Toward Equity in Mathematics Education for Students With Dis/abilities: A Case Study of Professional Learning

Abstract

This case study documents a professional learning community (PLC) comprised of urban elementary educators working toward equitable education for students with dis/abilities. We employ an equity-expansive learning frame to evoke and then examine tensions and contradictions that emerged during the PLC and mediated learning as evidenced by participants’ expanded notions of equity. We introduced equity-oriented mathematics education content and tools based on what emerged from the PLC, then utilized an interpretive approach to analyzing data through a multistage process. Results indicate identity and power tensions that worked against equitable practices. However, participants recognized several tensions and proposed to address them as contradictions that mediated learning, thereby expanding notions of equitable education.

Forty Years of Mathematics Education: 1980-2019

“…The mathematics education studies in WoS database were first published at early 1980s and despite the change in the rate of growth, the number of publications continued to increase in each period. According to keyword analysis, there were a great variety of studies in mathematics education to determine standards and principles of teaching and learning mathematics such as reform movements (Gravemeijer et al, 2016;Lundin, 2012;Sengupta-Irving, Redman, & Enyedy, 2013), curriculum (Fonger et al, 2018;Fouze & Amit, 2017;Pepin et al, 2017;Voigt, Fredriksen, & Rasmussen, 2020), educational policy (Dalby & Noyes, 2018;Lin, Wang, & Chang, 2018;Nortvedt & Buchholtz, 2018), equity (Jurdak, 2011(Jurdak, , 2014Nortvedt & Buchholtz, 2018;Tan & Thorius, 2019), assessment (Beumann & Wegner, 2018;Kim & Cho, 2015;Nortvedt & Buchholtz, 2018;Veldhuis & van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, 2014;Veldhuis et al, 2013), to evaluate the cognitive and affective skills such as problem solving (Boonen et al, 2016;Verschaffel et al, 2020), achievement (Ciftci, 2015;Veldhuis & van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, 2020), motivation (Schukajlow, Rakoczy, & Pekrun, 2017), to learn more about and support mathematics teachers such as professional development (Sztajn et al, 2007;Williams & Ryan, 2020), teacher education (Buchholtz, 2017;Healy & Ferreira dos Santos, 2014;Tatto & Senk, 2011), teacher knowledge (Koponen et al, 2017;Olfos & Rodríguez, 2019;Scheiner et al, 2019), teacher beliefs…”

Leading through a critical lens: The application of DisCrit in framing, implementing and improving equity driven, educational systems for all students

“…Schools that successfully include students who are often marginalized and minoritized elsewhere find paths around, under and over policies that seem to block progress in other settings (Geier et al , 2008; Scheurich and Skrla, 2003). The education reform literature is rife with examples of classrooms and schools that have engaged in disruptive practices that offered access, voice and empowered students and families with the ability to shift curriculum and pedagogies through shared dialog and action with teachers and other school professionals (Annamma and Morrison, 2018; DeMatthews, 2015; Scheurich and Skrla, 2003; Tan and Thorius, 2019). Although these idiosyncratic, locally driven learning spaces emerge from a complex policy landscape, their features and outcomes seem to travel poorly into other locations (Fullan and Hargreaves, 2009).…”

“…Further, failure to achieve specific educational standards or benchmarks is located within individuals rather than the systems that set up a competitive, sorting mechanism. The prevailing normative stance frames failure as dis/ability that needs mending (Tan and Thorius, 2019). This ableist view of difference permeates US professional, familial and community lives, traveling from childhood through adulthood shaping our ideas and questions.…”

Facilitating en/counters with special education’s cloak of benevolence in professional learning to eliminate racial disproportionality in special education

“…In what follows, I focus on the process of expansive learning I work to facilitate through professional learning meant to contribute to eliminating special education disproportionality. I note efforts to illustrate each step of an expansive learning cycle, yet emphasize my deliberate introduction of primary stimulus artifacts into the professional learning relationship activity system and which stimulate participants' en/counters (Tan & Thorius, 2018a;Thorius et al, 2018) with special education's cloak of benevolence as a powerful contradiction in relation to step two of an expansive learning cycle. Over time, and mediated by my introduction of secondary stimulus artifacts in the form of potential tools to be appropriated in resolving this contradiction stimulates educators' development of new activity models for addressing disproportionality.…”