(Un)Hidden Voices: Disabled Teachers and Students of Color as Holders and Creators of Knowledge (Poster 8)

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

Abstract

For too long, the histories, experiences, cultures, and ways of knowing of disabled communities of color have been devalued, misinterpreted, or omitted within formal educational settings. In this paper, the authors use Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) and critical race feminist scholarship and activism (Annamma, et al., 2013; Davis, 2016; Sins Invalid, 2019) to highlight how critical raced-gendered-disability epistemologies can recognize disabled teachers and students of color as holders and creators of knowledge, specifically in the area of mathematics. While DisCrit and critical race feminist scholarship are growing, the field of mathematics education is still emerging in their development of intersectional discourse and activism in their examination of disability.

The paper shares the collaborative of a group of disabled women of color, community activist educators, and disability scholars. The project mission is to use an intersectional approach to expand inclusion in mathematics education providing educational space dedicated to recording and amplifying intersectional justice in mathematics education through collective reflexivity to consider the exclusions, framing, and normative presuppositions pervasive in current mathematics education research and practice. Critical race theory and critical disability activism have shown the power of counter storytelling as a genre that exposes violence, disrupts silencing, and builds solidarity among disabled people of color (Sins Invalid, 2019; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). Within the field of education, scholar-activists are increasingly taking up counter storytelling as a pedagogical, methodological, and activist approach to social justice that transgresses traditional paradigms in academia. Unlike the more common training of researchers to produce unbiased knowledge, counter storytelling challenges objectivity by situating the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization, oppression, or resistance. These approaches have resulted in new understandings about how multiply marginalized communities (Annamma, 2018) build solidarity and respond to and resist dominant culture, laws, and policies that perpetuate inequity.

This paper contributes to our understanding of counter-storytelling to advance intersectional inclusive, equity, and justice in mathematics education as it relates to methodology, pedagogy, research. The paper maps the counter-storytelling genre with a focus on the ways in which critical race scholars and disability activist communities have contributed to and reshaped it and its application in methodologies, pedagogies and research in mathematics education. We begin with a discussion of the contours of the genre including its political purpose. We then take up both the methodology and pedagogy of counter-storytelling providing a paired analysis of snapshots of common mathematics classroom interactions using a critical raced-gendered-disability epistemology and traditional positivist fields to highlight its potential in offering new direction in mathematics education research and teaching.

Authors

• Cathery Yeh, University of Texas at Austin

• Emilia Frias, Magnolia School District