Melissa Cieto - STEM Education Dissertation Defense
Title:
Stories of Synergy: Collaborative Practices Between Special and Science Educators for Inclusive Science Education
Dissertation Advisor:
Stephen B. Witzig (Education Department)
Committee Members:
Shakhnoza Kayumova (Education Department) and Matthew Taylor (Salve Regina University)
Abstract:
This study employs Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry framework to explore the lived school experiences of special education teachers and general education science teachers in public inclusion elementary settings as they collaborate to support their shared students with exceptionalities within the general education setting. This research centers around the participants’ stories in situ as they unfolded across the three dimensions of narrative inquiry: the temporality dimension, personal/social dimension, and the place or sequences of places dimension. Narrative threads reveal that participants story collaboration as a lived, relational experience shaped by time, institutional contexts, and interpersonal relationships rather than as the implementation of formal co‑teaching models.
The conceptual framework supports how Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry captures participants’ embodied stories across the three dimensions of the narrative inquiry space. Key substantive constructs that guided the study include the storytellers’ preparedness to teach science content to students with exceptionalities, the affordances and challenges of elementary science education in inclusion settings, the partnerships needed to support students with exceptionalities’ access to rigorous science instruction, and how participants negotiate their roles and responsibilities when creating and implementing curricular accommodations. These constructs, in conversation with the history of special education in the United States and Massachusetts, are present in the temporality and place dimensions of narrative inquiry. This narrative inquiry aims to tell the participants’ narratives of how they live collaboration in real time, including how collaborative practices evolve across sustained partnerships and are disrupted by shifting roles, schedules, and institutional constraints.
Three pairs of in‑service teachers were interviewed using semi‑structured narrative interviews in conjunction with observation of collaborative opportunities and artifact analyses of inclusion science lessons. Participants’ stories highlight how collaboration often occurs informally and “on the fly,” shaped by limited planning time and the marginalization of elementary science relative to tested subject areas, while simultaneously creating flexible, inquiry‑based learning spaces that support multiple entry points for students with exceptionalities. Narrative threads illuminated that teachers’ preparedness and collaborative roles are deeply influenced by institutional structures and professional histories rather than individual willingness or expertise alone. Through these storied accounts, collaboration emerges as uneven and continually negotiated, grounded in trust, shared responsibility, and moral commitment to students with exceptionalities.
This qualitative study contributes a narrative account detailing in-service educators’ collaborative efforts in inclusion settings, reframing collaboration as lived relational work rather than a technical practice to be implemented. Through the three pairs of in-service educators’ stories, five narrative threads emerged: 1) collaboration between science and special educators is fluid; 2) collaboration between science and special educators is improvised in constrained places; 3) participants’ stories position science inclusive education as marginalized; 4) there is ongoing tension between participants’ aspirational views of collaboration and their enacted collaboration; and 5) specific institutional structures continue to inhibit students with exceptionalities’ access to science content within Massachusetts inclusion classrooms as highly contextual places. These storied experiences hold implications for educational policies, in‑service professional development, building‑based school schedules, and pre‑service teacher education.
CCB 115
Stephen Witzig
508-910-9030
switzig@umassd.edu
https://umassd.zoom.us/j/91802967143?pwd=tsflWJvunrvYP0y1ducXPa6c25A2bV.1