Invited Panel: Humanizing Institutional Landscapes of Ability Differences and Learning

How can schools, universities, and community spaces construct, reinforce, or challenge how ability differences and disabilities are understood and organized in relation to race, language, and culture? This session brings together researchers working in schools, higher education, and out-of-school settings to study, reconceptualize, and redesign institutional, programmatic, and pedagogical practices. Through an engaging, dialogic format, the panelists will share stories and artifacts from four participatory design projects and explore common themes and challenges. The goal is to grapple with institutional landscapes that unevenly distribute learning opportunities, and to consider what equitable, culturally sustaining approaches to ability differences and disabilities in learning might look like. Cathery Yeh uses participatory mapping with youth, teachers, and families to capture lived experiences, decision points, and institutional boundaries shaping access, labels, and opportunities across bilingual education, special education, and mathematics, tracing patterns of exclusion and possibility to inform asset-based intervention systems. Erin McCloskey is investigating multi-generational college classrooms involving formerly incarcerated individuals, examining how storytelling about home, school, and community illuminates systemic patterns of disability, racial, linguistic, and economic inequality. Alfredo J. Artiles will describe the critical cultural-historical framework he is bringing to a research-practice partnership to involve practitioners and families in co-developing systems of support for African American students. The project is conducted in a school district that has been chronically cited for racial disparities in special education affecting African American learners. Mimi Ito is working with educators and families developing "Neurodiversity Oases"— informal learning environments that offer neurodivergent young people identity-affirming, inclusive, social spaces centered on their technology, media, and creative interests.