Toward Equity in Mathematics Education for Students With Severe Disabilities: A Case Study of Professional Learning

• In Event: 16.043 - Applying Cultural Historical Activity Theory to Resolve Long-Standing Inequities at the Intersections of Dis/ability, Race, and Language in Education

Abstract

Many students identified with severe dis/abilities continue to be educated in self-contained or separate environments where they have limited access to the general education curriculum and opportunities to engage in learning with their non-dis/abled peers. Our framework for educational equity in the context of this study draws from Gutiérrez (2013), and requires a focus on access, achievement, identity, and power within the context of mathematics curriculum and instruction, which we extend to account for students with severe dis/abilities. This presentation reports on a study in which we examined teachers’ expanded notions of equity in mathematics education as they participated in a series of professional learning community (PLC) sessions.

We drew from the notion of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987). We examined contradictions: historically evolving tensions that emerge and are addressed in activity systems (Engeström & Sannino, 2010) through a process of deliberate examination and actions that lead toward expansive learning (Roth & Lee, 2007). Accordingly, we examined: (1) Tensions and contradictions that emerged during the professional learning activity system where we introduced tools and facilitated discussions with the object of advancing equity in mathematics education for students with severe dis/abilities.

Researcher-designed and facilitated PLC sessions, researcher debriefs, session transcripts, and individual interviews comprised our primary data sources, all of which we conducted and collected over a six-month period. We employed an interpretive approach (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008; Yanow, 2014) to explore our two inquiry areas. We analyzed data using a three-stage process where each subsequent stage refined our development of major themes and subthemes. We used CHAT to during the final stage to frame salient elements of each theme to better understand and organize the sources of the contradictions in the activity systems, its relatedness to other elements in the system, and subsequently how learning was expanded through some of the ways those contradictions were addressed. We approached trustworthiness mainly via researcher debriefs and member checking (Brantlinger, Jimenez, Klingner, Pugach, & Richardson, 2005).

With regard for our focus on PLC activity system tensions and contradictions, three major themes emerged: (1) special education teachers were positioned as marginalized professionals, (2) special education students were positioned as marginalized learners, and (3) teachers recognized and addressed these marginalizations which consequently led to expanded learning toward equitable mathematics education for students with dis/abilities.

This study confirmed and provided additional insights into teacher and organizational learning grounded in CHAT and Engeström and Sannino’s (2010) concept of expansive learning. Specifically and with regard to our second inquiry area, we found teachers’ understandings of mathematical equity for students with severe dis/abilities attended to (1) transforming and formulating new school cultures, (2) constructing new theoretical knowledge and concepts of practice, and (3) hybridizing the work of separate structural entities. These results not only offer insights into equitable practices in mathematics on marginalization encountered by special educators and students with dis/abilities, but also on contradictions that mediated expansive learning through facilitators and participants’ recognition of and moves made toward countering systemic tensions.

Author

• Kathleen King Thorius, Indiana University - IUPUI