Dr. Adai Tefera
Dr. Tefera’s research helps to improve special education policies and practices for minoritized families—particularly families of color, im/migrant, and working-class families, as well as their children with disabilities.
“Listen to the whispers.”
“My early experiences in schools continue to fuel me and my focus on justice in education.”
What drives the work that you do including your scholarship as well as any other work you'd like to highlight?
Beginning when I was young, as early as elementary school, I remember observing the ways race and ability shaped the educational opportunities young people faced. This included the experiences of my sister whose disability labels relegated her to limited educational opportunities despite legal protections in the law that guaranteed inclusive and equitable classrooms. This was complicated by race given our family's African immigrant origins. As a young Black student, I too experienced the ways hierarchical structures within school - e.g., tracking - granted differential access to curricula based on social, cultural, and racial backgrounds. These key moments shaped my research, most recently my focus on improving special educational policies and practices for minoritized families, particularly families of color, im/migrant and working-class families and their children with disabilities.
What fuels your passion?
My early experiences in schools continue to fuel me and my focus on justice in education for multiply marginalized populations. In addition, my sister, whose disability labels, and my family, always center and ground me especially in focusing on connecting research with policy and practice with the hope that the work I do helps make some contribution to improving outcomes for multiple marginalized students with disabilities and their families.
What advice would you give your younger self? Or, if you could give advice to your younger self, what would it be?
Suleika Jaouad notes the importance of making decisions in life based on what is "most natural, where there's the most energy." I would tell my younger self to listen to the whispers that are always telling me how to move in the direction of where there is the most energy and what is most natural rather than what might seemingly bring the most "success." It is when I do this that the rhythms of my life feel most satisfying. I would remind my younger self to listen to and trust those whispers.
“It is critical to be informed and understand how historical dynamics are shaping current educational practices.”
Find some time to listen to Dr. Tefera’s Inquiry Oasis Podcast, in which she explains how her own schooling and family experiences with unfairness and limited opportunities shaped her insightful policy-focused research agenda about the relevance of history, context, and intersectionality in disproportionally placing racialized students of color and multi-lingual learners in special education and disproportionally referring them for disciplinary actions and school district responses to all of this.
Ep. 10: Dr. Adai Tefera: Exploring the Layers of Inequity Race, Disability, and Education