Srikala Naraian
Biographic Data
| ID | 205778 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Srikala Naraian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Srikala |
| FAMILY NAME | Naraian |
| SIGNATURE | NARAIAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4038-8831 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Diss ing Time, Disabling Narrative
Animated by neuroqueerness as a theoretical and analytical tool for opening up new directions in qualitative inquiry, we attend to the methodological turnings that are provoked when notions of temporality fuse with insights from disability studies. We develop an “assemblage of narration” with Spencer, an autistic and intellectually disabled student, during a series of art-making sessions when we invited disabled middle and high schoolers to expre…
The affordance of sense
This article explores how curriculum can serve our methodological practice as we inquire into inclusive schooling with intellectually/developmentally disabled middle and high school students. Interweaving a theory of activist affordances (Dokumaci, Citation2023) with writings that emphasize the potentiality of transgressive actions via sensory contact, we analyze the curricular affordances of our research space, namely a series of art-making sess…
Getting lost with artifacts in teacher inquiry
This paper attends to the creation and effects of arts-based artifacts when inquiring into teacher embodiment within practices of inclusive education. Taking a postqualitative approach, we engaged in 'making' data with four teacher participants, including an embodied poem, digital boards, and an affective storyboard. These artifacts reflect our conversations with participants and present portals back into them, enlivening and alerting us to the p…
Teaching for inclusion
Explorations of posthumanist methodology for disability studies in education (DSE) research
This paper takes up the struggles of doing of post-qualitative inquiry for inclusion and teacher education for inclusion. As collaborators who have taken different turns in the quest to understand posthumanist methodology, broadly speaking, we write with different voices. We take up two important themes—identity/ethics and becoming—to venture into conversations that might evoke new movements for disability studies in education (DSE) scholars. One…
Making inclusion matter
This paper explores the affordances of critical disability studies (CDS) for curricular theorizing in teacher education for inclusion and socially just pedagogy. Specifically attending to the posthumanist thread within this field, I offer provocations to three tenets that undergird a disability studies informed teacher education curriculum for inclusion, and which are also salient within the larger field of teacher education. These tenets include…
Emergent Concepts of Inclusion in the Context of Committed School Leadership
Inclusion of students with disabilities within general education settings is increasingly accepted as the desirable response of school systems to student learning differences. It has triggered districtwide reforms that are differentially enacted and realized within different schooling contexts. This study explores meanings of inclusion that were produced when three school leaders in a large urban school district adopted buildingwide initiatives t…
Learning to read 'inclusion' divergently
Drawing on our experiences as researchers and educators in multiple national contexts, we argue for the necessity for conceptualizations of 'inclusion' that subsume both the discourse of equity and the material conditions of its enactment. In this paper, we look specifically at two groups engaged in enacting inclusion - novice teachers in the US and school principals in Germany. Using the theoretical frame of new materialisms, we read our data in…
Precarious, debilitated and ordinary
As the effects of high-stakes accountability mandates increasingly impact curricular enactments in schools, careful investigations of the “how” of inclusion may allow the disclosure of its complexity to stretch the ways in which it is currently theorized. Drawing on my prior research, I have extracted three canonical elements of schooling that have remained largely unexamined within curricular theorizing for social justice, namely: the durability…
Teaching for “Real”
Increasing evidence of the re-segregation of students of color within special education suggests that the constructivist-explicit instruction debate may still be relevant for urban educators. While inclusive educators advocate learner-centered constructivist methods for supporting students with disabilities, mainstream special educators equally promote explicit instructional processes. This article describes the literacy instruction of two teache…
Becoming an inclusive educator
Inclusive education complexly defined for teacher preparation
Research in the implementation of inclusive education in international contexts shows that progress in the Global South appears to lag behind nations in the North. In this paper, I investigate this phenomenon not by associating it with regional cultural and socioeconomic resource limitations, but by reconsidering the assumptions within inclusive education scholarship itself. Drawing on the theory of disability as complex embodiment [Siebers, T. (…
Happy places, horrible times, and scary learners
Drawing on data from two studies conducted in US public schools, this paper traces the affective productions and performances of teachers to illustrate the role of affect in delineating (non)normative pedagogical practices in inclusive classrooms. Occupying a borderland space in narrative inquiry that permitted the straddling of differing philosophical traditions, we sought to both acknowledge the agentive work of teachers as well as the affectiv…
Professional Development for Special Education Reform
As urban districts undertake special education reform initiatives to move toward inclusive schooling arrangements, educators are challenged to reflect critically on their practices to support greater participation of all students, including those with disabilities. The authors describe the narratives of three educators who participated in a professional development opportunity offered in the context of special education reform within a large urba…
Love’s labor lost
This study reports on the dilemmas of practice experienced by a parent–school facilitator, Melanie, within a large urban school district. Melanie struggled to reconcile her commitment to families in her school with the demands placed on her by an administrative ideology that viewed families as adversaries. Her attempts to manage the conflicts induced by this situation remained trapped in a polarizing discourse of families as marginalized within a…
Dis/ability, Agency, and Context
In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they coll…
Seeking transparency
The successful participation of students with disabilities in a general education classroom is generally presumed to be contingent on the creation of classroom communities that can nurture the qualities of equity and care and where different forms of diversity are valued. However, there has been less scholarship that documents the production of such communities. This paper reports on an ethnographic study that was conducted in an urban first-grad…
Transforming for inclusive practice
Few models of professional development (PD) are designed to bring about the fundamental shifts in thinking about student behaviour that can support the inclusion of students labelled as having emotional/behavioural disabilities within general education classrooms. In this paper, we seek to accomplish two goals: (1) we briefly delineate the features of a model of PD to build the capacity of teachers to create hospitable classrooms for students wit…
Readiness for Change
There are few instances in the literature on urban school reform that have closely studied specific school buildings to describe the grant resource appropriation process. This study attempts to fill that gap by developing case studies of two middle schools with divergent profiles in resource utilization through micro-ethnographies. One school exhibited optimal engagement with opportunities made available through a large federally funded grant, wh…
Pedagogic Voicing
Within inclusive education research, the call to foster participation stems from a generalized vision for promoting democratic practices within classrooms, prompting the concern for eliciting student “voices.” In this ethnographic study, I explore the utility of “voice” as a workable construct in securing participation within inclusive classrooms. Drawing on the concept of “pedagogic voice” (Madeline Arnot and Diane Reay 2007) that is premised on…
General, special and … inclusive
Teacher discourse, peer relations, significant disability
Mainstream research in the education of students with significant disabilities, which seeks to improve the ways these students can participate successfully in general education settings, has established the importance of teachers and classroom contexts in mediating relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers in the classroom. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the ways in which teacher practice,…
Institutional stories and self‐stories
This paper describes the data collected from a study that examined the participation of two students with significant disabilities in separate settings — a first‐grade classroom and a high school. Interweaving several theoretical strands — disability studies, narrative theory and socio‐cultural perspectives on learning — it incorporates an understanding of relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers that centralizes t…
Becoming an inclusive educator
Happy places, horrible times, and scary learners
Drawing on data from two studies conducted in US public schools, this paper traces the affective productions and performances of teachers to illustrate the role of affect in delineating (non)normative pedagogical practices in inclusive classrooms. Occupying a borderland space in narrative inquiry that permitted the straddling of differing philosophical traditions, we sought to both acknowledge the agentive work of teachers as well as the affectiv…
Dis/ability, Agency, and Context
In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they coll…
Precarious, debilitated and ordinary
As the effects of high-stakes accountability mandates increasingly impact curricular enactments in schools, careful investigations of the “how” of inclusion may allow the disclosure of its complexity to stretch the ways in which it is currently theorized. Drawing on my prior research, I have extracted three canonical elements of schooling that have remained largely unexamined within curricular theorizing for social justice, namely: the durability…
Professional Development for Special Education Reform
As urban districts undertake special education reform initiatives to move toward inclusive schooling arrangements, educators are challenged to reflect critically on their practices to support greater participation of all students, including those with disabilities. The authors describe the narratives of three educators who participated in a professional development opportunity offered in the context of special education reform within a large urba…
Transforming for inclusive practice
Few models of professional development (PD) are designed to bring about the fundamental shifts in thinking about student behaviour that can support the inclusion of students labelled as having emotional/behavioural disabilities within general education classrooms. In this paper, we seek to accomplish two goals: (1) we briefly delineate the features of a model of PD to build the capacity of teachers to create hospitable classrooms for students wit…
Emergent Concepts of Inclusion in the Context of Committed School Leadership
Inclusion of students with disabilities within general education settings is increasingly accepted as the desirable response of school systems to student learning differences. It has triggered districtwide reforms that are differentially enacted and realized within different schooling contexts. This study explores meanings of inclusion that were produced when three school leaders in a large urban school district adopted buildingwide initiatives t…
Learning to read 'inclusion' divergently
Drawing on our experiences as researchers and educators in multiple national contexts, we argue for the necessity for conceptualizations of 'inclusion' that subsume both the discourse of equity and the material conditions of its enactment. In this paper, we look specifically at two groups engaged in enacting inclusion - novice teachers in the US and school principals in Germany. Using the theoretical frame of new materialisms, we read our data in…
Teaching for inclusion
Seeking transparency
The successful participation of students with disabilities in a general education classroom is generally presumed to be contingent on the creation of classroom communities that can nurture the qualities of equity and care and where different forms of diversity are valued. However, there has been less scholarship that documents the production of such communities. This paper reports on an ethnographic study that was conducted in an urban first-grad…
Readiness for Change
There are few instances in the literature on urban school reform that have closely studied specific school buildings to describe the grant resource appropriation process. This study attempts to fill that gap by developing case studies of two middle schools with divergent profiles in resource utilization through micro-ethnographies. One school exhibited optimal engagement with opportunities made available through a large federally funded grant, wh…
Pedagogic Voicing
Within inclusive education research, the call to foster participation stems from a generalized vision for promoting democratic practices within classrooms, prompting the concern for eliciting student “voices.” In this ethnographic study, I explore the utility of “voice” as a workable construct in securing participation within inclusive classrooms. Drawing on the concept of “pedagogic voice” (Madeline Arnot and Diane Reay 2007) that is premised on…
Teacher discourse, peer relations, significant disability
Mainstream research in the education of students with significant disabilities, which seeks to improve the ways these students can participate successfully in general education settings, has established the importance of teachers and classroom contexts in mediating relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers in the classroom. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the ways in which teacher practice,…
Institutional stories and self‐stories
This paper describes the data collected from a study that examined the participation of two students with significant disabilities in separate settings — a first‐grade classroom and a high school. Interweaving several theoretical strands — disability studies, narrative theory and socio‐cultural perspectives on learning — it incorporates an understanding of relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers that centralizes t…
General, special and … inclusive
Teacher discourse, peer relations, significant disability
Mainstream research in the education of students with significant disabilities, which seeks to improve the ways these students can participate successfully in general education settings, has established the importance of teachers and classroom contexts in mediating relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers in the classroom. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the ways in which teacher practice,…
Seeking transparency
The successful participation of students with disabilities in a general education classroom is generally presumed to be contingent on the creation of classroom communities that can nurture the qualities of equity and care and where different forms of diversity are valued. However, there has been less scholarship that documents the production of such communities. This paper reports on an ethnographic study that was conducted in an urban first-grad…
Transforming for inclusive practice
Few models of professional development (PD) are designed to bring about the fundamental shifts in thinking about student behaviour that can support the inclusion of students labelled as having emotional/behavioural disabilities within general education classrooms. In this paper, we seek to accomplish two goals: (1) we briefly delineate the features of a model of PD to build the capacity of teachers to create hospitable classrooms for students wit…
Readiness for Change
There are few instances in the literature on urban school reform that have closely studied specific school buildings to describe the grant resource appropriation process. This study attempts to fill that gap by developing case studies of two middle schools with divergent profiles in resource utilization through micro-ethnographies. One school exhibited optimal engagement with opportunities made available through a large federally funded grant, wh…
Pedagogic Voicing
Within inclusive education research, the call to foster participation stems from a generalized vision for promoting democratic practices within classrooms, prompting the concern for eliciting student “voices.” In this ethnographic study, I explore the utility of “voice” as a workable construct in securing participation within inclusive classrooms. Drawing on the concept of “pedagogic voice” (Madeline Arnot and Diane Reay 2007) that is premised on…
Love’s labor lost
This study reports on the dilemmas of practice experienced by a parent–school facilitator, Melanie, within a large urban school district. Melanie struggled to reconcile her commitment to families in her school with the demands placed on her by an administrative ideology that viewed families as adversaries. Her attempts to manage the conflicts induced by this situation remained trapped in a polarizing discourse of families as marginalized within a…
Dis/ability, Agency, and Context
In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they coll…
Professional Development for Special Education Reform
As urban districts undertake special education reform initiatives to move toward inclusive schooling arrangements, educators are challenged to reflect critically on their practices to support greater participation of all students, including those with disabilities. The authors describe the narratives of three educators who participated in a professional development opportunity offered in the context of special education reform within a large urba…
Inclusive education complexly defined for teacher preparation
Research in the implementation of inclusive education in international contexts shows that progress in the Global South appears to lag behind nations in the North. In this paper, I investigate this phenomenon not by associating it with regional cultural and socioeconomic resource limitations, but by reconsidering the assumptions within inclusive education scholarship itself. Drawing on the theory of disability as complex embodiment [Siebers, T. (…
Happy places, horrible times, and scary learners
Drawing on data from two studies conducted in US public schools, this paper traces the affective productions and performances of teachers to illustrate the role of affect in delineating (non)normative pedagogical practices in inclusive classrooms. Occupying a borderland space in narrative inquiry that permitted the straddling of differing philosophical traditions, we sought to both acknowledge the agentive work of teachers as well as the affectiv…
Becoming an inclusive educator
Precarious, debilitated and ordinary
As the effects of high-stakes accountability mandates increasingly impact curricular enactments in schools, careful investigations of the “how” of inclusion may allow the disclosure of its complexity to stretch the ways in which it is currently theorized. Drawing on my prior research, I have extracted three canonical elements of schooling that have remained largely unexamined within curricular theorizing for social justice, namely: the durability…
Teaching for “Real”
Increasing evidence of the re-segregation of students of color within special education suggests that the constructivist-explicit instruction debate may still be relevant for urban educators. While inclusive educators advocate learner-centered constructivist methods for supporting students with disabilities, mainstream special educators equally promote explicit instructional processes. This article describes the literacy instruction of two teache…
Emergent Concepts of Inclusion in the Context of Committed School Leadership
Inclusion of students with disabilities within general education settings is increasingly accepted as the desirable response of school systems to student learning differences. It has triggered districtwide reforms that are differentially enacted and realized within different schooling contexts. This study explores meanings of inclusion that were produced when three school leaders in a large urban school district adopted buildingwide initiatives t…
Learning to read 'inclusion' divergently
Drawing on our experiences as researchers and educators in multiple national contexts, we argue for the necessity for conceptualizations of 'inclusion' that subsume both the discourse of equity and the material conditions of its enactment. In this paper, we look specifically at two groups engaged in enacting inclusion - novice teachers in the US and school principals in Germany. Using the theoretical frame of new materialisms, we read our data in…
Making inclusion matter
This paper explores the affordances of critical disability studies (CDS) for curricular theorizing in teacher education for inclusion and socially just pedagogy. Specifically attending to the posthumanist thread within this field, I offer provocations to three tenets that undergird a disability studies informed teacher education curriculum for inclusion, and which are also salient within the larger field of teacher education. These tenets include…
Explorations of posthumanist methodology for disability studies in education (DSE) research
This paper takes up the struggles of doing of post-qualitative inquiry for inclusion and teacher education for inclusion. As collaborators who have taken different turns in the quest to understand posthumanist methodology, broadly speaking, we write with different voices. We take up two important themes—identity/ethics and becoming—to venture into conversations that might evoke new movements for disability studies in education (DSE) scholars. One…
Teaching for inclusion
Getting lost with artifacts in teacher inquiry
This paper attends to the creation and effects of arts-based artifacts when inquiring into teacher embodiment within practices of inclusive education. Taking a postqualitative approach, we engaged in 'making' data with four teacher participants, including an embodied poem, digital boards, and an affective storyboard. These artifacts reflect our conversations with participants and present portals back into them, enlivening and alerting us to the p…
Diss ing Time, Disabling Narrative
Animated by neuroqueerness as a theoretical and analytical tool for opening up new directions in qualitative inquiry, we attend to the methodological turnings that are provoked when notions of temporality fuse with insights from disability studies. We develop an “assemblage of narration” with Spencer, an autistic and intellectually disabled student, during a series of art-making sessions when we invited disabled middle and high schoolers to expre…
The affordance of sense
This article explores how curriculum can serve our methodological practice as we inquire into inclusive schooling with intellectually/developmentally disabled middle and high school students. Interweaving a theory of activist affordances (Dokumaci, Citation2023) with writings that emphasize the potentiality of transgressive actions via sensory contact, we analyze the curricular affordances of our research space, namely a series of art-making sess…
Pedagogy (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (14 works) · Collaborative Teaching and Inclusion (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Disability Education and Employment (10 works) · Inclusion (mineral (10 works) · Mathematics education (10 works) · Social science (10 works)