Using CSCL to Conceptualize Disability Toward Inclusive Education Design

Abstract

This paper presents a framework and design activity to support pre-service PSEs (PSEs) in conceptualizing disability and inclusive education using representations within a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. PSEs often only receive limited or cursory training about disability and how to design for inclusive education. Discourses focus on diagnoses and prescriptive support strategies, which can limit PSEs’ ability to effectively support students’ needs. I argue PSEs need opportunities to engage with their epistemological and ontological commitments to disability before advancing to considerations for design. Moreover, how PSEs identify in relation to disability can impact their agency in supporting students’ needs and how they shape social structures of how disability and inclusion is manifested in their contexts. Framed by Dewey’s notion of an aesthetic experience, I propose a design activity where PSEs develop and exercise metarepresentational competencies to individually and collaboratively create, critique, and interpret external representations, such as drawings, imagery, or models of disability and inclusive education. Such representations can be mapped to a digital network and used as mediating artifacts toward collaborative conceptualization of disability. Furthermore, PSEs can draw upon the network to refine, manipulate, and create new representations of possibilities of inclusive education. The network affords the ability for PSEs to democratize their learning and situate their representations, identities, agency, and social structures to see how they collide, converge, and diverge. As noted by CSCL scholars, meaning making does not occur inside the mind and requires external social negotiation of ideas. Combining representational design with CSCL offers a powerful way for PSEs to create socioculturally informed conceptualizations of disability and consider implications for inclusive education design.