical model, representing disability as a finite, knowable deficit that resides in individual learners, and portraying students with disabilities as needy and passive. The textbook's medicalised conceptualisation of disability is further analysed in relationship to the hegemony of the medical model and the emancipatory ideology of the social model. Implications are discussed for teacher educators seeking to engage preservice teachers in sophisticated thinking about their legal and ethical professional responsibilities toward a more just and equitable education for learners with disabilities.