Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

A Conversation with Alan Gelfand

Alan E. Gelfand was born April 17, 1945, in the Bronx, New York. He attended public grade schools and did his undergraduate work at what was then called City College of New York (CCNY, now CUNY), excelling at mathematics. He then surprised and saddened his mother by going all the way across the country to Stanford to graduate school, where he completed his dissertation in 1969 under the direction of Professor Herbert Solomon, making him an academic grandson of Herman Rubin and Harold Hotelling. Alan then accepted a faculty position at the University of Connecticut (UConn) where he was promoted to tenured associate professor in 1975 and to full professor in 1980. A few years later he became interested in decision theory, then empirical Bayes, which eventually led to the publication of Gelfand and Smith [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 85 (1990) 398-409], the paper that introduced the Gibbs sampler to most statisticians and revolutionized Bayesian computing. In the mid-1990s, Alan's interests turned strongly to spatial statistics, leading to fundamental contributions in spatially-varying coefficient models, coregionalization, and spatial boundary analysis (wombling). He spent 33 years on the faculty at UConn, retiring in 2002 to become the James B. Duke Professor of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University, serving as chair from 2007-2012. At Duke, he has continued his work in spatial methodology while increasing his impact in the environmental sciences. To date, he has published over 260 papers and 6 books; he has also supervised 36 Ph.D. dissertations and 10 postdocs. This interview was done just prior to a conference of his family, academic descendants, and colleagues to celebrate his 70th birthday and his contributions to statistics which took place on April 19-22, 2015 at Duke University.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-STS521 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Valuing the Intersection Between Arts, Culture, and Community: An Exchange of Research and Practice

This report is based a half-day gathering of thirty-five practitioners and researchers that took place on September 12, 2013, at Downtown Art's East Village studio. Downtown Art is a member of Fourth Arts Block, a nonprofit coalition of cultural and community groups that lead the development of the East 4th Street Cultural District, the only official cultural district in Manhattan. This gathering was convened by Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts -- New York (NOCD-NY), a citywide alliance of artists, activists, creative manufacturers, and policy makers committed to revitalizing New York City "from the neighborhood up." Through presentations, questions, and dialogue, participants learned about the structural inequities that exist in cities and philanthropy and gained deeper insight into the power of neighborhood cultural clusters as sources of community health and resilience.The exchange grew out of NOCD-NY's initial explorations around a collaborative research agenda that responds to the shared needs of members. NOCD-NY recognized that coordinated efforts could broaden and deepen the impact of members' research (e.g., door-to-door surveys, oral histories, community asset mapping) already under way in their respective neighborhoods with the multiple goals of strengthening practice, understanding neighborhood and artist needs, case making, and field learning. At the same time, NOCD-NY members continue to grapple with one of the key challenges in this work -- identifying and communicating appropriate measures for the social, community, environmental, and economic impacts of these districts. While most people readily acknowledge that there is some degree of relationship between culture, community, and economy, the concrete connections are complex, subtle, and still largely undocumented. As a coalition of community-based cultural leaders, NOCD-NY was eager to tell a compelling story without falling back on data sets that diminish or dilute these complex connections. This gathering offered an entry point from which to explore research approaches and tools that can make visible the value of this work

Information-Age Populism: Higher Education as a Civic Learning Organization

Viewing higher education as an environment "ripe for change," Harry Boyte makes the case for colleges and universities to forsake their traditional bastions of cloistered scholarship to become "civic learning" organizations. Many faculty members are willing and able to pursue their interests in the public relevance of teaching and research. What is needed to undertake the democratization of the production and diffusion of knowledge, Boyte says in this report from the Council on Public Policy Education, is to stress the need for disciplines to interact across porous boundaries with the wider world

Students, Faculty and Sustainable WPA Work

In lieu of an abstract, here is the chapter\u27s first paragraph: Despite several cycles of reforms spanning the last fifteen years, we three composition colleagues were unable to achieve widespread student engagement in our required one-semester writing course. At California State University, Chico, the WPA oversees faculty development and program assessment for a first-year writing program that serves 2700 students each year with over 100 sections of first-year writing. Several different WPAs experienced fatigue as they undertook challenging and often unproductive work: resisting an outdated California State policy on the aims and goals for General Education, including what constitutes appropriate aims for writing courses; revising notions of student writing that are too tied to the “modes” and views of information literacy that end in exercises rather than in the activity of scholarship; developing and delivering assessments whose findings frequently conflict with budgetary, ideological, or departmental constraints; and promoting the complex underlying assumptions of our work despite widespread and reductive beliefs about the writing capabilities of first year students