2025 Theses Doctoral

Teaching Mathematics to Students with Disabilities: Exploring the Lived Experiences of High School Teachers

Prem, Dana Marie

Mathematics education research has shifted to emphasize conceptual understanding over rote algorithms, aligning with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ focus on problem-solving and reasoning. Ongoing reforms grounded in constructivism advocate for reasoning and sense-making at all levels. Research highlights a strong link between teachers’ beliefs and their instructional practices, influencing how mathematics standards are enacted in classrooms. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act has increased the inclusion of students in general education, often with the support of special education teachers. However, the continued dominance of the medical model of disability, which emphasizes deficits, can lead to the assumption that conceptually rich tasks are unsuitable for these students. As a result, strategies used to teach mathematics to students with disabilities are often grounded in behaviorist approaches, despite the evolving research in mathematics education that emphasizes constructivist approaches.

Guided by an interpretivist approach, this study explores teachers’ conceptions of mathematics and ability through the stories of their life experiences and how these experiences inform their representation of the mathematics curriculum in mainstream high school mathematics classrooms. Using a narrative inquiry methodology, this study centered the voices of four high school mathematics teachers to examine how high school mathematics teachers came to make pedagogical decisions in the context of a complex mathematics curriculum, a variety of student learning needs, and other school-based factors that impact their daily decision making.

An analysis of the narrative data, grounded in Disability Studies/in Education (DS/E) and Disability Studies in Mathematics Education (DSME), highlights notions of ability and competence that emerge in teachers’ stories about their teaching and learning of mathematics. The stories these teachers told about their own journey of learning mathematics suggested that speed continued to be a marker of success in mathematics, while variation in their progress while learning math challenged their mathematical identities. A

dditionally, their stories suggested that their pedagogy arose from a variety of personal and professional experiences, including their family members’ schooling experiences, the dynamics of co-teaching relationships, frustrations over students' perceived lack of work ethic, and the pressures of the New York state Regents examinations. Further examination revealed that, despite being disproven by scientific research, the notion of a math person still functions as an organizing concept for mathematics development among teachers, which leads to transmission-based pedagogical practices that reinforce this concept in inclusive high school classrooms.