Professor, San Francisco State University
Visiting Scholar, Center on Adolescence
(Un)Learning Disability: Recognizing and Changing Restrictive Views of Student Ability
How do high school students confront and resolve conflicting messages about their intelligence and academic potential, particularly when labeled with social and learning disabilities? How does disability become “disablement” when negative attitudes and disparaging perceptions of ability position students as outsiders? Following the lives of adolescents at home and at school, Professor Baines will discuss how her book, (Un)Learning Disability, makes visible the disabling language and unconscious social practices that restrict learning regardless of special education services. Her talk will showcase how young people resist disablement to transform their worlds and pursue pathways most important to them.
In writing the foreword, Professor Ray McDermott says, "AnnMarie Baines brings us good news. She gives us reason to believe that millions of disabled children in American schools are in much better shape than their labels imply…Her important news is that no one should ever give up on children, no matter how difficult or even broken they seem, before engaging them as guides to new designs for learning and new sources of critique of what their adults have offered them."
