Disabling and enabling mathematics classrooms

I had been teaching a group of students in their first mathematics sessions as they embarked on a teacher education programme. It was to be a one-off session which I was repeating on several occasions over a week. I cannot remember what activities I had asked the group to engage in. As I cleared the tables at the end of the session, the aspiring teachers having left the room, I noticed a post-it note left on one of the tables. On it was written:

Bits were difficult and scary as my disability has left me with very little working memory

But …

You are the first teacher who has made me feel confident about employing creative strategies in teaching and solving maths problems.

Thank you 

This note is clipped to my notice board above the desk at which I write. It is now very faded, but I think the message remains important. I look at it often, but in the last week I have particularly needed its comfort. 

The post-it!

I am autistic. When I was at school in the 60s and 70s, autism was not something that was yet recognised. I am grateful for this as I avoided the label and was able to negotiate my own way through school, finding tactics which meant I could avoid the wrath of teachers demanding ‘normality’. An example. I am aged 11, in my final year at Primary school and we are assigned seats through by the results of a mental arithmetic tests every Friday morning. I knew I could get 20/20. I also knew that if I got about 14/20, I would be assigned the seat diagonally away from the teacher’s desk – far from his prying eyes or interest. ‘Work’ consisted mainly of answering questions which seemed very routine for me. I could finish them very quickly – they usually took about 20 minutes out of the hour lesson. This gave me 40 minutes each lesson to read the book I would have brought in with me from home. So, every week in the test I would deliberately get 6 questions wrong and get my seat by the window. 

So, why have I noticed my autism this week in particular. Event 1: I am working with two lovely colleagues in Melbourne on an Australian version of the book Understanding and Teaching Primary Mathematics. We were finishing off the inclusion chapter and one of them said, “I have changed ‘Autistic students’ to ‘students with Autism’ throughout.” This is interesting I thought, I make a conscious decision to use ‘Autistic person’ rather than ‘person with …’ in the same way that a woman will say I am female rather than a person with femaleness’. Autistic is something I am not something I have. It just happens to be the way that my brain is wired and there is no reason why this should get in the way of learning. But, there appears to be an accepted way to apply the label, probably decided by people who are not autistic. 

The second event this week was the opening of a mathematics education conference which I have been attending for over 20 years. I was invited to be a part of an opening panel and one of the questions I was asked was the areas in which I thought the conference fell short. I suggested that exploring disability and mathematics learning had been conspicuously absent at a conference exploring issues of equity and social justice in mathematics education. This was an online conference and the ‘chat’ had been quite busy. I have been around the conference for a long time and so was expecting some supportive responses in the ‘chat’ when I announced that I was autistic, something I hadn’t done in this company. Silence in the ‘chat function’ is as clear as embarrassed silence in a room. Then a colleague said, “Well, it is important that people research what they are interested in.” And the moment passed.

I tell these stories as they both ‘disabled’ me. Neither intervention was meant in this way but they reminded me of the way that teachers and managers throughout my life have disabled me, some completely unintentionally and some very intentionally indeed!

So, I return to the post-it note as a reminder that classrooms don’t have to be disabling. I take it as a reminder, as a warning that any classroom, any teacher, any educational policy which treats all learners as the same will disable a section of learners. Equality is not treating everyone on the same way; is not expecting everyone to learn in the same way. Equality is treating people in the same way when that is appropriate but noticing, and acting, when people need treating differently.

If you notice a disabled person, or rather if you notice someone being disabled in your classroom ask yourself what you should do differently so that they are enabled. 

Tony Cotton is editor of Mathematics Teaching. The journal of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics (ATM). For more information on the ATM go to www.atm.org.uk. The views in this blog are Tony’s own.

His book Understanding and Teaching Primary Mathematics has just published its 4^th edition. https://bit.ly/3kFkM5Q