In U.S. public school systems, students from racially minoritized communities experience harsher ... more In U.S. public school systems, students from racially minoritized communities experience harsher and more frequent exclusionary school discipline (e.g., detention, suspension, expulsion, and referral to law enforcement). Disproportionate representation of students from nondominant communities in school discipline rates presents a critical inequity because exclusionary discipline correlates with harmful academic, social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes (e.g., loss of instructional time and increased involvement in the juvenile justice system). Racial disproportionality in school discipline is a situated problem that requires ecologically valid solutions developed with local stakeholders in response to diverse and ever-changing needs, interests, and goals within dialectical dynamics of the specific social-historical-spatial context. Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL) was implemented to address racial disproportionality that American Indian students experience at a rural high school serving a band of an Anishinaabe nation in the United States. ILL is an inclusive knowledge-production and systemic design process that is informed by cross-pollination between cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and decolonizing methodology. ILL exemplifies a utopian methodology for dismantling oppressive settler-colonial school discipline systems. This study examines how ILL facilitated local stakeholders’ utopian future-making by means of Ruth Levitas’s (2006) three modes of utopian methodology—utopia as archaeology, architecture, and ontological becoming—to design an inclusive, positive, and culturally responsive behavioral support system as a collective pursuit of utopian future-making.
In the United States, historically minoritized students 1 (e.g., African American, Latinx, and Na... more In the United States, historically minoritized students 1 (e.g., African American, Latinx, and Native American students) are disproportionately removed from general education settings for behavioral incidents 2 such as suspensions, expulsions, and emotional/behavioral disturbance (E/BD; American Psychological Learning Objectives
Twice exceptional (2e) students are students who are both gifted and have a disability. At the in... more Twice exceptional (2e) students are students who are both gifted and have a disability. At the intersection of exceptionality and race, twice exceptional students from racially minoritized communities may experience behavioral difficulties in schools. In this article, we provide information for educators as well as school and district administrators about the unique challenges and possibilities in teaching 2e students of color. We offer a research-based collective problem-solving process, Learning Lab, that brings together practitioners, students, school and district leaders, families, and community members, especially those who have been excluded from schools’ decision-making activities. Learning Lab members engage in root cause analyses, map out their existing behavioral support system, and design a culturally responsive school wide behavioral support model in response to experiences, resources, needs, and goals of 2e students and their school contexts. In Learning Labs, the local school community has power in determining the future of their school. Practitioners, students, family and community members’ diverse histories and interests are utilized to develop just, effective, and gifted schools for all.
In the United States, school disciple has been racialized. Youth from racially minoritized backgr... more In the United States, school disciple has been racialized. Youth from racially minoritized backgrounds receive exclusionary discipline more frequently and severely for more subjective reasons such as disrespect, excessive noise, and dress code violation in U.S. schools. The study presents how an urban school community in Wisconsin engaged in inclusive knowledge-production and systemic design process, Learning Lab, to collectively examine and address racial disparities in school discipline. Learning Lab members (school staff, parents, and community representatives) engaged in root cause analysis behind disproportionality in their local context and identified the manifestations of the systemic contradiction (racial disproportionality) as dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts, and double binds in everyday practices of the school community. They collectively designed a new culturally responsive school-wide behavioral support system to address the systemic contradiction. We identified 194 discursive manifestations of contradictions in the 14 meetings of the Learning Lab. These manifestations stemmed from three main contradictions as tensions between components in the school activity system, related to classroom management, school-community partnership, and behavioral support tools.
This double symposium brings together activity-theoretical formative intervention research conduc... more This double symposium brings together activity-theoretical formative intervention research conducted in six continents. The aim is to illuminate and examine the common threads, important differences, and new challenges of formative intervention studies to address “wicked problems” in different cultural, political, and economic contexts. Formative interventions facilitate expansive learning and systemic transformation led by local stakeholders in organizations and social movements. The formative intervention methodology is based on the principles of double stimulation and ascending from the abstract to the concrete. Its most well-known application is the Change Laboratory method. Formative interventions generate and support expansive learning and transformative agency. The current global crises of climate change, poverty and deepening inequalities are giving rise to what is called fourth generation activity theory for tackling fateful challenges by building heterogenous multiactivity coalitions. The symposium will present the theoretical and pedagogical challenges and
possibilities in Change Laboratories and other formative interventions to develop just and sustainable solutions to global crises.
Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem whose patterns cha... more Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem whose patterns change from one context to another. In order to develop systemic solutions that are responsive to local contexts, school stakeholders’ collective, agentic actions toward systemic changes are essential. Utilizing a participatory systemic design process led by an urban high school community, this case study examines how Learning Lab, an inclusive problem-solving process, fostered urban school stakeholders’ transformative agency. Through structured decision-making and collaborative design activity, Learning Lab participants analyzed systemic contradictions in the school discipline system and developed a culturally responsive behavioral support system to address racial disproportionality in discipline outcomes.
Due to war, famine and political reasons in the world, migration movements
and refugees have beco... more Due to war, famine and political reasons in the world, migration movements and refugees have become a phenomenon affecting societies in many geographies. It is very important for the countries exposed to migration to plan the education services to be provided to refugees in order to ensure their integration into society. In this context, a significant number of refugee individuals took refuge in the country for different reasons. Increasing the quality of educational services offered to refugee individuals at school age can only be possible with the understanding by stakeholders of this new phenomenon. The present study examined Syrian refugee students’ educational experiences in Eskisehir, Turkey. The ethnographic data were generated through participant observations and semi-structured interviews with 19 participants, including nine teachers, two school principals, three parents and six students at a public elementary school in a low-income neighborhood in Eskisehir. Five themes emerged through induction analyses. The findings revealed the behavioral, social and academic problems that Syrian refugee students experienced. Teachers and school administrators described the home address-based school enrollment system as an obstacle for refugee youth to study with their non-refugee peers. This policy decreased the quality of education as it increased the density of refugee students at schools. Participants’ suggestions for refugee education included exclusively providing Turkish language courses to newly arrived students, providing psychological support for traumatic stress related to war and immigration, supporting teachers with appropriate teaching materials and professional development opportunities for refugee education, and establishing active family-school partnerships.
Turkish Journal of Special Education Research and Practice, 2021
In this study, an examination of the reading interventions applied to students with intellectual ... more In this study, an examination of the reading interventions applied to students with intellectual disabilities in the context of Lev Vygotsky's Cultural-Historical Activity Theory is presented. The studies identified in the literature were examined in terms of subject, method and tools, objectives, rules, environment, division of labor and results. In the study, it was aimed to reveal the factors affecting the teaching process in the reading interventions applied to students with intellectual disabilities. By examining the TR Index database and the electronic archives of 24 journals published in Turkey in the field of education, it was determined that a total of 11 articles met the inclusion criteria. The results showed that the reading interventions are researcher-based, there are differences in terms of the tools and methods used, the students and their families are more passive targets in the process, and the intervention environments do not support inclusion. The results were discussed in the context of the general literature and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, and suggestions were made for future studies.
Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusiona... more Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusionary school discipline in the United States. Utilizing cultural-historical activity theory and the formative intervention methodology, we conducted a yearlong formative intervention, Learning Lab, in an elementary school with significant racial disproportionality in school discipline. Teachers, family members, administrators, support staff, and community members with diverse and often opposing histories and goals worked together to critically examine their existing behavioral support system and racial disparities in practices, assumptions, processes, and outcomes from multiple perspectives. We utilized the method of expansive learning actions to analyze qualitative data from ten subsequent sessions. Our findings showed that local stakeholders successfully formed and sustained a diverse working group that represented families, educators, researchers, and community members. Learning Lab members worked collaboratively to question their existing school practices and to examine the root causes of racial disproportionality through historical and empirical analyses. We discuss both possibilities and challenges regarding inclusive knowledge production and the systemic transformation process at local schools.
Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusiona... more Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusionary school discipline in the United States. Utilizing cultural-historical activity theory and the formative intervention methodology, we conducted a yearlong formative intervention, Learning Lab, in an elementary school with significant racial disproportionality in school discipline. Teachers, family members, administrators, support staff, and community members with diverse and often opposing histories and goals worked together to critically examine their existing behavioral support system and racial disparities in practices, assumptions, processes, and outcomes from multiple perspectives. We utilized the method of expansive learning actions to analyze qualitative data from ten subsequent sessions. Our findings showed that local stakeholders successfully formed and sustained a diverse working group that represented families, educators, researchers, and community members. Learning Lab members worked collaboratively to question their existing school practices and to examine the root causes of racial disproportionality through historical and empirical analyses. We discuss both possibilities and challenges regarding inclusive knowledge production and the systemic transformation process at local schools.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2020
Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist an... more Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist and cognitive theories that privilege the individual as the unit of analysis (Conway & Artiles, 2005). Behaviorist and Cognitive theories are particularly dominant in special education research in the United States. The first attempts to educate people with disabilities, for instance, were conducted by French psychiatrists such as Pinnel, Itard, and Seguin, and brought to the U.S. by Samuel Grisley Howe. These early attempts to teach people with disabilities proposed a mix of physiological and cognitive approaches to remediate physical mobility and dysfunction of senses (e.g., impaired vision). Furthermore, the identification of students with disabilities as well as those as gifted were also highly influenced by individualistic, cognitivist theories. The adoption of intellectual assessments by Terman in the early 20 th century continue to have a strong hold on how students are identified as gifted or having a disability. In addition, behaviorist theories inform dominant research and practices such as applied behavior analysis, the most common form of teaching students with autism. These approaches to teaching and learning fuse a "bounded individual view of learner" (Conway & Artiles, 2005, p. 27) with a medical model of disability that conceptualizes disability as a biological or psychological deficit situated within the individual, which needs to be fixed (Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2011). Because of these deeply ingrained approaches, special education researchers tend to design, test, and disseminate teaching practices in the forms of individual interventions that focus on remedying students with disabilities' deficits. In the last two decades, researchers have increasingly drawn from cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as an alternative to predominant behavioral and cognitive theories to study the teaching and learning of students with disabilities. CHAT was born out of Vygotsky's (1978, 1993) revolutionary experimental research on human-context interactions and cultural mediation. There are various names used to describe this
In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive
harsher and more frequent school dis... more In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts. Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social, and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive, equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students’ identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured. To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support system aimed to address racial disparity in school discipline, the Indigenous Learning Lab was implemented at a rural high school in Wisconsin. Indigenous Learning Lab is an inclusive problem-solving process through which Native American students, parents, and community members and non-native school staff collectively examine disproportionality in school discipline and design a new school-wide system. The purpose of this study is to examine how participation in Indigenous Learning Lab expanded local stakeholders’ individual agency to collective, transformative agency in designing a culturally responsive behavioral support system.
This article presents a formative intervention study, called Learning Lab that facilitated the co... more This article presents a formative intervention study, called Learning Lab that facilitated the collective design of a culturally responsive behavioral support system at an urban middle school in the United States. Learning Lab united parents, teachers, support staff, education leaders, and researchers, specifically those who have been historically excluded from schools’ problem-solving activities to address an inner contradiction that they face—racial disproportionality in school discipline. Learning Lab members excavated and analyzed the school’s discipline system with its activities and disturbances and designed a new school-wide behavioral support system that is responsive to diverse experiences, perspectives, practices, and goals of their school community. A qualitative analysis of the Learning Lab process was conducted related to the development of the new system. Members examined outcomes in the existing discipline system, identified daily manifestations of the inner contradiction and collectively designed a culturally responsive system. The study showed the “how” of a systemic design and transformation process that helped develop a deeper understanding of educational change as a form of collective learning. The study demonstrated how a secondary artifact (system mapping) might facilitate movement from problem-definition to envisioning new possibilities. Given the inability of top-down education policies to impact sustained systemic transformation in schools, Learning Lab provides an ecologically valid collective knowledge-production and systemic design process that shows the possibilities of transforming marginalizing systems from the ground-up and collectively envisioning schools as spaces of solidarity, emancipation, and innovation.
Background: In the United States, students of color are more likely to receive disciplinary exclu... more Background: In the United States, students of color are more likely to receive disciplinary exclusion compared with their White peers. The racial disproportionality in exclusionary school discipline (e.g., office discipline referrals and suspension) marginalizes students from nondominant communities and further aggravates inequalities in academic, social, and behavioral outcomes. As a socially, historically, and geographically situated inequity issue, addressing racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes requires a transformative experiment in which local stakeholders can engage in situated problem identification and problem-solving efforts in response to their specific needs, goals, and local dynamics. Purpose of Study: This study examined how Learning Lab, an inclusive, collaborative problem-solving process, created a collaborative problem-solving space wherein school stakeholders exercised their collective, transformative agency to bring about a qualitative transformation in the school discipline system at an urban middle school for the creation of culturally responsive and equity-oriented learning environments for all students. Setting: The research took place at Rogoff Middle School in Wisconsin, which has historically served students from urban, low-income families. The school community struggled with the overrepresentation of Black students in exclusionary school discipline. Participants: Learning Lab comprised 14 members. Three parents and 11 school staff—administrators, teachers, social workers, an after-school coordinator, and a parent/paraprofessional working in a special education classroom—participated in the Learning Lab. Research Design: This study used the Learning Lab intervention, taking place at an urban middle school between November 2012 and May 2014, as an instrumental case to explore how the participatory, design-based intervention transformed a schoolwide behavioral support system. Data collected from 14 meetings include observations, ethnographic field notes, school disciplinary data, and photos. All meetings were video recorded and transcribed, then analyzed using a transformative agency framework. Findings/Results: With the aim of organizing inclusive problem-solving activities for shared, collaborative future-making learning experiences, the Learning Lab encouraged local stakeholders to exercise their collective, transformative agency in order to produce locally meaningful and emancipatory knowledge aimed at reshaping a dysfunctional, punitive system that historically has yielded racial injustice in school discipline. Conclusions/Recommendations: As a community-driven, scaled-down design process, Learning Lab can be a powerful leadership tool for school leaders to unite school stakeholders by building authentic school–family–community partnerships and leveraging expertise, experiences, and ingenuity for the development of locally optimized solutions to inequity.
The paper presents the first framework to theorize and operationalize cultural responsiveness in ... more The paper presents the first framework to theorize and operationalize cultural responsiveness in the context of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. The CRPBIS framework offers the Learning Lab methodology as the operational definition of cultural responsiveness. Learning Lab is the first formative intervention in U.S. schools.
Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist an... more Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist and cognitive theories that privilege the individual as the unit of analysis (Conway & Artiles, 2005). Behaviorist and Cognitive theories are particularly dominant in special education research in the United States. The first attempts to educate people with disabilities, for instance, were conducted by French psychiatrists such as Pinnel, Itard, and Seguin, and brought to the U.S. by Samuel Grisley Howe. These early attempts to teach people with disabilities proposed a mix of physiological and cognitive approaches to remediate physical mobility and dysfunction of senses (e.g., impaired vision). Furthermore, the identification of students with disabilities as well as those as gifted were also highly influenced by individualistic,cognitivist theories. The adoption of intellectual assessments by Terman in the early 20th century continue to have a strong hold on how students are identified as gifted or having a disability. In addition, behaviorist theories inform dominant research and practices such as applied behavior analysis, the most common form of teaching students with autism. These approaches to teaching and learning fuse a “bounded individual view of learner” (Conway & Artiles, 2005, p. 27) with a medical model of disability that conceptualizes disability as a biological or psychological deficit situated within the individual, which needs to be fixed (Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2011). Because of these deeply ingrained approaches, special education researchers tend to design, test, and disseminate teaching practices in the forms of individual interventions that focus on remedying students with disabilities’ deficits. In the last two decades, researchers have increasingly drawn from cultural- historical activity theory (CHAT) as an alternative to predominant behavioral and cognitive theories to study the teaching and learning of students with disabilities. CHAT was born out of Vygotsky’s (1978, 1993) revolutionary experimental research on human–context interactions and cultural mediation. There are various names used to describe this theoretical tradition based on the work for Vygotsky and his collaborators (e.g., Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev) around the world such as cultural- historical psychology, sociocultural theory, or activity theory. In this review, we followed Michael Cole’s (2005) suggestion and used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as an amalgam of terms that were used by Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev. The main assumption of CHAT is that human learning is a socially and historically constructed and culturally mediated process situated in goal-oriented collective activity systems. The term, CHAT, emphasizes the focus on the cultural mediation in learning and development, historical analysis, and commitment to ground the analysis in everyday activities. The present systematic review of literature sought to understand the extent to which researchers study the teaching and learning of students with disabilities utilizing CHAT. We were interested in examining how CHAT-based studies defined disability and the overall contributions of this body of research.
Drawn from interdisciplinary perspectives of special education, critical geography, and education... more Drawn from interdisciplinary perspectives of special education, critical geography, and education policy, in this study, we examined the spatial patterns of residential areas, school attendance zones, and school discipline rates of an urbanizing school district in Wisconsin to understand the construction of spatial “Other.” We measured the city’s dissimilarity index to examine racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and elementary schools. We also measured the school district suspension rates to examine racial disproportionality in school discipline. We then analyzed to what extent the redrawing of elementary school attendance zones in the 2007-2008 school year was able to reduce the spatial concentration of racially and economically minoritized students in one elementary public school. We found that despite the well-intentioned efforts of the rezoning committee to lower the percentage of students from low-income families, spatial othering at the neighborhood level continued to funnel students from racially and minoritized backgrounds into the school, due to the concentration of low-income housing in the neighborhood of the school.
In U.S. public school systems, students from racially minoritized communities experience harsher ... more In U.S. public school systems, students from racially minoritized communities experience harsher and more frequent exclusionary school discipline (e.g., detention, suspension, expulsion, and referral to law enforcement). Disproportionate representation of students from nondominant communities in school discipline rates presents a critical inequity because exclusionary discipline correlates with harmful academic, social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes (e.g., loss of instructional time and increased involvement in the juvenile justice system). Racial disproportionality in school discipline is a situated problem that requires ecologically valid solutions developed with local stakeholders in response to diverse and ever-changing needs, interests, and goals within dialectical dynamics of the specific social-historical-spatial context. Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL) was implemented to address racial disproportionality that American Indian students experience at a rural high school serving a band of an Anishinaabe nation in the United States. ILL is an inclusive knowledge-production and systemic design process that is informed by cross-pollination between cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and decolonizing methodology. ILL exemplifies a utopian methodology for dismantling oppressive settler-colonial school discipline systems. This study examines how ILL facilitated local stakeholders’ utopian future-making by means of Ruth Levitas’s (2006) three modes of utopian methodology—utopia as archaeology, architecture, and ontological becoming—to design an inclusive, positive, and culturally responsive behavioral support system as a collective pursuit of utopian future-making.
In the United States, historically minoritized students 1 (e.g., African American, Latinx, and Na... more In the United States, historically minoritized students 1 (e.g., African American, Latinx, and Native American students) are disproportionately removed from general education settings for behavioral incidents 2 such as suspensions, expulsions, and emotional/behavioral disturbance (E/BD; American Psychological Learning Objectives
Twice exceptional (2e) students are students who are both gifted and have a disability. At the in... more Twice exceptional (2e) students are students who are both gifted and have a disability. At the intersection of exceptionality and race, twice exceptional students from racially minoritized communities may experience behavioral difficulties in schools. In this article, we provide information for educators as well as school and district administrators about the unique challenges and possibilities in teaching 2e students of color. We offer a research-based collective problem-solving process, Learning Lab, that brings together practitioners, students, school and district leaders, families, and community members, especially those who have been excluded from schools’ decision-making activities. Learning Lab members engage in root cause analyses, map out their existing behavioral support system, and design a culturally responsive school wide behavioral support model in response to experiences, resources, needs, and goals of 2e students and their school contexts. In Learning Labs, the local school community has power in determining the future of their school. Practitioners, students, family and community members’ diverse histories and interests are utilized to develop just, effective, and gifted schools for all.
In the United States, school disciple has been racialized. Youth from racially minoritized backgr... more In the United States, school disciple has been racialized. Youth from racially minoritized backgrounds receive exclusionary discipline more frequently and severely for more subjective reasons such as disrespect, excessive noise, and dress code violation in U.S. schools. The study presents how an urban school community in Wisconsin engaged in inclusive knowledge-production and systemic design process, Learning Lab, to collectively examine and address racial disparities in school discipline. Learning Lab members (school staff, parents, and community representatives) engaged in root cause analysis behind disproportionality in their local context and identified the manifestations of the systemic contradiction (racial disproportionality) as dilemmas, conflicts, critical conflicts, and double binds in everyday practices of the school community. They collectively designed a new culturally responsive school-wide behavioral support system to address the systemic contradiction. We identified 194 discursive manifestations of contradictions in the 14 meetings of the Learning Lab. These manifestations stemmed from three main contradictions as tensions between components in the school activity system, related to classroom management, school-community partnership, and behavioral support tools.
This double symposium brings together activity-theoretical formative intervention research conduc... more This double symposium brings together activity-theoretical formative intervention research conducted in six continents. The aim is to illuminate and examine the common threads, important differences, and new challenges of formative intervention studies to address “wicked problems” in different cultural, political, and economic contexts. Formative interventions facilitate expansive learning and systemic transformation led by local stakeholders in organizations and social movements. The formative intervention methodology is based on the principles of double stimulation and ascending from the abstract to the concrete. Its most well-known application is the Change Laboratory method. Formative interventions generate and support expansive learning and transformative agency. The current global crises of climate change, poverty and deepening inequalities are giving rise to what is called fourth generation activity theory for tackling fateful challenges by building heterogenous multiactivity coalitions. The symposium will present the theoretical and pedagogical challenges and
possibilities in Change Laboratories and other formative interventions to develop just and sustainable solutions to global crises.
Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem whose patterns cha... more Racial disproportionality in school discipline is an enduring systemic problem whose patterns change from one context to another. In order to develop systemic solutions that are responsive to local contexts, school stakeholders’ collective, agentic actions toward systemic changes are essential. Utilizing a participatory systemic design process led by an urban high school community, this case study examines how Learning Lab, an inclusive problem-solving process, fostered urban school stakeholders’ transformative agency. Through structured decision-making and collaborative design activity, Learning Lab participants analyzed systemic contradictions in the school discipline system and developed a culturally responsive behavioral support system to address racial disproportionality in discipline outcomes.
Due to war, famine and political reasons in the world, migration movements
and refugees have beco... more Due to war, famine and political reasons in the world, migration movements and refugees have become a phenomenon affecting societies in many geographies. It is very important for the countries exposed to migration to plan the education services to be provided to refugees in order to ensure their integration into society. In this context, a significant number of refugee individuals took refuge in the country for different reasons. Increasing the quality of educational services offered to refugee individuals at school age can only be possible with the understanding by stakeholders of this new phenomenon. The present study examined Syrian refugee students’ educational experiences in Eskisehir, Turkey. The ethnographic data were generated through participant observations and semi-structured interviews with 19 participants, including nine teachers, two school principals, three parents and six students at a public elementary school in a low-income neighborhood in Eskisehir. Five themes emerged through induction analyses. The findings revealed the behavioral, social and academic problems that Syrian refugee students experienced. Teachers and school administrators described the home address-based school enrollment system as an obstacle for refugee youth to study with their non-refugee peers. This policy decreased the quality of education as it increased the density of refugee students at schools. Participants’ suggestions for refugee education included exclusively providing Turkish language courses to newly arrived students, providing psychological support for traumatic stress related to war and immigration, supporting teachers with appropriate teaching materials and professional development opportunities for refugee education, and establishing active family-school partnerships.
Turkish Journal of Special Education Research and Practice, 2021
In this study, an examination of the reading interventions applied to students with intellectual ... more In this study, an examination of the reading interventions applied to students with intellectual disabilities in the context of Lev Vygotsky's Cultural-Historical Activity Theory is presented. The studies identified in the literature were examined in terms of subject, method and tools, objectives, rules, environment, division of labor and results. In the study, it was aimed to reveal the factors affecting the teaching process in the reading interventions applied to students with intellectual disabilities. By examining the TR Index database and the electronic archives of 24 journals published in Turkey in the field of education, it was determined that a total of 11 articles met the inclusion criteria. The results showed that the reading interventions are researcher-based, there are differences in terms of the tools and methods used, the students and their families are more passive targets in the process, and the intervention environments do not support inclusion. The results were discussed in the context of the general literature and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, and suggestions were made for future studies.
Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusiona... more Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusionary school discipline in the United States. Utilizing cultural-historical activity theory and the formative intervention methodology, we conducted a yearlong formative intervention, Learning Lab, in an elementary school with significant racial disproportionality in school discipline. Teachers, family members, administrators, support staff, and community members with diverse and often opposing histories and goals worked together to critically examine their existing behavioral support system and racial disparities in practices, assumptions, processes, and outcomes from multiple perspectives. We utilized the method of expansive learning actions to analyze qualitative data from ten subsequent sessions. Our findings showed that local stakeholders successfully formed and sustained a diverse working group that represented families, educators, researchers, and community members. Learning Lab members worked collaboratively to question their existing school practices and to examine the root causes of racial disproportionality through historical and empirical analyses. We discuss both possibilities and challenges regarding inclusive knowledge production and the systemic transformation process at local schools.
Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusiona... more Students from racially minoritized backgrounds have been disproportionately subject to exclusionary school discipline in the United States. Utilizing cultural-historical activity theory and the formative intervention methodology, we conducted a yearlong formative intervention, Learning Lab, in an elementary school with significant racial disproportionality in school discipline. Teachers, family members, administrators, support staff, and community members with diverse and often opposing histories and goals worked together to critically examine their existing behavioral support system and racial disparities in practices, assumptions, processes, and outcomes from multiple perspectives. We utilized the method of expansive learning actions to analyze qualitative data from ten subsequent sessions. Our findings showed that local stakeholders successfully formed and sustained a diverse working group that represented families, educators, researchers, and community members. Learning Lab members worked collaboratively to question their existing school practices and to examine the root causes of racial disproportionality through historical and empirical analyses. We discuss both possibilities and challenges regarding inclusive knowledge production and the systemic transformation process at local schools.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2020
Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist an... more Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist and cognitive theories that privilege the individual as the unit of analysis (Conway & Artiles, 2005). Behaviorist and Cognitive theories are particularly dominant in special education research in the United States. The first attempts to educate people with disabilities, for instance, were conducted by French psychiatrists such as Pinnel, Itard, and Seguin, and brought to the U.S. by Samuel Grisley Howe. These early attempts to teach people with disabilities proposed a mix of physiological and cognitive approaches to remediate physical mobility and dysfunction of senses (e.g., impaired vision). Furthermore, the identification of students with disabilities as well as those as gifted were also highly influenced by individualistic, cognitivist theories. The adoption of intellectual assessments by Terman in the early 20 th century continue to have a strong hold on how students are identified as gifted or having a disability. In addition, behaviorist theories inform dominant research and practices such as applied behavior analysis, the most common form of teaching students with autism. These approaches to teaching and learning fuse a "bounded individual view of learner" (Conway & Artiles, 2005, p. 27) with a medical model of disability that conceptualizes disability as a biological or psychological deficit situated within the individual, which needs to be fixed (Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2011). Because of these deeply ingrained approaches, special education researchers tend to design, test, and disseminate teaching practices in the forms of individual interventions that focus on remedying students with disabilities' deficits. In the last two decades, researchers have increasingly drawn from cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as an alternative to predominant behavioral and cognitive theories to study the teaching and learning of students with disabilities. CHAT was born out of Vygotsky's (1978, 1993) revolutionary experimental research on human-context interactions and cultural mediation. There are various names used to describe this
In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive
harsher and more frequent school dis... more In the U.S. school systems, Native American students receive harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts. Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social, and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive, equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students’ identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured. To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support system aimed to address racial disparity in school discipline, the Indigenous Learning Lab was implemented at a rural high school in Wisconsin. Indigenous Learning Lab is an inclusive problem-solving process through which Native American students, parents, and community members and non-native school staff collectively examine disproportionality in school discipline and design a new school-wide system. The purpose of this study is to examine how participation in Indigenous Learning Lab expanded local stakeholders’ individual agency to collective, transformative agency in designing a culturally responsive behavioral support system.
This article presents a formative intervention study, called Learning Lab that facilitated the co... more This article presents a formative intervention study, called Learning Lab that facilitated the collective design of a culturally responsive behavioral support system at an urban middle school in the United States. Learning Lab united parents, teachers, support staff, education leaders, and researchers, specifically those who have been historically excluded from schools’ problem-solving activities to address an inner contradiction that they face—racial disproportionality in school discipline. Learning Lab members excavated and analyzed the school’s discipline system with its activities and disturbances and designed a new school-wide behavioral support system that is responsive to diverse experiences, perspectives, practices, and goals of their school community. A qualitative analysis of the Learning Lab process was conducted related to the development of the new system. Members examined outcomes in the existing discipline system, identified daily manifestations of the inner contradiction and collectively designed a culturally responsive system. The study showed the “how” of a systemic design and transformation process that helped develop a deeper understanding of educational change as a form of collective learning. The study demonstrated how a secondary artifact (system mapping) might facilitate movement from problem-definition to envisioning new possibilities. Given the inability of top-down education policies to impact sustained systemic transformation in schools, Learning Lab provides an ecologically valid collective knowledge-production and systemic design process that shows the possibilities of transforming marginalizing systems from the ground-up and collectively envisioning schools as spaces of solidarity, emancipation, and innovation.
Background: In the United States, students of color are more likely to receive disciplinary exclu... more Background: In the United States, students of color are more likely to receive disciplinary exclusion compared with their White peers. The racial disproportionality in exclusionary school discipline (e.g., office discipline referrals and suspension) marginalizes students from nondominant communities and further aggravates inequalities in academic, social, and behavioral outcomes. As a socially, historically, and geographically situated inequity issue, addressing racial disparities in disciplinary outcomes requires a transformative experiment in which local stakeholders can engage in situated problem identification and problem-solving efforts in response to their specific needs, goals, and local dynamics. Purpose of Study: This study examined how Learning Lab, an inclusive, collaborative problem-solving process, created a collaborative problem-solving space wherein school stakeholders exercised their collective, transformative agency to bring about a qualitative transformation in the school discipline system at an urban middle school for the creation of culturally responsive and equity-oriented learning environments for all students. Setting: The research took place at Rogoff Middle School in Wisconsin, which has historically served students from urban, low-income families. The school community struggled with the overrepresentation of Black students in exclusionary school discipline. Participants: Learning Lab comprised 14 members. Three parents and 11 school staff—administrators, teachers, social workers, an after-school coordinator, and a parent/paraprofessional working in a special education classroom—participated in the Learning Lab. Research Design: This study used the Learning Lab intervention, taking place at an urban middle school between November 2012 and May 2014, as an instrumental case to explore how the participatory, design-based intervention transformed a schoolwide behavioral support system. Data collected from 14 meetings include observations, ethnographic field notes, school disciplinary data, and photos. All meetings were video recorded and transcribed, then analyzed using a transformative agency framework. Findings/Results: With the aim of organizing inclusive problem-solving activities for shared, collaborative future-making learning experiences, the Learning Lab encouraged local stakeholders to exercise their collective, transformative agency in order to produce locally meaningful and emancipatory knowledge aimed at reshaping a dysfunctional, punitive system that historically has yielded racial injustice in school discipline. Conclusions/Recommendations: As a community-driven, scaled-down design process, Learning Lab can be a powerful leadership tool for school leaders to unite school stakeholders by building authentic school–family–community partnerships and leveraging expertise, experiences, and ingenuity for the development of locally optimized solutions to inequity.
The paper presents the first framework to theorize and operationalize cultural responsiveness in ... more The paper presents the first framework to theorize and operationalize cultural responsiveness in the context of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. The CRPBIS framework offers the Learning Lab methodology as the operational definition of cultural responsiveness. Learning Lab is the first formative intervention in U.S. schools.
Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist an... more Research on teaching students with disabilities has historically been dominated by behaviorist and cognitive theories that privilege the individual as the unit of analysis (Conway & Artiles, 2005). Behaviorist and Cognitive theories are particularly dominant in special education research in the United States. The first attempts to educate people with disabilities, for instance, were conducted by French psychiatrists such as Pinnel, Itard, and Seguin, and brought to the U.S. by Samuel Grisley Howe. These early attempts to teach people with disabilities proposed a mix of physiological and cognitive approaches to remediate physical mobility and dysfunction of senses (e.g., impaired vision). Furthermore, the identification of students with disabilities as well as those as gifted were also highly influenced by individualistic,cognitivist theories. The adoption of intellectual assessments by Terman in the early 20th century continue to have a strong hold on how students are identified as gifted or having a disability. In addition, behaviorist theories inform dominant research and practices such as applied behavior analysis, the most common form of teaching students with autism. These approaches to teaching and learning fuse a “bounded individual view of learner” (Conway & Artiles, 2005, p. 27) with a medical model of disability that conceptualizes disability as a biological or psychological deficit situated within the individual, which needs to be fixed (Dudley-Marling & Gurn, 2011). Because of these deeply ingrained approaches, special education researchers tend to design, test, and disseminate teaching practices in the forms of individual interventions that focus on remedying students with disabilities’ deficits. In the last two decades, researchers have increasingly drawn from cultural- historical activity theory (CHAT) as an alternative to predominant behavioral and cognitive theories to study the teaching and learning of students with disabilities. CHAT was born out of Vygotsky’s (1978, 1993) revolutionary experimental research on human–context interactions and cultural mediation. There are various names used to describe this theoretical tradition based on the work for Vygotsky and his collaborators (e.g., Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev) around the world such as cultural- historical psychology, sociocultural theory, or activity theory. In this review, we followed Michael Cole’s (2005) suggestion and used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) as an amalgam of terms that were used by Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev. The main assumption of CHAT is that human learning is a socially and historically constructed and culturally mediated process situated in goal-oriented collective activity systems. The term, CHAT, emphasizes the focus on the cultural mediation in learning and development, historical analysis, and commitment to ground the analysis in everyday activities. The present systematic review of literature sought to understand the extent to which researchers study the teaching and learning of students with disabilities utilizing CHAT. We were interested in examining how CHAT-based studies defined disability and the overall contributions of this body of research.
Drawn from interdisciplinary perspectives of special education, critical geography, and education... more Drawn from interdisciplinary perspectives of special education, critical geography, and education policy, in this study, we examined the spatial patterns of residential areas, school attendance zones, and school discipline rates of an urbanizing school district in Wisconsin to understand the construction of spatial “Other.” We measured the city’s dissimilarity index to examine racial and economic segregation between neighborhoods and elementary schools. We also measured the school district suspension rates to examine racial disproportionality in school discipline. We then analyzed to what extent the redrawing of elementary school attendance zones in the 2007-2008 school year was able to reduce the spatial concentration of racially and economically minoritized students in one elementary public school. We found that despite the well-intentioned efforts of the rezoning committee to lower the percentage of students from low-income families, spatial othering at the neighborhood level continued to funnel students from racially and minoritized backgrounds into the school, due to the concentration of low-income housing in the neighborhood of the school.
In this chapter, we present a theoretically robust and practitioner friendly methodology called L... more In this chapter, we present a theoretically robust and practitioner friendly methodology called Learning Lab, based in Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (CRPBIS), to address systemic issues in educational institutions. We also introduce a paradigm shift in cultural responsiveness that became a foundation of the Learning Lab methodology to address systemic issues including racial disproportionality in behavioral outcomes that have long put historically minoritized students, including those with disabilities, at an academic and social disadvantage.
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Papers by Aydin Bal
possibilities in Change Laboratories and other formative interventions to develop just and sustainable solutions to global crises.
and refugees have become a phenomenon affecting societies in many geographies. It is very important for the countries exposed to migration to plan the education services to be provided to refugees in order to ensure their integration into society. In this context, a significant number of refugee individuals took refuge in the country for different reasons. Increasing the quality of educational services offered to refugee individuals at school age can only be possible with the understanding by stakeholders of this new phenomenon. The present study examined Syrian refugee students’ educational experiences in Eskisehir, Turkey. The ethnographic data were generated through participant observations and semi-structured interviews with 19 participants, including nine teachers, two school principals, three parents and six students at a public elementary school in a low-income neighborhood in Eskisehir. Five themes emerged through induction
analyses. The findings revealed the behavioral, social and academic problems that Syrian refugee students experienced. Teachers and school administrators described the home address-based school enrollment system as an obstacle for refugee youth to study with their non-refugee peers. This policy decreased the quality of education as it increased the density of refugee students at schools. Participants’ suggestions for refugee education included exclusively providing
Turkish language courses to newly arrived students, providing psychological support for traumatic stress related to war and immigration, supporting teachers with appropriate teaching materials and professional development opportunities for refugee education, and establishing active family-school partnerships.
and often opposing histories and goals worked together to critically examine their existing behavioral support system and racial disparities in practices, assumptions, processes, and outcomes from multiple perspectives. We utilized the method of expansive learning actions to analyze qualitative data from ten subsequent sessions. Our findings showed that local stakeholders successfully formed and sustained a diverse working group that represented families, educators, researchers, and community members. Learning Lab members worked collaboratively
to question their existing school practices and to examine the root causes of racial disproportionality through historical and empirical analyses. We discuss both possibilities and challenges regarding inclusive knowledge production and the systemic transformation process at local schools.
harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts.
Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social,
and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive,
equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students’
identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured.
To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support system
aimed to address racial disparity in school discipline, the Indigenous
Learning Lab was implemented at a rural high school in Wisconsin.
Indigenous Learning Lab is an inclusive problem-solving process
through which Native American students, parents, and community
members and non-native school staff collectively examine disproportionality in school discipline and design a new school-wide
system. The purpose of this study is to examine how participation
in Indigenous Learning Lab expanded local stakeholders’ individual
agency to collective, transformative agency in designing a culturally
responsive behavioral support system.
diverse experiences, perspectives, practices, and goals of their school community. A qualitative analysis of the Learning Lab process was conducted related to the development of the new system. Members examined outcomes in the existing discipline system, identified daily manifestations of the inner contradiction and collectively designed a culturally responsive system. The study showed the “how” of a systemic design and transformation process that helped develop a deeper understanding of educational change as a form of collective learning. The study demonstrated how a secondary artifact (system mapping) might facilitate movement from problem-definition to envisioning new possibilities. Given the inability of top-down education policies to impact sustained systemic transformation in schools, Learning Lab provides an ecologically valid collective knowledge-production and systemic design process that shows the possibilities of transforming marginalizing
systems from the ground-up and collectively envisioning schools as spaces of solidarity, emancipation, and innovation.
possibilities in Change Laboratories and other formative interventions to develop just and sustainable solutions to global crises.
and refugees have become a phenomenon affecting societies in many geographies. It is very important for the countries exposed to migration to plan the education services to be provided to refugees in order to ensure their integration into society. In this context, a significant number of refugee individuals took refuge in the country for different reasons. Increasing the quality of educational services offered to refugee individuals at school age can only be possible with the understanding by stakeholders of this new phenomenon. The present study examined Syrian refugee students’ educational experiences in Eskisehir, Turkey. The ethnographic data were generated through participant observations and semi-structured interviews with 19 participants, including nine teachers, two school principals, three parents and six students at a public elementary school in a low-income neighborhood in Eskisehir. Five themes emerged through induction
analyses. The findings revealed the behavioral, social and academic problems that Syrian refugee students experienced. Teachers and school administrators described the home address-based school enrollment system as an obstacle for refugee youth to study with their non-refugee peers. This policy decreased the quality of education as it increased the density of refugee students at schools. Participants’ suggestions for refugee education included exclusively providing
Turkish language courses to newly arrived students, providing psychological support for traumatic stress related to war and immigration, supporting teachers with appropriate teaching materials and professional development opportunities for refugee education, and establishing active family-school partnerships.
and often opposing histories and goals worked together to critically examine their existing behavioral support system and racial disparities in practices, assumptions, processes, and outcomes from multiple perspectives. We utilized the method of expansive learning actions to analyze qualitative data from ten subsequent sessions. Our findings showed that local stakeholders successfully formed and sustained a diverse working group that represented families, educators, researchers, and community members. Learning Lab members worked collaboratively
to question their existing school practices and to examine the root causes of racial disproportionality through historical and empirical analyses. We discuss both possibilities and challenges regarding inclusive knowledge production and the systemic transformation process at local schools.
harsher and more frequent school discipline than White counterparts.
Exclusionary discipline may result in adverse academic, social,
and life outcomes. There is an urgent need for creating an inclusive,
equity-oriented learning environment where Native American students’
identities, well-being, and dignity are promoted and nurtured.
To develop a culturally responsive behavioral support system
aimed to address racial disparity in school discipline, the Indigenous
Learning Lab was implemented at a rural high school in Wisconsin.
Indigenous Learning Lab is an inclusive problem-solving process
through which Native American students, parents, and community
members and non-native school staff collectively examine disproportionality in school discipline and design a new school-wide
system. The purpose of this study is to examine how participation
in Indigenous Learning Lab expanded local stakeholders’ individual
agency to collective, transformative agency in designing a culturally
responsive behavioral support system.
diverse experiences, perspectives, practices, and goals of their school community. A qualitative analysis of the Learning Lab process was conducted related to the development of the new system. Members examined outcomes in the existing discipline system, identified daily manifestations of the inner contradiction and collectively designed a culturally responsive system. The study showed the “how” of a systemic design and transformation process that helped develop a deeper understanding of educational change as a form of collective learning. The study demonstrated how a secondary artifact (system mapping) might facilitate movement from problem-definition to envisioning new possibilities. Given the inability of top-down education policies to impact sustained systemic transformation in schools, Learning Lab provides an ecologically valid collective knowledge-production and systemic design process that shows the possibilities of transforming marginalizing
systems from the ground-up and collectively envisioning schools as spaces of solidarity, emancipation, and innovation.