mathematizing4all

I love research. I do it, I write about it, and I read it daily. I absolutely love learning about education well studied. It is one way I learn about disability and neurodiversity. But I also have learned a tremendous amount from people in my circle: family, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Personal narratives about how life is experienced with a disability have taught me more useful information about disability and education than any other source. When I began to do work in the academic field of disability studies, I learned how much our field values these “insider narratives” or disability life stories (Ferri, 2011).

I am asked a lot by math educators how to change mindsets about disability, how to shift from a deficit perspective to a strengths-based perspective. I remember when disability studies scholar and my professor during my special education masters program at Teachers College in the early 2000s, Jan Valle told me that two things shift mindsets: stories and experiences. In her class, she assigned memoirs for us to read. Experiences can be teachers seeing and interacting with kids with IEPs thinking creatively about mathematical problems—this experience can be transformative.

When I shifted from being a special education/inclusion teacher to a professor, I became very interested in stories and memoirs. I remember reading Paula Kluth’s work, which used autobiographies of autistic authors to explore how to make classrooms and communities accessible (Kluth, 2004; 2010). I highly recommend her work if you want to learn more about autism from a strengths-based perspective (@paulakluth.bsky.social). I used her work as a model for our own studies of autobiography. A group of students and I read tons of memoirs by people with dyslexia and learning disabilities, pulled out all the narratives about learning and school, and then analyzed those to better understand what barriers existed in schools, what supported learning, and how these insiders understood their own learning differences (Lambert et al., 2019). You can read that paper here.

So now I am wondering about insider narratives on social media. I found this beautiful poem about being a Jeep by flaming.ADHD on TikTok. It is a thoughtful expression of what it feels like to be slow in math, and how that slowness can be a gift. I am planning to show this to some teachers in professional development, and wonder what other social media stories people have found that can help us as a field shift away from seeing students as broken, and instead, seeing what they offer and how they see the world!

Also, do you think that insider narratives are a way to accomplish this? Have stories from those you know, or memoirs, or any other media helped you rethink disability, neurodiversity and/or Deafness? And can that matter in our work as math educators?

Ferri, B. A. (2011). Disability life writing and the politics of knowing. Teachers College Record, 113(10), 2267–2282.

Kluth, P. (2004). Autism, autobiography, and adaptations. Teaching Exceptional Children, 36(4), 42–47.

Kluth, P. (2010). “You’re going to love this kid!”: Teaching students with autism in the inclusive classroom (2nd ed.). Brookes Publishing.

Lambert, R., Chun, M., Davis, J., Ceja, K. L., Aguilar, K., Moreno, P., & Manset, L. (2019). “My dyslexia is like a bubble”: How insiders with Learning Disabilities describe their differences, strengths, and challenges. Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 24(1), 1–18. Full Text (Author’s Manuscript) (note, the author’s version does not include all the authors, who are listed above.)