About

Dian Mawene is a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests center on the intersections of equity, disability, inclusion, and special education.

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Collective Transformative Agency: The Power of Ordinary People to Create Systemic Change

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2026-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Background: The design of educational policy is typically dominated by those in positions of power, such as elected officials, education departments, school districts, and administrators. However, ordinary people, such as students, parents, and community members, who are often perceived as passive recipients of policy, do have rights to educational policy design. It is essential to address cultures of exclusion as a foundation for a transformative co-design process that honors and leverages the knowledge, experience, and expertise of ordinary people who are typically sidelined and silenced in educational policy design. Purpose: This paper explores how a diverse group of stakeholders, including school and district administrators, teachers, students, parents, and community members, form their collective transformative agency—their ability to challenge and break away from traditional rules and norms about expertise in education policy. Specifically, the study looks at how these stakeholders address cultures of exclusion that have historically marginalized certain groups in the co-design process. Through the use of the Learning Lab methodology, this paper examines how Lab members formed a collective transformative agency to co-design a district-level policy. This process allowed them to create an inclusive, student-centered protocol that challenges existing power dynamics and fosters a more equitable approach to policy co-design. Research Design: This qualitative study was conducted in the Aleph School District (ASD) in the U.S. during the 2022–23 academic year. The Learning Lab intervention involved 16 members. After the intervention, we conducted individual interviews with Lab members, and we analyzed the emergence of their collective transformative agency. We analyzed data from Lab meetings and interview recordings, along with ethnographic memos, to explore how transformative agency manifested within the Learning Lab. Conclusions: Collective transformative agency is critical for achieving a truly inclusive co-design of educational policy that moves beyond incremental and tokenistic efforts toward inclusion. In ASD, transformative agency gradually fostered the development of a new, inclusive culture within the district that extended beyond the Learning Lab. District leadership began to seek out the valuable knowledge, expertise, and power that students and families bring to the district decision-making processes. As a result, students’ perspectives and the voices of parents and the community are now seen as legitimate contributors and knowledge creators in educational policy development at the district.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond siloed systems: a call for integrated approaches to preparing special education teachers for multilingual learners with disabilities

  Journal for Multicultural Education · 2026-04-24

  articleSenior author

  Purpose This paper aims to discuss the systemic barriers that constrain the preparation of special education teachers to effectively serve multilingual learners with disabilities (MLwDs), as well as the conceptual and ideological misalignments that shape prevailing approaches to teacher preparation. It also argues for a fundamental ontological rethinking of how bilingualism, disability and professional knowledge are conceptualized within special education teacher preparation programs. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a commentary approach, drawing on a broad interdisciplinary research base spanning special education, bi/multilingual education, disability studies and teacher education. Findings Over the past two decades, limited progress has been made in preparing special education teachers to work effectively with MLwDs in the USA. Existing special education teacher preparation programs continue to lack robust empirical and theoretical foundations, as well as sufficient institutional support for designing and implementing integrated coursework, coherent field experiences and comprehensive frameworks that address the intersecting linguistic, cultural and disability-related needs of MLwDs. Originality/value This paper advances the field by reiterating that the challenges surrounding the preparation of special education teachers for MLwDs cannot be addressed through minor programmatic adjustments or the addition of stand-alone courses. It calls for a renewed, equity-oriented vision of teacher preparation grounded in critical, intersectional and asset-based frameworks that more accurately reflect the lived realities of MLwDs and the professional demands placed on teachers.

  PublisherDOI

• 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

• Fostering Inclusive Practices in Educational Policy Reform

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we examine how a group of diverse stakeholders in a predominantly White school district expanded their practice of inclusion through an intentional co-design process.The Aleph School District (ASD) in New England, U.S., co-designed a protocol for addressing discrimination and harassment, a persistent concern affecting historically marginalized students with and without disabilities.The school district partnered with the local university and employed the Learning Lab intervention (Bal et al., 2016;2018), an inclusive, process-oriented methodology to enable the local stakeholders most impacted the chance to better understand and address their concerns.Our analysis of data suggests that, in addition to producing a needed and useful protocol, this process expanded authentic inclusion of student voice in the school district.Further, we identify practices that fostered meaningful inclusion within the Learning Lab and tangible and intangible outcomes that extended beyond the Learning Lab space.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coded words in a demographically changing suburban school district: a critical geography perspective of White spatial imaginary

  Whiteness and Education · 2025-07-16 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Fostering inclusion: students’ voices in the co-design of a school-district level policy

  International Journal of Inclusive Education · 2025-04-24 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Proximity vs. equity: Policy actors’ decision-making on attendance zone boundaries in a suburban school district

  Education Policy Analysis Archives · 2025-09-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study provides a qualitative analysis of how local policy actors in a predominantly White suburban school district engaged in collective decision-making regarding elementary school attendance boundaries. Given the long-standing neighborhood segregation caused by housing policies and practices since the city’s inception, Riverside policy actors faced two competing options: maintaining the neighborhood school concept or addressing equity issues arising from the imbalanced distribution of students by income and racial groups. Utilizing critical policy analysis (CPA) and critical geography perspectives, the study found that while some community members and members of the rezoning committee challenged race-neutral approaches that influenced the decision-making process, the majority of policy actors ignored the existing spatial segregation. Instead, they positioned their decision-making as neutral and prioritized bureaucratic rationality. The implications for policy actors and future research are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Past as Prologue: A Critical Spatial Analysis of Exclusionary Discipline

  Behavioral Disorders · 2025-10-26 · 1 citations

  article

  Compared to white peers, Black, Latinx, and American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) students are more likely to experience exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspension) and its harmful effects, calling for policy and practice transformation. Informing this transformation will require the field to contend with contextually dependent spatial-historical legacies that influence contemporary discipline practices. Focused on one geographic region of California, we used a convergent mixed-methods design to examine out-of-school suspensions across race and space. In the quantitative strand, we analyzed discipline-based outcomes spatially, merging student-level suspension records from 2011/12 to 2021/22 with geospatial historical redlining data. In the qualitative strand, we analyzed historical and contemporary policy documents to identify underlying carceral logics that inform school discipline policy. Through systematic integration of qualitative and quantitative findings, we found that Black students were overrepresented in suspensions compared to white students, and that contextual factors—including historical redlining policies, school composition, school resources, and carceral policies—undergirded suspension outcomes in schools. We provide a mixed-methods joint display from our analysis to illustrate this throughline, and we conclude with recommendations for statewide and district-level policy change.

  PublisherDOI

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

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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

  article1st authorCorresponding

  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

Frequent coauthors

• Aydın Bal

  13 shared

• Dosun Ko

  Santa Clara University

  11 shared

• Morgan Mayer-Jochimsen

  5 shared

• Linda Orie

  5 shared

• Aaron Bird Bear

  4 shared

• Jahyun Yoo

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  3 shared

• Elizabeth M. Schrader

  3 shared

• Kemal Afacan

  Artvin Coruh University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• University of New Hampshire College of Liberal Arts Global R…