Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Mathematical Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmathb From the margin to the center: A framework for rehumanizing mathematics education for students with dis/abilities Cathery Yeh a, *, Mark Ellis b , Dina Mahmood a a Chapman University, One University Drive, Orange, CA, 92806, United States b California State University, Fullerton, College of Education, CP-600, PO. Box 6868, Fullerton, CA, 92834, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Disability Mathematics education Disability studies Embodiment Situated learning Critical pedagogy ABSTRACT Mathematics education for students with dis/abilities has a legacy of exclusion; its scholarship has been dominated by ableist perspective: a focus on rote mathematics facts, procedural in- struction, and a narrow range of mathematics content. Grounded in critical pedagogy and critical disabilities studies, we argue for a shift in the focus away from the student as the site of defect and intervention to recognize the complex embodiment of dis/ability as a process produced within historical, political, social, and material contexts. The theoretical assumptions and guiding principles for a framework of culturally responsive and relational understanding of dis/ability will be shared together with a case of such an approach in classroom practice. The paper ad- vances efforts to support all learners in robust mathematics learning communities and to situate research from perspectives that acknowledge the situated, interactional nature of ability, iden- tity, and achievement. 1. Introduction Mathematics education for students with dis/abilities has a legacy of exclusion. Its scholarship has been dominated by deficit- centered traditions: a focus on basic mathematics skills, the use of procedural instruction, and narrow approaches to mathematics content (Lambert & Tan, 2017; Lewis & Fisher, 2016; Tan, Lambert, Padilla, & Wieman, 2018). In U.S. public schools, 13 categories of dis/ability are sanctioned for special education services. Generally, only students in a few dis/ability categories, such as learning dis/ ability or speech/language impairments, spend a majority of their school day in the general education classroom. Students identified with “moderate” and “severe” dis/abilities (e.g. intellectual dis/abilities, autism, multiple dis/abilities) spend the majority of their school day in segregated special education classrooms (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). Several studies have compared mathematics instruction between general education classrooms and self-contained special education classrooms and found that mathematics in self-contained classrooms was generally something done to students. The majority of instructional time in special education classrooms was spent on rote tasks or procedural mimicry (as opposed to one-third of instructional time in general edu- cation) instead of opportunities for meaning-making (Jackson & Neel, 2006; Scherer, Beswick, DeBlois, Healy, & Opitz, 2016). Our goal herein is to not only critique and problematize the traditional perspectives and practices for students with dis/abilities but to reimagine and reconceptualize such work. In this article, we intentionally use the term dis/ability (Tan & Kastberg, 2017) to trouble the field’s emphasis on “the individual, rather than the mutual construction of intersubjectivity, and the focus on pathology rather than creating collaborative interaction” (de Freitas & Sinclair, 2013, p. 455). We begin by introducing the theoretical framing of critical pedagogy and critical disability studies, then describing the three components for a culturally responsive and relational https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmathb.2020.100758 Received 1 May 2019; Received in revised form 24 November 2019; Accepted 6 January 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: yeh@chapman.edu (C. Yeh), mellis@fullerton.edu (M. Ellis), dmahmood@chapman.edu (D. Mahmood). Journal of Mathematical Behavior 58 (2020) 100758 0732-3123/ © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. T