Conceptualizing Critical Dis/ability Noticing: Contextualizing Beginning Teacher Noticing to Challenge Ableism in Mathematics Education

• In Event: Conceptualizing Teacher Noticing in Research on Teaching and Teacher Learning

Abstract

There is growing call for mathematics teacher preparation to support teachers to understand “the role of power, privilege, and oppression in mathematics education and equipped to question existing educational systems that produce inequitable learning experiences and outcomes for students” (AMTE, 2017, p. 18). While there is increased attention to power and privilege, dis/ability has been left out of the conversation. I use a slash to denote dis/ability not as an individual trait but, rather, a product of cultural, political, and economic practices in which notions of ability are relied and constructed in tandem with other identity markers (e.g. gender, race, language) (Annamma et al., 2013). Dis/abled students have experienced oppression with great consequence to access in learning mathematics, whose abilities are recognized and valued, and who has authority to decision making in classrooms and school systems (Author, 2020).
This paper draws from the work of teacher noticing to explore how beginning teachers identify and address issues of difference, inclusion, and ableism in mathematics. To conceptualize these processes, we propose the theoretical framework of critical dis/ability noticing to refer to the process of attending, interpreting, and responding to notions of dis/ability in the everyday work of mathematics teaching and learning. Teacher noticing studies highlight student thinking as foundational to classroom activity; this study extends focus on teaching “responsive” to student thinking to attend to students across cultures, languages, and bodyminds. The following questions guide this study: a) What noticing competencies do beginning teachers demonstrate during mathematics methods, student teaching, and first year graduation from teacher preparation in relation to issues of difference, inclusion and ableism in mathematics?; And b) how do contextual factors influence noticing in practice?
To build theoretical knowledge about critical dis/ability noticing processes, the study used a comparative case study design to analyze how beginning teachers identify and attend to dis/ability in mathematics teaching and learning situations and factors that influenced noticing over time and context. Two white teachers and a Latinx teacher who expressed strong commitments to inclusion and addressing ableism and one self-identified with dis/abilities were purposely selected and followed from mathematics methods, into student teaching, to first year graduation from teacher preparation with written, interview, and video data gathered at all three time points to capture their noticing across time and context.
Case analyses revealed two preliminary findings: (a) all three teachers demonstrated a range of critical dis/ability noticing competencies (e.g. discrimination issues, differentiated instruction, barrier removal), but differed in terms of how the phenomena of dis/ability was interpreted (e.g. individual student trait or social and/or political phenomenon); and (b) contextual factors (e.g. teaching setting, school inclusion policies and practices, student demographics) influenced what they noticed and how they responded in terms of behaviorist instructional techniques of identifying and remediating students’ deficits or asset-based pedagogies that honored student self-efficacy and dis/abled perspectives. Findings highlight the need for explicit opportunities to attend, interpret, and respond to the complexity of dis/ability and mathematics education’s role in perpetuating exclusion and oppression for dis/abled students.

Author

• Cathery Yeh, Chapman University