Description:

• Comfy Cozy Community (CCC) teaching and learning is connected to the disability justice tenet #1 of INTERSECTIONALITY: “We do not live single-issue"lives"—Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”

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Prior knowledge reflection:

• Who has access to experiencing CCC teaching and learning spaces? Who doesn’t?

• Why are teaching and learning spaces often not comfy, cozy, and community-centered?

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Essential question:

• How can educators proactively enact and practice intersectionality within CCC teaching and learning?

• How can educators continuously educate themselves and others to fully enact and support intersectional teaching and learning?

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Objectives:

• To provide examples of enacting and practicing intersectionality in the CCC teaching and learning classroom.

• To continuously research, learn, and teach intersectionality.

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Content:

• Within her Black Disability Politics book, Black disabled feminist, Sami Schalk, maps the ways in which the disability rights movement was intersectional when supporting multiply connected and inseparable communities through the example of the Black Panthers and LGBTQ organizers collaborating in solidarity with disability rights activists who led section 504 and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) sit in protests. Black Panthers, LGBTQ, and disability rights activists took care of each other, fed and bathed each other, and met access needs through providing accessible ramps, wheelchairs, canes, ASL, and more. Black Panthers, LGBTQ, and disability rights activists working together is an example of intersectionality how access to public spaces, education, businesses, housing, and more offered through section 504 and the ADA impacts people of interconnected identities. The issue of disability rights and access expands to our multiple and inseparable communities. Disability is an intersectional race, class, gender, and sexuality issue. Our communities are intertwined, multiple, connected, and inseparable. To learn more, read Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk.

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Effective classroom strategies:

• Educators can name one issue related to the subject of their teaching and prompt students to discuss how this one issue expands out to be shaped by and impact multiple and interconnected communities.

  • For example, when teaching Science, educators can center sick, disabled, two spirit, non-binary, transgender, queer, and/or BIPOC scientists and how their contributions to science benefit our multiple and interconnected communities.

  • For example, when teaching Language Arts, educators can center the wisdom, writing, art, and activism of multiply marginalized communities and how these contributions impact all of our communities.

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References:

• Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.