Interrogating Anti-Ableist Potential of Cultural Historical Activity Theory within Mathematics Education: Sustaining Pan-Disability Culture

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in Mathematics Education: Constructing a New Vision for Research and Classroom Practices

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
The purpose of this presentation is to employ the concept of pan-disability culture to interrogate Cultural Historical Activity Theory’s (CHAT) anti-ableist potential, trying to also broaden its reach into meso-level/communal interventions such as those afforded by mathematics inquiry-based learning. As part of this interrogation, we elevate Rector-Aranda’s (2019) notion of authentic caring in schooling.

Perspective(s)/Framework
One of our foundational assumptions is that disability is a social category of culture in action. Its cultural funds of knowledge flow in reciprocal interaction with institutionalized settings. Each disability category constitutes a sub-cultural sphere. Disability’s unique difference-based sense of richness can thus enhance collective contexts for mathematics learning in special ways. Thus, we draw on Paris and Alim’s (2014) concept of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP) to unleash the power of true belonging in co-learning spaces and the communal elevation of alternative knowledges. CHAT accounts and explores the situated and contextual meaning of these collaborative activities.

Methods
We engender an invitational dialogue revolving around the need to explore ways to articulate a new, much more embracing conceptualization of interdisciplinarity that transforms the way everyday mathematics education practices inside and outside the classroom are conceived and enacted. Our ultimate aim is to empower and incorporate disability difference and the knowledges it affords into why and how things are approached and learned by students with and without disabilities within and across mathematics education.

Data Sources
Through an intersectional anti-ableist lens, we turn to the second presenter’s previous work in mathematics education involving disabled participants to critically re-examine the activity systems enacted as well as illustration of a more liberatory one.

Results
We see this presentation as an opportunity to conceptualize collaborative ways to bring into the classroom embodied modes of ‘minor’ or ‘nomadic’ mathematics practices of emancipatory resistance. By these we mean critical and compassionate modes of teacher intellectualism that take organic modes of CSP seriously in an effort to humanize ways of relating with pan-disabled students through authentic caring pedagogical and assessment practices. Such practices involve exploring proactive ways to implement body and soul everyday modes of inclusivity.

Scholarly Significance
This presentation significance lies in the ways that agentic space of collaborative resistance can be created within and beyond mathematics education, especially within the current state of massive interlocking modes of oppression. Such endeavors are authentically anchored in the fluid wisdom of pan-disability culture alternative funds of knowledge with and by intersectional pan-disabled students and communal actors.

Authors

• Alexis Padilla, Independent Scholar

• Paulo Tan, University of California - Santa Cruz