Overcoming Obstacles for the Inclusion of Visually Impaired Learners through Teacher–Researcher Collaborative Design and Implementation

Abstract

Teacher preparation to address the needs of disabled learners in mainstream mathematics classrooms is quintessential for the implementation of the inclusive educational policies that governments are often committed to. To identify teacher preparation needs, we draw on data and analyses from the doctoral study of the first author, who endorsed sociocultural and embodied perspectives in an investigation—first exploratory, then interventional—of visually impaired (VI) learners’ experiences and their teachers’ inclusion discourses. Here, we focus on the intertwined contributions of physical and digital resources in the mathematical learning experiences of VI pupils, as these resources co-existed simultaneously in the observed mathematics lessons. We first summarise findings from the exploratory phase that highlighted inclusion issues related to resource use in the mathematics classroom. We then offer a critical account of the circumstantial and systemic obstacles that impeded the successful intertwinement of digital and physical resources and discuss teacher–researcher collaborative design and implementation of classroom tasks (auditory, tactile) in the intervention phase. We conclude by making the case that well-meaning individual teacher–researcher collaboration is a necessary condition for such interventions to succeed but not a sufficient condition for these interventions to be scaled up and have longevity.

Keywords

• inclusion
• disability
• mathematics teacher education
• mainstream classrooms
• visually impaired learners
• tactile and auditory mathematical tasks