Beth A. Ferri, Ph.D.

Associate Professor in Teaching and Leadership
and Cultural Foundations of Education at Syracuse University

Keynote presentation: Doing a (dis)Service: Reimagining Special Education from a Disability Studies Perspective.

"Special education has been criticized for the overrepresentation of students of color, the lack of efficacy of pull-out programs, and the continued segregation of students with disabilities. Steeped in medical and deficit models of disability, special education positions disabled students as objects of a clinical and diagnostic gaze that leaves little room for alternative ways of knowing about disability experience. Because students are positioned as objects of study—as problems to either correct or remediate—their voices and perspectives remain silenced and devalued just as their bodies remain segregated and marginalized. When we view disabled people as sources of knowledge, we can begin to reimagine practice in ways that honor different ways of knowing and being, that seamlessly integrate support for all students; and that demand transformation of existing notions of social justice in education."

At Syracuse University, Professor Ferri serves on the graduate faculty in Disability Studies, coordinates the Masters program in Secondary Inclusive Special Education and the Doctoral program in Special Education, and serves on the Advisory Board for Women's Studies and the Senate committee for LGBT concerns. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Adapting Instruction for Inclusive Classrooms, Critical Issues in Dis/Ability and Inclusion, and Disability Studies. Her research interests include inclusive education, disability studies, critical pedagogies and methods, and narrative inquiry.

Professor Ferri has recently published articles on the intersection of race and disability in special education history and practice in Teachers College Record, The Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice, Remedial & Special Education, Journal of Learning Disabilities, and the Journal of African American History. Her book, written with David J. Connor, titled Reading Resistance: Discourses of Exclusion in Desegregation and Inclusion Debates, chronicles through newspaper sources how problematic rhetorics of race and disability were used to maintain and justify segregation after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. She has published articles in feminist disability studies in Prose Studies, Women's Studies International Forum, and Women's Studies Quarterly, and was recognized in 2003 as Outstanding Young Scholar in Disability Studies in Education, and has been nominated by her students for recognition in the Who's Who Among American Teachers (2000, 2002, & 2005 editions).