Mildred Boveda
Mildred Boveda is an Assistant Professor of Special Education and Cultural and Linguistic Diversity at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. In her scholarship, she uses the term “intersectional competence” to describe teachers understanding of diversity and how students, families, and colleagues have multiple sociocultural markers that intersect in nuanced and unique ways. She designed the Intersectional Competence Measure to assess teachers’ preparedness for an increasingly diverse student population. Her research focuses on establishing the theoretical and empirical evidence of validity of the intersectional competence construct. Drawing from Black feminist theory and collaborative teacher education research, she interrogates how differences are framed across education communities to influence education policy and practice.Dr. Boveda started her career as a special education teacher in Miami Dade County Public Schools. She engages in various professional activities that allow her to examine the research, practice, and policies involved with educating students with diverse needs. She is currently President of the Division for Diverse and Exceptional Learners of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and the Chair of the Diversity Caucus for the Teacher Education Division of CEC. She earned an Ed.D. in Exceptional Student Education at Florida International University and an Ed.M. in Education Policy and Management from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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professional identities. They expressed the important role that teacher education played in developing an understanding of sociocultural differences. The participants discussed the complexities of intersecting identities when speaking about their own educational experiences and
when considering discriminatory attitudes that persist within minoritized
communities.
but academically trained within the Global North, we adopt a de/
colonial, intersectional feminist lens to analyze the “general education
curriculum” in the United States. We use testimonios, each
told in first-person, as entry points where we situate the entanglement
of gendered, classed, linguistic, and racialized experiences
with disabilities and the US academy. With an understanding that
disability is not to be confused with special education identification,
we examine the experiences of women and girls of Color
with mental disabilities across institutions and educational spaces.
The narratives move from lived experiences with bipolar disorder,
to pedagogical practices employed within the US school context,
to discussions about disabilities in teacher preparation programs.
We offer these stories as collaborative sense-making of the general
education curriculum and the westernized (i.e. colonial/white
supremacist/ableist/patriarchal) ontoepistemology it reinforces.
Transcending curricular approaches that are tolerant of disabilities
and othered sociocultural identities, we propose an intersectional,
de/colonial orientation that is humanizing along the axes of dis/
ability, race, socioeconomic status (SES), class, language origin,
ethnicity, religion, gender expression, sexuality, nationality, and
citizenship. Such an orientation favours relationality and community
over isolation and individualism, and de-centers normative
curriculum in special education and specialized programming.
Institution. I provide examples from a published book, web articles, and personal e-mail communications that reveal how peers, faculty, and administrators reacted to my departures and arrivals. I contend with the paradox of the US academy granting me access to theorists who name critical pedagogy and intersectionality, while simultaneously exacerbating constraints I mitigated as a Black woman with familial ties to the Global South. Centering the de/colonial sense-making women embodying multiple marginality offer, I identify the epistemic frictions that motivated my critical academic migrations. I conclude by offering points of considerations for institutions of higher education that are purportedly committed to equity, inclusion, and supporting diverse onto-epistemic orientations.
and leadership education. We critique colonial assumptions from a post-oppositional approach that moves away from antagonistic discourse and toward considering possibilities for a transformative future. We enact our proposed ethical orientation through personal narratives, critical self-reflection, and prioritizing knowledge construction from (non)traditional spaces such as those created by our mothers. We conclude with points of consideration for those engaged in urban education research that center love-based onto-epistemologies and the lived realities of people who are
traditionally minoritized, racialized, or ignored in academia.