DisCrit Literacies: Early Childhood Teachers Critically Reading School as Text and Imagining an Otherwise

Beneke, Margaret R.; Machado, Emily; Taitingfong, Jordan

doi:10.1002/rrq.466

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 78 publications

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“…Multiple studies suggest that when teachers see students they perceive as struggling participate in and benefit from a particular mathematical instructional practice, they experience a shift in their views of those students (e.g., Darragh & Valoyes-Chávez, 2019; Guskey, 2002; Jackson et al, 2017), which may then relate to future enacted practice. Professional learning opportunities for in-service teachers could then be structured to promote the use of practices that are designed toward rigorous mathematical activity, coupled with ongoing reflection and discourse around teachers’ shifting views of disability and capability (e.g., Beneke et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teachers’ Views of the Mathematical Capabilities of Students With Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Study

Mason

2023

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Background/Context: Most students with disabilities receive the majority of their instruction in general education classrooms. Yet, general education teachers persistently describe feeling unprepared to academically support students with disabilities in those spaces. Because disabled students are typically excluded from mathematics education research, and because special education researchers typically describe mathematics teaching and learning in ways that are incongruent with ambitious mathematics instruction, there is arguably a lack of guidance for these teachers. In the absence of clear guidance, teachers may turn to the well-established mathematical ability hierarchy, which positions disabled students (among others) as less capable. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this study was to uncover teachers’ talk about the mathematical capabilities of students with (and without) disabilities. Existing coding schemes (perhaps inadvertently) treat teachers’ views as uniform across students despite evidence that teachers hold different views of different students, in part because of the multiple and varied identities that students bring to the classroom. By using an adapted interview protocol, which yielded more (and more nuanced) analytic categories, I foregrounded students’ disability status as a factor that could relate to differences in teachers’ conceptions of who they view as mathematically capable. Research Design: I interviewed general education mathematics teachers ( N = 20) about their students ( n = 407) using an adapted version of Jackson et al.’s (2017) semi-structured protocol that focused on uncovering teachers’ usages of diagnostic and prognostic frames. I used open and concept coding to develop an expanded version of Jackson et al.’s coding scheme and then applied the new coding framework to the entire data set. I used student demographic data to compare within-group percentages, noticing to what degree students with disabilities were represented within particular qualitative categories in relation to their representation within the entire data set. I also used transformed data to estimate two multinomial logistic regressions: one that used diagnostic frames as the outcome variable, and one that used prognostic frames as the outcome variable. Both models used students’ disability status and teacher dummy codes as predictor variables. Conclusions/Recommendations: The majority of teachers in this sample explained mathematical struggle in unproductive terms and said they would aim instructional adjustment at unproductive outcomes for students with and without disabilities. However, students with disabilities were overrepresented in unproductive categories and underrepresented in productive categories in relation to both diagnostic and prognostic frames. Regression analyses indicated that a student was statistically less likely to get a productive diagnostic or prognostic frame if they had a disability label. Findings from this study highlight the necessity of including teachers’ views of their students’ mathematical capabilities in instructional improvement efforts. Second, they indicate that student-level factors, such as disability status, relate to qualitatively and quantitatively meaningful differences in teachers’ views of their students, suggesting the importance of attending to broader narratives around constructs that may be associated with teachers’ views, and the subsequent enactment of those views, in mathematics instruction.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Teachers’ Views of the Mathematical Capabilities of Students With Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Study

Mason

2023

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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“…Through a dual analysis of ableism and racism in schools, researchers might utilize critical, participatory approaches to inquiry with teachers (Beneke et al, 2022), co-analyzing how their emotional relationships with whiteness and ability manifest in discursive, spatial, and/or pedagogical practices as a means to disrupt them. This reflexive analytic process requires teacher educators to also contend with the emotional geographies of exclusion of which they are a part and can help teacher educators in identifying how they might disrupt such emotional processes in their everyday interactions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional Geographies of Exclusion: Whiteness and Ability in Teacher Education Research

Beneke

Siuty

Handy

2022

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education

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Context: Geographies of exclusion (e.g., segregated special education classrooms, school district zoning) are constituted through intersecting oppressive ideologies (e.g., ableism, racism, classism) that co-naturalize notions of “normalcy” and deviance and yield harmful consequences for disabled children of Color. Geographies of exclusion dynamically contribute to and constitute teacher candidates’ feelings about themselves and their social worlds. White teacher candidates’ investment in dominant racial ideologies is well-documented, and recent scholarship has interrogated the role of white emotionality in these processes. However, the extent to which white teacher candidates emotionally ascribe to oppressive constructions of ability have been underexamined. Focus of Study: We sought to uncover how white teacher candidates (TCs) used emotional practices to position themselves in relation to ability within geographies of exclusion as they narrated their educational journeys. Such an examination is necessary to upend ongoing constructions of racial-ability hierarchies in and through teacher education. Using disability critical race theory and emotional geographies, our study was guided by the following question: How do white, nondisabled TCs engage in emotional practices in relation to geographies of exclusion? Research Design: This critical narrative study took place in two teacher education programs in the Pacific Northwest with 42 white, nondisabled teacher candidates. We drew on qualitative mapping as a method for participants to tell stories about themselves and their relationships to places and people over time. All participants generated narratives through written reflections after creating their maps, clarifying aspects of their maps and providing details not captured in their visual representations. Data sources included 42 written narratives and 36 qualitative maps. We analyzed emotional dimensions of TCs’ written narratives and qualitative maps through multiple rounds of both deductive and inductive coding. Conclusions/Recommendations: Our analysis revealed ways white TCs weaponized emotionality to uphold racial-ability hierarchies through emotional geographies of gratitude, ambivalence, and claims to care. By sentimentalizing multiply-marginalized children’s suffering, TCs preserved a façade of being committed to educational justice. We conclude with suggestions for educational researchers, emphasizing that research with white teachers cannot ignore emotional practices that perpetuate harm for multiply-marginalized children. Instead, researchers must surface these engagements head-on, using DisCrit as a driver in teacher education research toward intersectional justice.

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“…However, we maintained flexible stances, adapting to meet their needs and desires in the moment. Session agendas included such experiences as (a) collaboratively analyzing children’s and scholarly literature, (b) discussing classroom dilemmas, (c) processing teaching in the context of social crises, and (d) composing creative and pedagogical writing (for a description of our activities during each session, see Beneke et al, 2022a).…”

Section: Context and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Rise Up, Hand in Hand”: Early Childhood Teachers Writing a Liberatory Literacy Pedagogy

Machado

Taitingfong

2023

American Educational Research Journal

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Although writing is often used for personal reflection in teacher education, it is less commonly leveraged to imagine educational futures (Gilligan, 2020)—particularly those centered on collective liberation. Amid intersecting social crises, however, imagining futures is critically important (Ladson-Billings, 2021), and writing is a crucial step toward bringing them into the present. In this participatory case study (Reilly, 2010), we explored the future-oriented writing practices of five early childhood teachers in an inquiry group. Drawing on critical literacy (Vasquez et al., 2019) and prolepsis (Cole, 1993), we describe how collaborative, creative, and pedagogical writing supported them in envisioning, enacting, and leading liberatory literacy pedagogies within and beyond their schools. Findings contribute to literature in teacher education, early childhood education, and literacy.

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DisCrit Literacies: Early Childhood Teachers Critically Reading School as Text and Imagining an Otherwise

Cited by 9 publications

References 78 publications

Teachers’ Views of the Mathematical Capabilities of Students With Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Study

Teachers’ Views of the Mathematical Capabilities of Students With Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Study

Emotional Geographies of Exclusion: Whiteness and Ability in Teacher Education Research

“Rise Up, Hand in Hand”: Early Childhood Teachers Writing a Liberatory Literacy Pedagogy

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