Illuminating the epiphany: reflecting on disability and inclusion in education

Storytelling is vital to disseminating knowledge in the educational arena. As a provider of professional development to teachers and training to pre-service teachers, I often receive a common piece of feedback: “Your stories caused me to have a lightbulb moment”. Fascinated with the concept of the epiphany and how that epiphanic moment causes us to shift our beliefs or attitudes, I began writing about the epiphanies that shifted my perception and transformed my teaching practice. When I first worked in special education, I was out of my depth. In all honesty, I viewed students with a disability through the cultural lens of pity and sadness. The many students whom I encountered soon disrupted my beliefs, and I quickly found myself advocating their equitable rights and inclusion in educational settings. The autoethnography enables the writer to provide valuable insight into human behaviour and retelling stories can pull at the heartstrings. An integral component of the autoethnography is the epiphany as method; where the stories evocatively ask the audience to reflect on their own view of disability and inclusion. This study contains two vignettes that elucidate the epiphanic moments of profundity that transformed my pedagogical position and attitude towards disability and inclusion.