Transdisciplinarity as Multimodal Reimaginings of Deficit Framings of Disability in School Science

• In Event: Critical and Emergent Perspectives on Transdisciplinarity in Learning

Abstract

Objectives

Disabled students in science are most often positioned as deficient, needing assistance and accommodations to participate in science learning activities (McGinnis & Kahn, 2014). One group of disabled students that has been almost left out of inclusive science education research is users of augmentative and alternative communications (AAC) technologies. The term AAC is used to describe a variety of tools, from picture-based communication books to voice output devices, which generate spoken words from user-inputted symbols, typing or predictive text. They are often used by students with autism spectrum disorders, cerebral palsy, apraxia of speech and other disabilities that can impact expressive language. This critical review paper explores the possibilities inherent in the multi-modal ways of knowing and creativity of disabled students in rethinking the relationship that disabled students are thought to have with scientific knowledge and practices.

Modes of Inquiry and Theoretical Framework

We offer a transdisciplinary account through integrating literature in critical disability studies, human computer interaction, and scientific modeling, and ask how the everyday representational practices that disabled children engage in with assistive and communicative technological devices are synergistic with modeling in science education. Challenging typical deficit framing of AAC users, HCI researchers illustrated the complexity and richness of conversations of between AAC users, non-AAC users and communication partners in terms of the multimodality of symbolic, gestural, material and linguistic representational resources in order to establish common ground (Higginbotham, 2009; Ibrahim et al., 2018). At the same time, the emphasis on modeling as the central practice of science and science education offers us essential and deep synergies. Scientists leverage the similarities between models and the natural world to generate hypotheses and test generalizations about natural processes (Giere, 2004) through repeated layering of multimodal discourses (e.g., Lemke, 1998), in ways that deeply intertwine epistemic and representational practices (Pickering, 1995).

Warrants for Arguments/Point of View and Scholarly Significance

We propose that the emphasis on multimodality as a central feature of scientific modeling has the potential to be deeply synergistic with the representational practices of AAC users in a way that can contribute to re-understanding AAC users as valued actors in classroom scientific practices. There is ample evidence in the literature on AAC users’ communicative strategies that suggest that AAC users are continuously engaged in interpreting, adapting, and creating multimodal representations (Higginbotham, 2009; Ibrahim et al., 2018). The choice of a single word on an AAC device often emerges from a heterogeneous set of actions that involve multiple modes of representational communication such as gestures and diagrams, as well as sophisticated and sometimes subversive repurposing of symbols, words and sounds to communicate analogical meanings or assert agency within an interaction (Doak, 2019). This paper presents a conceptual analysis of the intersections of how multimodality is taken up in studies of AAC users and of scientific representation in schools, culminating in a framework for conceptualizing how modelling experiences in school science can begin from (rather than merely accommodate) the complex understanding and experience of representation of AAC users.

Authors

• Marie-Claire Shanahan, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary