Ensemble 1: Historical Epistemologies

• In Event: Expansive Futures for Disability Intersectional Learning Research Braiding Culture, History, Equity, and Enabling Technologies

Abstract

Learning scientist: Shirin Vossoughi (Northwestern University)

Anthropology of disability: Karen Nakamura (Cal)

Building from Artiles (2019), we suggest future disability learning research should embrace a historical imagination and produce alternative representations of learning. Following Luria, future programs of learning research should combine nomothetic and ideographic approaches to explain the nature of learning and document its rich “historically evolving social, cultural and psychological environments” (Lamdan & Yasnitsky, 2013, p. 1). This paradigm is timely considering the enduring equity challenges that students of color and learners with disabilities face in their educational trajectories. For this purpose, we will invite a learning scientist and a historian (or anthropologist) of disability to explore points of convergence and silences in the histories of disability and of learning research. We will ask these scholars to grapple with questions such as [we will refine Qs in consultation with panelists]:
• How do the persistent historical entanglements of disability with markers of difference converge with the ways learning has been historically framed and studied?
• What factors have shaped the formation of laminated identities in the construction of disability-race intersections? (Holland & Leander, 2004)
• What kinds of interdisciplinary interventions can make visible these intersectional identity configurations in future disability learning research?

Authors

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University

• Susan Schweik, University of California - Berkeley