About

Maggie Beneke is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington College of Education, with additional appointments as Affiliate Faculty in Disability Studies and the Banks Center for Educational Justice. Her scholarship focuses on transforming deficit discourses surrounding young children's identities and competencies, especially those marginalized by intersecting oppressions such as ableism, racism, and linguicism. Coming from a background as a white woman scholar and former inclusive early childhood teacher who was labeled with a disability as a child, she draws on critical disability studies in education and disability justice movement work. Her recent research examines how young children, families, and early educators negotiate, resist, and imagine beyond oppressive notions of 'normalcy' in early literacy contexts, and how such resistance can inform shifts in teacher education and early childhood education.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Pedagogy
• Developmental psychology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Law

Selected publications

• Resisting developmentalism: A Black mother-teacher's relational pedagogy of knowing her child

  Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood · 2025-11-27

  articleSenior author

  Early learning contexts often promote narrow developmental expectations that inherently ignore and dismiss Black boys’ ways of knowing and being. However, adults in their lives can resist how rigid racial-ability hierarchies are instantiated in early childhood. This qualitative case study examines how a Black mother-teacher and her preschool-aged son engaged in co-resistance within their classroom. We asked: How are a Black mother-teacher's beliefs about child development constituted through, and in resistance to, normative developmental expectations, and how she and her son negotiate those expectations in their early learning environment? Findings reveal forms of resistance enacted through protection, the valuing of multiple ways of knowing, and collaborative learning. These insights illuminate how resisting developmentalism in solidarity with Black children is both relational and pedagogical.

  PublisherDOI

• Revealing and resisting ableism in the deficit positioning of families

  Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood · 2025-11-24

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “I Draw Mommy Right Here . . . Wearing Mask”: Care, Criticality, and Crip Linguistics Through Early Childhood Literacy

  American Educational Research Journal · 2025-09-16 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The intersecting crises of 2020 had profound impacts on disabled young children. Existing literature has centered on the challenges disabled children faced and the interventions they needed. Few studies have offered counternarratives that showcase their critical insights, playful interactions, or relational meaning making. In this qualitative case study, we explored how disabled young children and their caregivers used language and literacy as they processed converging social crises. Drawing on critical childhood studies and crip linguistics, we share findings from analyses of virtual art/writing workshops. We highlight how children and caregivers recognized one another’s meaning making, co-constructed spaces for refusal, and navigated fantasy and reality together. Out findings contribute to literature on early childhood education, literacy studies, and disability studies in education.

  PublisherDOI

• “So That I May Hope to Honor You”: Centering Wholeness, Agency, and Brilliance in Qualitative Research With Multiply Marginalized Young Children

  Educational Researcher · 2024-03-12 · 15 citations

  article

  Scholars of early childhood education have urged qualitative researchers to adapt their methods for use with young children. However, unjust social imaginations of childhood (e.g., who is considered a “child”) play out in qualitative research, particularly for young children who are made most vulnerable by intersecting oppressions (e.g., racism, linguicism, ableism). Extending Morrison’s metaphor of “the white gaze,” we argue that qualitative research is often framed through an “adult gaze,” which presumes children’s worth in terms of who they will ultimately become and differentially imagines who is considered a child in the present. Informed by theoretical understandings from the fields of critical childhood studies and early literacy studies, we consider how qualitative researchers might disrupt the adult gaze and honor multiply marginalized children by centering their wholeness, orienting toward their agency, and creating space for their brilliance.

  PublisherDOI

• Struggling toward abolition and dreaming beyond ableism in teacher education

  Theory Into Practice · 2024-05-15 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abolition is a verb, referencing how people build safe conditions while dismantling (and developing solutions beyond) harmful institutions, including within education. Considering disability justice movement work in our roles as teacher educators, we explored how we might contend with the harmful purposes and functions of educational structures as we prepare future teachers to adopt abolitionist stances in their pedagogies. We begin with the premise that the current educational system, rooted in ableism, is fundamentally designed to rank, categorize and hypervalue/devalue children based on ability. Ableism intersects with multiple oppressions, fueling the inequitable distribution of resources in special/gifted education; and racist educational outcomes. To divest from ableism — decoupling learning from punishment in practice — we share three pedagogical examples from our own teaching, discussing how we support future teachers to imagine and enact teaching practices beyond providing services or accommodations, so that multiply-marginalized children and educators can be recognized as whole.

  PublisherDOI

• Solidarity on the screen and six feet apart? DisCrit mothering amid multiple social crises

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2024-02-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In justice movements, solidarity means showing up for the humanity of others. This paper explores DisCrit mothering as a form of solidarity with children and families dehumanized by ableism and racism. As three motherscholars, who occupy varying spaces of privilege/marginalization in the academy, we reflect on our attempts to support our communities through DisCrit mothering, especially amid a global pandemic, uprisings for racial justice, and ongoing climate crises. As we encountered physical distance from our children’s learning communities, we asked: What might solidarity look like? To answer this question, we share how we attempted solidarity from a distance.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• DisCrit mothering: interrogating consequential education for our children’s lives and humanity

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2024-08-14 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this special issue, a collective of mother-scholar-activists focus on exploring the possibilities for an intersectional critical stance for motherhood. Building on and extending the field of Critical Race Parenting (ParentCrit), we propose a global DisCrit Mothering approach. We draw from Disability Critical Race Theory in Education (DisCrit) and Revolutionary Mothering, to forward DisCrit Mothering as politicized action (as opposed to biological function). Such politicized action is necessarily rooted in defiance and radical love for children dehumanized by intersecting oppressions (i.e., ableism, racism, linguicism, cisheteropatriarchy) in schools. Moreover, we view DisCrit mothering as an interdependent educational praxis that attends to the ways in which many of these intersecting oppression impact mothers themselves, often limiting their capacity to advocate for their children.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Conceptualizing White-Ability Saviorism: A Necessary Reckoning With Ableism in Urban Teacher Education

  Review of Educational Research · 2024-04-02 · 11 citations

  article

  White saviorism is a well-documented phenomenon in the education literature. Particularly, researchers have made connections between white saviorism and teacher preparation for urban contexts serving Students of Color negatively impacted by legacies of systemic racism. Scholars are increasingly taking an intersectional lens to understand the ways in which racism and ableism intersect, yet much of the literature on white saviorism does not critically examine the role of ableism. In this meta-ethnography, we review extant qualitative research on urban teacher preparation in an effort to extend the analysis to include a robust examination of ableism and deepen our understandings of white supremacy in these spaces. To this end, we conceptualize white-ability saviorism as a more comprehensive and precise way to understand the dynamics at play in urban teacher preparation that contribute to white supremacy and perpetuate educational inequities for urban Communities of Color.

  PublisherDOI

• A DisCrit Analysis of Quality in Early Childhood: Toward Pedagogies of Wholeness, Access, and Interdependence

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2022-12-01 · 25 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Background: In U.S. contexts, the language of “quality” early childhood education is widely invoked to evaluate the “goodness” of teaching and learning and is often leveraged in attempts to ameliorate inequities. Likewise, efforts to define and achieve generalizable conceptualizations of early childhood quality often guide what takes place in teacher education. Though objections to quality reform efforts and the ways they uphold white supremacy have been extensively discussed, less work has explicitly examined how ableism intersects with racism in the ways quality is defined and applied in early childhood. Purpose: The purpose of this conceptual article is to extend prior critiques of quality to critically examine intersections of racism and ableism in the definitions, measurements, and enactments of quality early childhood teaching and learning. We bring disability critical race theory (DisCrit; Annamma et al., 2013) into conversation with literature on quality in early childhood to examine how traditional notions of early childhood quality position and affect multiply-marginalized children, families, and teachers. We emphasize how dominant notions of early childhood quality are reinforced and can be disrupted in teacher preparation. Interpretive Analysis: We utilize DisCrit’s seven interrelated tenets to analyze how ableism and racism mutually reinforce notions of early childhood quality by: (1) predefining universal goals for teaching and learning; (2) reducing the complexity of teaching and learning; and (3) discarding the wisdom of multiply-marginalized children, families, and teachers. Each of these technocratic processes rely on one another (and at times, overlap) to uphold whiteness and ableism in both early childhood practice and teacher education; exposing them allows us to imagine alternate ways of conceptualizing and enacting meaningful early education. Through DisCrit praxis, we offer an alternative language of evaluation that centers multiply-marginalized young children, families, and teachers using pedagogies of wholeness, access, and interdependence. Conclusions: At the nexus of ableism and racism, standardized notions of early childhood quality create myriad forms of harm for multiply-marginalized children, families, and teachers. Although the language of quality pervades the field, we know it is not the only way. We implore teacher educators to support teacher candidates in developing a DisCrit praxis, as we engage in such processes of reflection and action ourselves. When teaching and learning are rooted in principles of wholeness, access, and interdependence, we put multiply-marginalized communities at the heart of our work, reclaiming and enacting meaningful pedagogies in early childhood.

  PublisherDOI

• DisCrit Literacies: Early Childhood Teachers Critically Reading School as Text and Imagining an Otherwise

  Proceedings of the 2022 AERA Annual Meeting · 2022-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jordan Taitingfong

  5 shared

• Emily Machado

  Florida International University

  5 shared

• Hailey R. Love

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  5 shared

• Gregory A. Cheatham

  University of Kansas

  5 shared

• Ariane N. Gauvreau

  4 shared

• Carlyn Mueller

  4 shared

• Susan R. Sandall

  University of Washington

  4 shared

• Molly Baustien Siuty

  Portland State University

  3 shared