As these examples suggest, activist educators attempt to understand and improve their practices while simultaneously developing new understandings and relationships.

Activist teacher researchers, by contrast, begin with the assumption that there is much that they don’tknow about students. Like theorists who have highlighted the importance of regarding disability as “a social location, complexly embodied” (Siebers, 2008, p. 14) rather than an individual pathology, activisteducators take social location—their own and their students’—seriously. The normal curve model is by definition generic rather than local: Students are charted and evaluated from a distance