Promoting ‘Epistemic Fissures’: Disability studies in teacher education

Historically, teacher education in special education has focused on identifying characteristics of various disabilities and promoting best practices for intervention and remediation. This article introduces a disability studies approach to teacher education in special education. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary area of study that utilizes the lenses from social sciences and humanities to view disability from personal, social, cultural, historical, critical, and literary perspectives. Pre‐service teachers who took such a course were interviewed with regard to their views on disability and inclusion. The results suggest: (1) the importance of providing a disability studies approach to future teachers; and (2) ways in which disability studies in teacher education can continue to be developed. Acknowledgement This study was supported in part by the University of Wisconsin System, Wisconsin Teaching Fellows program.