Disability as Innovation and Transformation: Informing Abolitionist Elementary Mathematics Education

• In Event: Disabled Youth’s Cultural Ways of Being, Knowing, and Doing in Education: Implications and Strategies

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
The purpose of this presentation is to offer ideas of remedy and repair to immediately address disability social justice struggles and embodiments in elementary mathematics education, a fertile context for abolitionist work.

Perspective(s)/Framework
The presenter draws on the Disability Studies in Mathematics Education (DSME) framework and expands it by integrating abolitionist tenets of immediacy, intersectionality, and imagining. Abolitionist practices crucially emphasize its persistent and cumulative nature in freedom struggle involving ongoing experimentation and regularly being in a state of uncertainty, which are generative. That is to say, while educators may not consider their small contribution to abolitionist work meaningful and, at times, defeating, their work is nonetheless crucial in that it contributes to a larger community of like-minded, intersectional, and justice seeking folks doing similar work. Such cumulative weight and persistence of such contributions to remedy and repair will eventually topple the unjust and harmful ways that we deny the flourishing of all humans and species in our universe. In this way, engaging prospective teachers with abolitionist mathematics unit planning and designing can make important contributions towards radical transformations, particularly in involving disabled youth.

Methods
The presenter applies reflexivity by moving back and forth from his experiences supporting prospective teachers with equity- and justice-oriented mathematics education while theorizing what took place and outlining possible implications. Reflexivity as methodology involves “a process of on-going mutual shaping between researcher and research” (Attia & Edge, 2017, p. 33). Engaging in reflexivity, the presenter is able to expand upon understandings of abolitionist practices with prospective teachers through observation, reflection, and focused interactions.

Data Sources
As a scholar-activist teacher educator, the presenter offers educational unit planning and designing centering disabled youth as an avenue for abolitionist practice in elementary mathematics classrooms. The presenter draws on his recent experiences with supporting prospective elementary teachers via the use of a DSME with Abolitionist Tenets (DSME-A) unit tool.

Findings
The core result of the presenter’s reflexive process is the outlining of a concrete way to engage prospective elementary teachers in abolitionist struggles. This includes targeted prompts to have prospective teachers build deeper understanding of disabled students and their contexts as well as to meaningfully connect mathematics education to larger intersectional work.

Significance
A key feature of this tool is who, youth with “severe or profound” disabilities, and what, equity and social justice, are centered. Such an approach aims to remedy and repair mathematics education contexts as sites of harm and incarceration for disabled youth, particularly those of color. This presentation closes with a detailed description of DSME-A unit planning and designing as well as key results for researchers and practitioners to consider in struggles toward liberatory practices in their contexts.

Author

• Paulo Tan, University of California - Santa Cruz