About

Aydin Bal is a professor of special education at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His research focuses on the interplay between culture, learning, and mental health across local and global education systems. He examines social justice issues in education, family-school-community-university collaboration, organizational innovation, and future making. Dr. Bal has developed the Culturally Responsive Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports framework and the Learning Lab methodology, which involves local stakeholders designing and implementing culturally responsive behavioral support systems. These Learning Labs have been implemented in multiple public schools and teacher education institutions across the United States and internationally, including in the Anishinaabe Nation, Brazil, and Turkey. As both a practitioner and researcher, he has worked with youth from minoritized communities experiencing academic and behavioral problems in various settings such as schools, hospitals, and prisons in the United States, South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Malawi, and Brazil. Dr. Bal has collaborated with several education agencies as a consultant and has published extensively in leading journals in education, learning sciences, and behavioral health. His contributions have been recognized through numerous awards, including the 2017 AERA Review of Research Award, a Fulbright fellowship, and the 2023 Council for Exceptional Children Distinguished Researcher from Underrepresented Groups Award.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Political Science
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Law
• Gender studies
• Developmental psychology
• Economic growth
• History
• Geography
• Mathematics education

Selected publications

• From contradictions to kinship: expansive learning and concept formation in the wild

  Frontiers in Education · 2026-02-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction This article examines the Explorer Program, a culturally grounded credit-recovery pathway co-designed through the Indigenous Learning Lab at a rural high school in the United States. Grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Indigenous relational epistemologies, the study investigates how historically produced contradictions in schooling, particularly between punitive disciplinary regimes and Indigenous kinship-based values, generated conditions for collective expansive learning and decolonizing agency between 2019 and 2024. Rather than framing student disengagement as an individual or familial deficit, the study conceptualizes schooling as a historically situated activity system shaped by settler-colonial logics, racialized discipline practices, and disrupted relations of kinship. Methods Using a longitudinal formative intervention design, Indigenous youth, educators, community members, and university researchers engaged in iterative cycles of collective analysis, design, and enactment. Processes of double stimulation were central, as participants mobilized Indigenous cosmologies, including the Seven Grandfather teachings, Anishinaabe lifeways, and land-based practices. These resources functioned as mediating cultural artifacts for kin-making, supporting the collective reworking of relationships, responsibilities, and meanings within the schooling activity system. Data sources included participant narratives, observations of Learning Lab sessions, and program records documenting attendance, disciplinary referrals, credit accrual, and graduation outcomes. Analyses traced how contradictions were surfaced, reinterpreted, and resolved through collective design activity. Results Through these processes, Indigenous Learning Lab participants reframed student disengagement from a behavioral problem to a form of cultural disconnection produced by schooling structures and disciplinary logics. Kin-making emerged as a central mediational process, enabling participants to rebuild relational ties among students, families, educators, and community members. This reframing catalyzed the emergence of new practices and organizational forms, including Tuesday Check-ins, restorative approaches to discipline, and the Explorer Program itself. Students reported increased senses of belonging, motivation, and purpose; educators observed sustained improvements in engagement and relational trust; and program records showed substantial reductions in absenteeism and disciplinary referrals, with graduation rates approaching 100 percent among participating students. Discussion The study advances learning theory by linking CHAT-based expansive learning and concept formation in the wild with kin-making as a mediational and relational process. It demonstrates how Indigenous communities reclaim epistemic authorship in educational design by transforming schooling activity systems in ecologically valid, culturally sustaining, and adaptive ways. More broadly, the study contributes to the learning sciences by illustrating how Indigenous-led research–practice partnerships can support equity-oriented systems change and generate inclusive educational futures grounded in relational responsibility, sovereignty, and collective agency.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From Margins to Center

  2026-03-11

  book-chapter

  Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was framed as a civil rights law, it has not eliminated racial disproportionality in special education. For decades, students of color—particularly in subjective categories such as learning disabilities, emotional disturbance, and intellectual disability—have been overidentified, segregated, and subjected to harsher discipline, fueling inequitable outcomes and school-to-prison pathways. IDEA’s monitoring system (e.g., Indicators 4, 9, and 10) seeks to address these inequities through technical risk ratio analyses and compliance requirements. However, research shows that such policy remedies often prioritize procedural compliance and color-evasive, decontextualized solutions rather than tackling the historical and structural roots of racism and ableism that shape disability identification and discipline. This chapter presents the Learning Lab methodology as a participatory, equity-oriented approach to localized policy development. Grounded in critical special education, the Learning Lab empowers school community members to co-design culturally responsive, race-conscious reforms that disrupt deficit-based narratives and promote inclusive, just educational futures.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning, development, and Theory in motion: Revisiting cultural-historical perspectives in uncertain times

  Mind Culture and Activity · 2026-04-30

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Speculative Design Toward Inclusive Futures: Leveraging Voices and Future Imaginations of the School Community to Transform a System of Punishment and Exclusion

  AERA Open · 2025-03-18 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Education researchers have increasingly used speculative design approaches to elevate the transformative agency of local stakeholders to re-mediate oppressive systems constituting harmful contexts of human learning and development. To explicitly redress racism, ableism, and other forms of interlocking oppression, the Indigenous Learning Lab was implemented in a rural high school struggling with persistent racial injustice in school discipline, profoundly affecting American Indian students and families. The Learning Lab methodology is a community-led systemic design process that leveraged local school community members’ histories, cultural assets, and sociopolitical future imaginations toward transformative knowledge production. This article examines how school community members collectively engaged in speculative future-making, amplifying their historicity, everyday resistance, cultural assets, and sociopolitical future imaginations to design a decolonizing, inclusive support system to dismantle a rural high school’s oppressive settler-colonial discipline system.

  PublisherDOI

• Towards Decolonizing Agency in Addressing Racialization of Behaviors in Settler Colonial Schools

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access

  This paper proposes a decolonizing agency framework, emphasizing how a diverse group of policy actors center Indigenous sovereignty, histories, lived experiences, and expertise to address racial disproportionality within a school community.Decolonizing agency builds upon existing frameworks on agency, in particular relational agency (Edwards, 2005; 2007) and expands the concepts in practice by incorporating decolonizing methodologies (Brayboy, 2005; Lomawaima, 2000; Smith, 2018;2021) and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT).We have developed the concept of decolonizing agency through a five-year-long transformative research partnership with an Anishanabee (Ojibwe) Nation to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous students in exclusionary school discipline and special education for "behavioral disturbance" at a rural high school.Six dimensions of decolonizing agency emerged based on our research-practice partnership to address the racialization of behavioral problems in a school serving Indigenous students.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Decolonizing Agency: A Framework for an Inclusive Co-Design of Behavioral Support Systems in Indigenous Land

  Exceptional Children · 2025-06-22 · 3 citations

  article

  Racial disproportionality in special education and school discipline remains a persistent social justice issue in the U.S. education system. Drawing from a 4-year-long school-community-university partnership within an Anishinaabe Band of Ojibwe in northern Wisconsin, we propose a theoretical and practical framework called decolonizing agency to address racial disproportionality through systemic transformation. Decolonizing agency transcends the recognition and utilization of others’ support in solving wicked education problems. It requires policy actors to draw from the historical legacies of oppression, racism, and systemic racial violence embedded within everyday schooling routines. It also entails surpassing epistemic ignorance to understand inequity problems, shifting from an individual approach to a systemic one. Lastly, the decolonizing agency demands that policy actors and educators center the epistemology, ontology, and value system of families, communities, and students from historically marginalized backgrounds as the knowledge producers. Informed by data and theory, we suggest six dimensions of decolonizing agency as core principles that educators and policy actors across decision-making levels can adopt to address their unique inequity issues.

  PublisherDOI

• Expansive Learning for Enacting Utopias: Theoretical and Practical Advances

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access

  This symposium brings together leading scholars from four continents to explore the potential of expansive learning in enacting utopias, understood as practical alternatives to the logic of profit and exploitation.By drawing on the theoretical framework of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), the symposium highlights the role of expansive learning in addressing societal challenges and fostering social change.The contributions presented in this symposium showcase a diverse range of case studies, including community-based initiatives, formative interventions, and social movements.These studies demonstrate how expansive learning can be used to challenge the status quo, enact alternative futures, and create more just and equitable societies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unpacking Systemic Contradictions in Inclusive Education Through a Cultural-Historical Activity Theoretical Analysis

  Exceptional Children · 2025-12-05 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  This systematic review examines the systemic contradictions hindering the implementation of inclusive education for students with disabilities in U.S. elementary schools through the lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. The present synthesis of 16 empirical studies identified systemic contradictions within and across the general and special education systems, including tensions in tools, rules, and roles perpetuating exclusionary practices. Findings show that entrenched individualistic and deterministic ideologies, fragmented collaboration, and inadequate resources exacerbate and perpetuate exclusionary practices, therefore marginalizing students with disabilities. This review underscores the critical need for systemic, equity-driven solutions, including reimagining accountability systems, fostering collaborative cultures and infrastructures, and addressing the intersectional needs of students with disabilities by amplifying the experiences, interests, goals, and dreams of students with disabilities and their families.

  PublisherDOI

• Developing Relational Agency for Addressing Racialization of School Discipline in the U.S

  Proceedings. · 2024-06-10 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  In this paper, we adapt Edwards's (2005;2007) concept of relational agency, situating it within the context of racialized schooling in the U.S. We posit that the ability to recognize and leverage others' support in addressing a complex problem necessitates the ability to acknowledge the historical legacies of systemic racial violence ingrained in everyday school practices.To support our theoretical argument, we present a case from Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), an inclusive task force established to design a culturally responsive behavioral support system addressing racial disproportionality in school discipline in a predominantly white high school serving American Indian students.Specifically, we emphasize the relational agency of Mr. Archer, the school principal, as he worked together with ILL members, particularly American Indian members.The purpose of this paper is to explore how a diverse group of local stakeholders developed relational agency (Edwards, 2005;2007) while collaborating on the Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL) project.The project aimed to create a culturally responsive school behavioral support system addressing racial disproportionality in school disciplinary practices at Newhope High School (NHS) (Pseudonym) in rural Wisconsin in the U.S., serving American Indian students.The ILL was an inclusive problem-solving task force where members collectively address local systemic social injustice issues (Bal et al., 2018).The ILL was comprised of members from diverse roles (e.g., parents, students, community members, educators, administrators) and racial/ethnic groups.This diverse group collaborated, recognized, and utilized each other's socio-spatial-historical perspectives and lived experiences as legitimate sources of knowledge.This collaborative approach allowed members to collectively unpack the complex problem of racial disproportionality in school discipline and proposed solutions tailored to their localized contexts.This paper specifically examines the relational agency of one member, Mr. Kevin Archer (Pseudonym), the principal at NHS, as he learned and developed his agency through interactions and engagements with other ILL members.Investigating Mr. Archer's relational agency is critical because the creation of school discipline policies/system is typically perceived as the domain of school technocrats, including principals and other members of administration at the school or district level.Administrators, like Mr. Archer, possess the privilege and authority to make decisions regarding the school system.Hence, it is crucial to understand how individuals with power and privilege utilize these attributes to learn from other stakeholders, particularly parents, community members, and historically marginalized students to collectively create systemic changes.This paper is theoretically anchored in the framework of relational agency (Edwards, 2005;2007), which emphasizes how a group of professionals across boundaries of practice work together to solve a complex problem.In the context of the U.S education system, embedded within a history of discrimination and oppression, we argue that the framework of relational agency needs expansion to capture the historical-social-spatial-political nuances that diverse groups of people bring to the table as they collaborate.The overarching question guiding this study is: How did the school principal develop relational agency throughout ILL? Racialization of school disciplinary practicesThe racialization of discipline in U.S. schools remains a persistent civil rights issue, with Black and American Indian/Alaska Native students experiencing the highest percentages of out-of-school suspensions in public K-12 schools (Leung-Gagn et al., 2022).Overrepresentation of historically marginalized students in school discipline is not merely an individual issue of students' incapability to follow school norms.It is also not simply attributed to educators' biases in singling out certain students based on their racial groups.We argue that racial disproportionality is a manifestation of how discipline systems-including norms and the roles of administrators and educators themselves-are embedded within whiteness and are permeated by day-to-day interactions within and outside of the school environment.The racialization of school discipline is fundamentally a form of violence

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Creating Thirdspace: Indigenous Learning Lab for Survivance, Expansive Learning, and Systemic Transformation

  Proceedings. · 2024-06-10

  articleOpen access

  Racialization of school discipline is an enduring systemic problem in the United States.This formative intervention study is based on a collaboration with 14 school stakeholders: American Indian students, parents, community members, and educators at a rural high school in a community-driven problem-solving process called Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL).Members analyzed the root causes of the racialized school discipline and created a new behavioral support system.Utilizing critical geography and decolonizing methodology, this formative intervention study aimed to unpack how ILL members formed Thirdspace-a space of resistance, possibilities, and hopes-to address enduring racial disproportionality in school discipline.Members challenged race-neutral representations of space, mapped out dystopia, revitalized American Indian epistemology, and mapped out a real utopian vision of schooling. Racialization of school discipline in the U.SThe U.S. school system has been a settler-colonial space since its inception, in which First Nations students and families struggle over cultural and linguistic erasure, recognition, and educational sovereignty (Grande, 2015;Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006;Sabzalian, 2019;Wolfe, 2006).Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, morals, and educational practice were/are pathologized by the settler-colonial state (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006).School discipline has historically been a tool for the settler projects of forced assimilation and cultural genocide masqueraded as "education."American Indian youth experience multiple forms of marginalization in the settlercolonial school system.Particularly, exclusionary school discipline (e.g., out-of-school suspension, expulsion, and referrals to law enforcement) has been used as a tool of exclusion through which Indigenous bodies are erased from the learning space and white settler-colonial privilege and property are reinforced and perpetuated.Despite complexity in disproportionality patterns across states, districts, and schools, nationally American Indian students are more likely to receive frequent and harsher school discipline compared to their white counterparts (Whitford et al., 2019).Racial disproportionality is a byproduct of settler-colonial practices that spatially arrange geography of opportunity (Tate, 2008) based on racial lines and is also a tool of erasure to uphold settler-colonial power privileging whiteness over indigeneity.To disrupt the racialized school discipline system, it is imperative to investigate how power, privilege, and marginalization are indexed in local social, spatial, and historical contexts simultaneously (Soja, 2010;Tuck & McKenzie, 2015).To address settler-colonial violence embedded in disciplinary policies and practices, a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab (ILL), was implemented in a close collaboration with an Anishinaabe Tribal government at Newhope High School (NHS) (Pseudonyms for all name of places and people in this paper) in a Midwest state between 2019 and 2024.As a community participatory design project, the ILL facilitated a critical design praxis of local school stakeholders-i.e., reflecting on systemic tensions and contradictions entrenched in the existing school system and taking collective action to co-design locally meaningful solutions in response to the needs, goals, and visions of school stakeholders (Afacan et al., 2021;Ko et al., 2022;Ko et al., 2023).The ILL was a systemic transformation through an inclusive problem-solving space that centered the multiple voices, perspectives, and histories of American Indian students and families, who together with school professionals designed a new school behavioral support system that reflected Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies (Ko et al., 2023).This study documents how ILL members leveraged their individual and collective histories and experiences in a dialogic space to disrupt: The settler-colonial school space that is socially, historically, spatially, and politically constructed to uphold white power and privilege; and color neutral and technocratic diagnosis of and solutions to racial disparities in behavioral and academic outcomes.Through the ILL, participants, in particular Anishinaabe members, formed Thirdspace-a generative space filled with survivance, transgression, and new imaginations (hooks, 1989;Soja, 1996;Vizenor, 2008).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Dosun Ko

  Santa Clara University

  15 shared

• Dian Mawene

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  13 shared

• Alfredo J. Artiles

  Stanford University

  9 shared

• Halil İbrahim Çakır

  Giresun University

  8 shared

• Aaron Bird Bear

  7 shared

• Kemal Afacan

  Artvin Coruh University

  6 shared

• Linda Orie

  6 shared

• Morgan Mayer-Jochimsen

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  2000

• M.S., Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1996

• B.A., Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1994

Awards & honors

• Review of Research Award , American Educational Research Ass…
• Fulbright fellowship (2018-2019)
• AERA Scholars of Color Early Career Award , American Educati…
• AERA Cultural Historical Special Interest Group Early Career…
• Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) – Division for Resear…