Browsing by Author "Ostrowdun, Christopher"

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    Navigating Figured Worlds: Preservice Teachers’ Understandings of Disability and Inclusion Through Representations
    (2021-09) Ostrowdun, Christopher; Lock, Jennifer; Takeuchi, Miwa; Shanahan, Marie-Claire; Burns, Amy Marie; Carrington, Suzanne
    Preservice teachers’ understandings of inclusion and disability can significantly shape their practices; they need opportunities to consider their perspectives as part of their teacher training. Yet, teacher education programs seldom have explicit opportunities for such considerations. Using a design-based approach, I iteratively developed and implemented representation tasks within a Bachelor of Education course. I examined how representations in the form of drawings supported preservice teachers in developing their understanding of inclusion and disability. The data sources included individual and collaborative drawings, video recordings of participants creating drawings, and audio recorded interviews with participants after their field experiences. I conducted a visual discourse analysis of the representations and an interaction analysis of video recordings to examine how they understood figured worlds of inclusion and disability. Figured worlds encompass the socially negotiated actors, actions, and outcomes that are valued, and they characterize people’s orientations to daily life (Holland et al., 1998). The findings show how participants progressed through (1) developing an individual understanding, (2) a collaborative understanding, and (3) a situated understanding of inclusion and disability. Individually, the participants held multiple, sometimes simultaneous, conceptions of disability and inclusion. Further, social positions and hierarchies were often conveyed through the drawings. In participants’ collaborative drawings, forces such as instructor appeasement, time constraints, and individual priorities competed in influencing their representations. During field experiences, the participants navigated complexities of school cultures, other teachers, and students in considering ways to understand and implement inclusion. As well, the participants had to author themselves and their roles as emerging teachers within figured worlds of inclusion and disability. Implications from this research include a need to support preservice teachers in navigating multiple figured worlds, the adoption of a critical disability studies lens in teacher education, and how representations can be used as a pedagogical tool. Furthermore, the research supports using representations as a methodological tool to studying figured worlds, proposes a framework to understand interactions, and offers connections between the fields of the Learning Sciences and Disability Studies.