Including Students With Disability in Sociopolitical Reforms of Mathematics Education: Supporting Participation, Access, and Identity (Poster 5)

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Ability, Normativity, and Equity: Methodologies in Mathematics Education Resistance and Justice

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Frameworks

Students with learning dis/abilities are often excluded from conversations about high-quality mathematics instruction and conversations about equitable mathematics instruction. They are often denied the opportunities that other students have to engage in mathematics with teachers who implement practices that the field of mathematics education would consider ‘high-quality” or “equitable.”

Notions of inequities around opportunities to learn mathematics with understanding, and positioned as capable in doing so, are well-documented for other marginalized populations, such as students who are racially and linguistically diverse. However, many in mathematics education do not recognize or include students with dis/abilities in their work (whether this work is explicitly centered around issues of equity or not). As a result, the issues of limiting and privileging that persist in classroom mathematics extend to this community as well.
Few studies have examined how students with learning dis/abilities perform and participate in student-centered, conceptually oriented mathematics learning environments. Twenty years ago, one research team reported that these students participated in conceptually oriented mathematics in qualitatively different ways compared to their peers (Baxter et al., 2001). Researchers suggested the differences in participation rested in different prior knowledge that students used to support their discourse; their use of different mathematical ideas supported less participation in small group discussion and less opportunities to discuss their reasoning in large group discussions. The team’s findings suggest students with learning dis/abilities need explicit, teacher-modeled instruction to promote successful mathematics outcomes.

Yet, contemporary work points to alternate findings. Studies suggest that instructional practices from the mathematics education literature are accessible and even beneficial for students with dis/abilities. Studies across six special education classrooms suggest that, when teachers more deliberately connected to students’ prior knowledge and experiences, students with dis/abilities inquire, hold mathematical conversations, share insights, and become interdependent (e.g., Goransson et al., 2016). Other studies (Hunt et al. 2020) also support that students with dis/abilities utilize their own ideas about mathematics concepts and their own problem-solving strategies when learning in smaller groups.

Methods, Data Sources, and Analysis

In this presentation, we share a case study of three students with learning dis/abilities’ participation in supplemental small group instruction grounded in high-quality and equitable mathematics instruction. Our findings illuminate shifts in participation and specific pedagogical mechanisms that supported students with learning dis/abilities to participate and demonstrate their own reasoning and sense making in student-centered, conceptually oriented mathematics. Implications and considerations for future research will be shared.

Scholarly Significance

Tan and Katsberg (2017) invited mathematics education researchers to challenge the disconnect between mathematics education and students with dis/abilities by coming together and using their voice and expertise to call attention to “blatant ableism” (p. 30) by including these students in the work of building processes for exploring inequities. They encouraged mathematics education researchers to partner with special education researchers to bring diverse theoretical perspectives and pedagogical approaches to research involving students with dis/abilities. We consider the work presented in this paper as one response to this invitation.

Authors

• Jessica H. Hunt, North Carolina State University

• Jonee Wilson, University of Virginia