Theoretical Cruxes in the Intersection of Disability Studies and Critical Mathematics Education

• In Event: Integrating Disability Studies and Critical Mathematics Education; Emerging Perspectives

Abstract

In this presentation, I will discuss two theoretical cruxes as we move towards using a disability studies lens in mathematics education. To do so, I will take up an idea of disability studies (DS), not as the study of people with disabilities, but as a methodology (Schalk, 2017). Looking at mathematics education with the methodology of DS means interrogating the production of both ability and disability in current mathematics classrooms and the institutions that prepare teachers. I will discuss theories of complex embodiment, and how those can resolve the binary between disability being “real” and being socially constructed. Second, I will problematize neurodiversity as a theoretical lens.
Both real and socially constructed. One problematic crux is the use of the social model to erase biological difference between those with and with and without disabilities. In my work on how learning disabilities are constructed within particular mathematical pedagogies, I am often asked if I do not believe learning disabilities exist, when disability is real in the body, AND socially constructed. Learning disabilities are biological, AND they are also constructed through particular pedagogies, sets of assumptions, and diagnostic criteria that are always already historically situated. In DS, there is now a long history of a critique of the strong social model, based in theories of complex embodiment. This foregrounding of bodily experience is also related to feminist perspectives in DS (Wendell, 1996). DS allows us to insert the body into theory, insists so in fact. Theories of complex embodiment move beyond this binary – bodily experience and its representations mutually co-create each other (Siebers, 2008).
The use of complex embodiment allows new ways to see (taste/hear/touch) in mathematics. Studying blind learners of mathematics, Fernandes and Healy (2013) write that including disability allowed them to "learn to see and to hear mathematical practices even when they do not sound or look exactly as we have come to expect" (p. 37). When mathematics educational research has included an embodied perspective on students with disabilities, it has complicated taken-for-granted assumptions about the established sequences of learning, as students with disabilities had unique ways of engaging in mathematical learning, simultaneously both sensorial and abstract (Radforth, 2013).
Towards a critical neurodiversity. The neurodiversity movement, developed from activism of autistic people, demands that such individuals be understood not as deficient, but as different: part of the natural and beneficial cognitive diversity of society (Robertson & Ne’eman, 2008). Neurodiversity is a powerful way to reframe disability, and allows sustained attention to be paid to the cognitive strengths of people with neurodiversity. It has valuable applications to reframing learners in mathematics.
At the same time, neurodiversity brings new critical issues. One is its possible co-option by a neoliberal agenda, as it can be shifted towards an individualist rather than a communal ideology. Neurodiversity discourse often creates a binary between neurodiverse individuals and “neurotypicals.” This positive reframing of disability as difference continues to posit the existence of “normal” individuals, reframing abnormal, but leaving the concept of normal in place.

Author

• Rachel Lambert, Chapman University