Redressing disadvantage in high school students: four capabilities toward agency and equity in teaching and learning

Abstract

This work addresses two questions: how can we better characterize the disadvantages faced by marginalized youth? And once characterized, how do we attend to and redress those disadvantages? In attending to these questions, I draw on Nussbaum’s (2011) capabilities approach as a broad, normative framework for characterizing individual well-being in the context of teaching and learning. Within this framework, I employ narrative inquiry into my own practice as a mathematics teacher at an alternative high school and explore the potential for hermeneutic pedagogy as a means to both interpret and cultivate capability. I set forth a tentative list of four capabilities – a disposition of expertise, autonomy, affiliation, and a hermeneutic imagination – each valuable in and of itself, but also as a means to cultivate and secure additional capabilities and redress disadvantage.