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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.

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Despite the push for inclusive mathematics education, students with disabilities continue to lack access to, and achievement in, rich mathematics learning opportunities. We assert that mathematics teacher educators have a central role in addressing these contradictions. This role includes enacting facilitative moves during mathematics teacher professional learning to encounter and counter social forces, which we denote in this article as en/counters. As part of a larger study, we explored the extent to which the use of an inclusive education-oriented tool, developed and introduced during a teacher learning program, elicited en/counters that mediated participants' learning toward inclusive mathematics education. We discuss shifts in participants' conversational content and focus on surrounding practices that involved students with disabilities and features of the tool and processes that supported these shifts, including specific facilitative moves that helped redirect deficit-focused conversations.

The construct of culture has been largely invisible In the research and long-standing debates in the learning disabilities (LD) field, such as those pertaining to the definition of LD and how research knowledge is used in local settings. When used, the idea of culture tends to be defined as unrelated to LD and studied as restricted to individual/group traits. We challenge the culture-LD dichotomy and the limited conception of culture used in this knov^ledge base. For this purpose, v^e make the case for a cultural model of learning that can inform scholarship about the nature of LD, and we propose a culturebased model for the study of research knov^^ledge use in professional practices. Moreover, we offer a third perspective on culture to study the strategies that the LD research community might be using to demarcate and maintain a cultureless paradigm of LD. Our discussion offers potentially rich opportunities for a culturally minded and reflexive stance in the LD field that is urgently needed in our increasingly diverse society.