Ensemble 2: Embodied Learning in Worlds of Difference

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

Abstract

Disability intervention research: Wayne Sailor (KU)

Socio-emotional dimensions of learning in/through technology design: Katherine Isbister (UCSC)

Contemporary developments in the learning sciences offer an integrated perspective on how people learn that includes cognition, gestures and body positions/movements, social processes, emotion, and identity formations around axes of difference (Nasir et al., 2020). Recent scholarship also documents learning processes as situated in culturally organized activities in formal and informal contexts in which identity markers play key roles in experienced opportunities to learn (Vossoughi, Jackson, Chen, Roldan, & Escude, 2020). A their own knowledge. The popularization and establishment of assistive technologies in product design, as exemplified by social media platforms such as TikTok, are shifting conceptions around where, how, and by whom learning occurs. Individuals with disabilities are slowly becoming visible in these evolving learning ecologies, thus affording opportunities to collapse rigid binary roles rooted in ableist pedagogy. It is less clear, however, how disability intersections with other identity markers (e.g., race, gender, social class, language) mediate participation in learning environments and shape outcomes. On the other hand, it seems that insights from new uses of assistive technology, social media, and user design can serve as a launching point for reimagining who learns, what counts as learning and how new understandings of learning contribute to novel inclusive learning ecologies.
Traditional disability learning research has largely ignored these scholarly developments. Instead, this line of research, particularly high-status intervention inquiries, has generally focused on designing intervention components and documenting the impact on student cognitive and behavioral metrics. Student agency has been limited to reductive measures of responses to interventions. In this portion of the session, a scholar conducting disability intervention research will dialogue with a human-computer interaction and games researcher that studies embodied learning and technology designs that support and enhance social and emotional experiences in learning. Questions guiding the conversation will include [we will refine Qs in consultation with panelists]:
• How can we leverage insights from technology-based embodied learning research to amplify the voice and agency of learners with disabilities?
• How can the expansion of digital technologies, as utilized by learners with disabilities in formal and informal contexts, open new avenues to understand learning and map potential applications for intervention research? How will attention to disability intersections with race, gender, social class and language enrich this work?
• Considering the current focus on response to intervention (RTI) and multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), what are the affordances of technology-based embodied learning models for enriching the design of academic interventions?

Authors

• Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez, Vanderbilt Peabody College

• Gabriela Richard, Pennsylvania State University