Kala naraian

Naraian Research Career

  • Use of the Metaphor Within Autism Research-Danforth & Naraian

    Explores metaphors commonly used in autism research that may lend itself to viewing students with autism as machines that need to be normalized rather than human.
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    Disability Studies in Education

  • "I Didn't Think I Was Going to Like Working With Him, but Now I Really Do!": Examining Peer Narratives of Significant Disability

    • Explores “How narratives of other students… can influence the participation of classmates with significant disabilities”. Asks: “What kind of narratives about severe disability circulate in classrooms that include one or more students with significant disabilities? What are the educational practices that contextualize those narratives? What are the effects of such narratives on the participation of all students within the setting?” (p. 108)
  • Institutional stories and self stories: Investigating peer interpretations of significant disability

    Explores how both self narratives and institutional narratives affect the understanding of identities and the formations of relationships with peers for students with disabilities
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    Narrative Theory

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    Socio-cultural Theory

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    Ethnographic Research

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    Family

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    Identity

  • General, special and...inclusive: reconfiguring professional identities in a collaboratively taught classroom

    Examines professional identities within the collaboration of special education and general education teachers.
    • “We need more descriptions about how educators, both special and general, orchestrate multiple discourses within their teaching-learning contexts and the authorial spaces they create in their efforts to implement inclusive classrooms.” (1685)
  • "Why not have fun?" Peers make sense of one inclusive high school program.

    Explores peer relationships in the context of enjoyable learning opportunities for students with disabilities and their peers in an inclusive classroom.
  • Disentangling the social threads in a communicative environment: A cacophonous tale of alternative and augmentative communication (AAC)

    Explores the experience of using specific technology for communication for students with disabilities in the classroom.
    • "The promise of technology to deliver access to mainstream educational experience and to enable self-expression is not separable from the individuals who use, administer or moderate it." (264)
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    Shift of Focus to Teacher Experience

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    Agency

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    Technology & Resources for Access

  • Seeking transparency: the production of an inclusive classroom community

    Examines teachers' experiences in their attempt to achieve transparency within an inclusive classroom community.
    • “Data from this study showed that overall transparency in the classroom was weakened by proceduralised notions of caring that left teacher practice highly susceptible to the influence of norms.” (956)
  • Teacher discourse, peer relations, significant disability: unraveling one friendship story

    How does teacher discourse (speech and dialogue) shape the identities of their students?
    • Study draws heavily on Vigotsky’s ZPD as well as Mercer (2002), and Ferguson (2003).
    • Teacher led discussions and discourse are instrumental in the understanding of disability and thus the sustaining of meaningful engagement with students with disabilities and their peers.
  • Readiness for Change: Appropriation of External Resources in Two Urban Naraian, Brown, & Navarro

    Examines ore-existing structure of schools to find relationship with the effectiveness of external federally funded programs being carried out within the school for a limited period of time.
    • “Replicating a successful urban school model in a new context generally has low transferability” (44)
    • Gear Up
    • Suggests that long term systemic changed would be better achieved by involving communities to improve their own conditions
  • Pedagogic Voicing: The struggle for Participation in an Inclusive Classroom

    Explores the utility of "voice" in an inclusive classroom and links that to the experience of participation for students with disabilities.
    • "Integrating silences into conceptions of participation means that we need a new situation of voice which implicates the ideological becoming of all individuals so that well-intentioned efforts to unearth previously silent voices are not oblivious to the conditions of speech that may equally include to whom one is speaking." (259)
  • Transforming for inclusive practice: professional development to support the inclusion of students labelled as emotionally disturbed--Naraian, Ferguson & Thomas

    Within the model of participatory action research, examines and narrates the experiences of teachers within a particular model of professional development which aimed to "to build the capacity of teachers to create hospitable classrooms for students with labels of emotional disabilities" (721)
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    Participatory Action Research

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    Teacher Education & Professional Development

  • Negotiating Normalcy with Peers in Contexts of Inclusion: Perceptions of youth with disabilities in India

    Examines different learning environments that students with disabilities in India can be exposed to and narrates their experience with forming meaningful peer relationships and learning experiences.
  • Dis/ability, Agency, and Context: A Differential Consciousness for Doing Inclusive Education

    Naraian uses the framework of Third World feminism, in particular the idea of differential consciousness, to explore the oppositional agency of all those working towards more inclusive experience for students with disabilities in India.
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    India

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    Third World Feminism

  • New Literacy Studies: An Alternative Frame for Preparing Teachers to Use Assistive Technology--Naraian & Surabian

    Draws on New Literacy Studies, which emphasizes the situatedness of all student learning, and a socio-cultural lens to examine how to best prepare teachers ideologically to use asisstive technology and promote increased accessibility to learning for all students.
  • Prefessional Development for Special Education Reform: Rearticulating the Experiences of Urban Educators--Naraian & Oyler

    “What should professional development for inclusively oriented practice consider in seeking such complex change?” (500) "The challenge of any PD effort, therefore, to build the capacity of practitioners to implement special education reform may lie ultimately in its capacity to remain relevant to dynamic professional lives of its participants.” (523)
  • Agency in real time? Situating teachers' efforts towards inclusion in the context of local and enduring struggles

    Examines struggles that teachers face when endeavoring to "do" inclusive education. Employs Holland and Lave's idea of "local contentious practice" to analyze the issues teachers face withing their school environments.
    "I draw on the inevitable entanglement if diverse commitments within educators' practices to suggest that inclusion as an act of deferring may be a helpful complement to those efforts...while upholding long-term commitments such as the disruption of norms of ability." (2)
  • Love's labor lost: emotional agency in a school worker's story of family advocacy

    Unearths the role of emotion in one particular educators work towards inclusion to "affirm the growing recognition of the place of emotion within efforts to work towards socially just practices, particularly within schooling contexts steeped in deficit-based discourses of students and families." (108)
  • Uncertainty as a foundation for change

    Narrative commentary to reflect on the experience of many educators in dealing with oppositional beliefs and polarized practices and in somehow navigating this uncertainty with intention as they carry out their work towards change in education.
  • New linkages for a complex inclusive education: Third World Feminism, disability studies, and post-psotivist realism.

    Naraian makes connections between Seibers (DS), Mohanty (TWF), and post-psitivist realism theories to describe the need to have a complexly defined inclusive education in teacher preparation, one that emphasizes process and agency.
  • This New Field of Inclusive Education: Beginning a Dialogue on Conceptual Foundations--Danforth & Naraian

    Critiques special education knowledge as the foundation for inclusive education and calls for the expansion of theoretical framework to include Democracy, Interpersonal relationships communicating value, Political consciousness, Situated Agency.
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    Emotion (later Affect) in Teaching

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    Realism

  • Inclusive education complexly defined for teacher preparation: the significance and uses of error

    Naraian suggests that "Seibers' realist theory of complex embodiment for a disability identity politics may increase the elasticity of inclusive education" (951). Encourages preparing teachers to accept a wide range of embodied experiences with disability and to accept "error" as a means to constantly widen the parameters of accepted truths.
  • Teaching for "Real": Reconciling Explicit Literacy Instruction with Inclusive Pedagogy in a Fourth-Grade Classroom

    Examines teachers "real" experiences with literacy instruction in urban classrooms and describes "eclecticism" as a part of these teachers practice.
  • Happy places, horrible times, and scary learners: affective performances and sticky objects in inclsive classrooms

    Explores the emotional experiences (affect) of teachers and how their practice is linked to fear, affection, and understandings of disability. Conclusions acknowledge teachers' need to jump or straddle boundaries of beliefs and practices to be effective in different situations and calls "to scholars of education to pay more attention to mobilities in researching schools, and to problematize school-centered conceptions of pedagogy." (1145)
  • Teaching for Inclusion: Eight principles for effective and equitable practice (book)

    Culmination of decade of research work.
  • When Theory Meets the "Reality of Reality": Reviewing the Sufficiency of the Social Model of Disability as a Foundation for Teacher Preparation for Inclusive Education

    Examines the in-class responses of a cohort of teacher education students to "inquire into the effectiveness of curriculum for the complex work entailed in implementing inclusive pedagogy" (82). Findings show a need for detailed work in agency, formation of teacher identity, emotional preparation for complex work, and guiding teachers through self-reflective journey that positions them within inclusive work.