Chapter 6: Disability and Equity in Mathematics

Teaching and learning of mathematics is at the heart of research interest in the mathematics education community. In the last decades, the interest of researchers has shifted from focusing on the teaching triangle (student– teacher–mathematics) to focusing on broader sociocultural (Lerman, 2000; Pais & Valero, 2014) and political (Gutiérrez, 2013) factors that affect mathematics teaching and learning. The development of approaches of the last few decades, such as ethnomathematics, critical mathematical education, and post-structural theories has led to revisions of perceptions that mathematics is a neutral object. At the turn of the century, Lerman (2000) called this shift in research interests, a “social turn.” Recently, Gutiérrez (2013) introduced the term “sociopolitical turn” to describe a growing body of research, but also applications that mainly pay attention to a political dimension, other than the social and cultural dimensions involved. Gutiérrez, while referring to equity, summarizes three theoretical perspectives that focus on knowledge, power, and identity as “interwoven and arising from (and constituted within) social discourses” (Gutiérrez, 2013, p. 40).