Disability Studies, Inclusive Education, and the Learning Sciences

1
Disability Studies, Inclusive Education, and
the Learning Sciences

• Joseph L. Polman, Ph.D.
• University of Missouri-St. Louis

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What are the Learning Sciences?

• Multidisciplinary cognitive science research
• Simultaneously develop
• understanding of learning
• educational practices
• Historical development, from
• Individual information processing to mediated
  action involving multiple agents
• Laboratories to authentic learning environments

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Three contributions of LS to inclusive school
communities

• Individual processes and trajectories of active
  learning, building on assets
• Mediation by cultural tools and sociocultural
  environment in a community of learners
• Methods of conducting design-based research

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Developmental trajectories

• For example
• Ann Brown (1992) on analogies
• Noticing them to productively using them to solve
  problems
• Surface features to deep features
• Nailah Nasir (2004) on playing dominoes
• Sustaining play with valid moves
• Basic scoring
• Maximizing scores, blocking, and helping partner
• Teachers role as facilitator of active learner
• Identifying and capitalizing on bridging
  strategies from existing conceptions/practices to
  more expert practices

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Mediation of learning by cultural tools in
sociocultural contexts

• Vygotskian approaches to development
• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
• Individuals appropriate cultural forms to solve
  socially situated and culturally structured
  problems
• Key role of dialogue and discourse (Bakhtin)
• Mind extends beyond the skin
• Hutchins cognition in the wild
• Peas distributed intelligence and Salomons
  distributed cognition
• Hakkarainens networked intelligence and
  Clarks natural born cyborgs
• Scaffolding (but not always fading)

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Designing tools environments to scaffold
learning

• Designing social interaction among peers and with
  teachers
• Palincsar Browns reciprocal teaching
• Building communities of learners
• Wenger in businesses, Rogoff in schools
• Computer-based tools, e.g., for science
• Diagnoser (www.diagnoser.com)
• WISE (Web-based Inquiry Science Environment)
• BGuILE (Biology Guided Inquiry Lrng Env)
• Building on cultural resources
• Carol Lees cultural modeling

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Action-oriented Methods Design-based Research

• Issue of Educational Researcher (v32 no1, 2003)
  on design-based research
• Efforts to combine strengths of
• Action research
• Anthropological techniques
• Task analysis and/or computer modeling
• Genetic and microgenetic discourse analyses
• Statistical methods applied judiciously
• for research on situated learning and
  continuous improvement in practices
• Refine theory to achieve generalizability frame
  selected aspects of the envisioned learning and
  of the means of supporting it as paradigm cases
  of a broader class of phenomena

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Challenges for learning sciences and disability
studies

• Dealing with meaningful sociocultural group
  categories without assuming sameness
• E.g., African-Americans, males, or particular
  disability groupings
• Not monolithic, but knowing trends may help
• Group learning
• How to analyze it?
• Allowing for individual differences in communal
  processes, while not allowing low expectations
  (of participants or facilitators) to limit
  individual growth
• Dealing with current political context
• Standardized tests schools reactions to them
• Gold standard of experimental design for research

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Keeping track of the Learning Sciences

• Journals
• The Journal of the Learning Sciences
• Cognition and Instruction
• Books
• Bruers Schools for Thought (MIT, 1993)
• Classroom Lessons, edited by McGilly (MIT, 1994)
• Bransford, Brown Cockings How People Learn
  (National Academy Press, 2000)
• International Society of the Learning Sciences
  (www.isls.org)