E.V.R. Update

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Last week Karen and I got really into adding concrete details to the story’s basic plot line. I asked guiding questions, like who what when where why to help her elaborate on her ideas. It really helped her get into the mindset of her main characters, which helped her be a lot more attuned to the way the plot would organically develop. On the down side, all of this detail slowed us up a bit, so it’ll take us another week to finish the story–but when we get there it’s sure to be awesome!

Disability Resources

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I really liked Patricia Dunn’s article “Re-Seeing (Dis)Ability: Ten Suggestions” because she argued that making curriculum more inclusive for students with disabilities is better for all students in the classroom. Her list of ten suggestions would definitely benefit all students because her recommendations are very general: using technology, using various types of assessment, having thoughtful discussions about disability, etc. I definitely agree with her suggestions because they echo a lot of what we have learned in class this semester. They are suggestions that would make the classroom more inclusive for students with all different identities, not just related to disability. Her suggestions recognize that all students have various strengths and interests that should be understood and valued in the classroom.

Still, I feel like students with serious learning disabilities would still need special accommodations in the classroom. Varying the types of assignments and assessments may not do enough to ensure that each student is getting the quality education that they deserve. I think Dunn’s ideas on more inclusive pedagogies must still be integrated with special needs programs to address students with more severe disabilities. I really don’t know anything about these types of programs and I would be curious to learn more.

Struggling Readers

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Triplett’s article on struggling readers seemed, to me, to be stating the obvious. When teachers establish personal relationships with their students, the students are more likely to engage. When a student feels like they have agency in the classroom and some level of control over the texts they are reading and using, they are more likely to have a positive, productive school experience. The fact that this article was published, however, made me think that these ideas, ones that I take for granted, might not be valued by many teachers. It seems like teachers often end up categorized as that friendly teacher who pals around with kids, doesn’t have high expectations for them, and doesn’t really challenge them, or they get categorized as the demanding teacher with high expectations who doesn’t foster personal relationships with students, wanting to be their teacher more than their friend. In my fieldwork at the high school and middle school, the teachers that kids liked tended to be less demanding, while the teachers they didn’t like were the ones that had high expectations, but little empathy for their students. I hope to avoid falling into either category. I think that students can enjoy being in class and have positive relationships with their teachers even when the teacher is demanding. Making school easy can win over students, but so can making school engaging.

One thing I found really interesting in the struggling readers article was Mitchell’s perception of his teachers as not enjoying teaching. I had never really thought about this. If a teacher clearly doesn’t want to be in the classroom, how can they expect the students to want to be there either? Looking back on my own experience, the teachers that I liked the most and from whom I think I learned the most were always engaged and excited to be in the classroom. The article made me think about first impressions both at the beginning of the year and at the start of every class. When I have a class of my own, I want to use my body language and energy level to immediately communicate to my students that I am excited to be there. I want to treat school like something interesting and exciting that we all get to do together instead of treating it like a chore we all have to deal with. In my fieldwork, a lot of the teachers took the attitude of, “Well we’re both stuck here. I don’t want to do this just as badly as you don’t want to do this. Don’t be mad at me, I hate this too.” While this definitely had a positive impact on how the students treated the teacher, it also made the entirety of school a chore, and nobody likes doing chores. Commiserating with students can be helpful sometimes, but I think empathizing is more effective. Instead of saying “this sucks for everyone”, I think it would be more productive to say, “I understand why you’re upset/struggling/angry, what can we do to make this more positive?”

All of this might seem really simple or overly optimistic, but I think that the little things like body language and a positive attitude, when communicated genuinely, can be really impactful.

Reading, Writing, and Rising Up

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I just read the book Reading, Writing, and Rising Up for the Multidisciplinary Methods seminar and I wanted to share the resource with the class. The author of the book is Linda Christensen, who has 24 years experience as a literacy teacher. I would recommend this book because Christensen is writing from a place of both experience and passion. The text contains unit descriptions, lessons, and sample worksheets and handouts. She also supplements the information with classroom anecdotes and examples of student work.

Throughout the text, it is evident that Christensen has developed and shared her curriculum because she genuinely loves teaching literacy and her students.  She is upfront about both her struggles and triumphs in the classroom and has created a resource for teachers because she empathizes with their challenges and wishes to help. She wants every educator to have the tools to create a classroom in which students work “together in a community to make meaning and to make change” (Christensen 182). Although the text does not explicitly address technology, the lessons could definitely be adapted to include digital literacy skills. I hope you all check it out!

Critical Discussion

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I really like the idea Dunn brings forth in the section “Use literary and other texts as a springboard for informed discussions of disability and ableism.” She talks about giving students reading that highlights ideas of self destructive view, stereotypes of the disabled and society’s misconceptions of the disabled. It is important for students to become “resisting readers”. This teaches them to be critical of everything they read and not accept one author’s opinion to be the only legitimate view. This made me think of a book that I have read called Should We Burn Babar?. In the book, Kohl argues that due to Babar’s messages of racism, sexism and the legitimization of colonialism, children should not be exposed to these books. However, Kohl did take the Babar books into a third grade classroom to have a critical discussion about the book series. After reading the books, he talked to the students about colonialism and other historical/social issues that come up in the book and how the author portrays these ideas as positive things. Even though these students are still very young, they were really effected by this lesson. The images of Babar as a clothed, upper class elephant, leaving behind his naked elephant friends and family members became a disturbing and uncomfortable image for the third graders to look at. Kohl’s conclusion in the introductory chapter was that this book should not be read to children. However, I think that his lesson in the third grade classroom is proof that these books can be used as an introduction to looking critically at literature. It is all up to the teacher to lead discussion and make sure that the students are receiving the right messages and using their own experience/knowledge to critique the author’s writing.

Breaking down barriers

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“In the same way stairs are a constructed barrier to buildings, there are constructed educational barriers in our classrooms and in our pedagogies. We can, and should, address those barriers too.” – Patricia Dunn, “Re-seeing (Dis)ability,” p. 16

I really liked this quote from Patricia’s Dunn’s article about rethinking disability. I thought the entire article was full of great suggestions about how to be a more inclusive and conscientious teacher. What I liked so much about this quote in particular was that it took the conversation about disability beyond the physical. I think many discussions about disability focus on the physical barriers students’ face, and fail to give adequate consideration to the other educational barriers they come up against. Breaking down physical barriers is often easier than breaking down the barriers in pedagogies. I really appreciated Dunn’s suggestions about broadening the definitions of reading and writing, creating diverse ways of assessing students, and using novels and stories with disabled characters to help students understand disability and break free from stereotypes.

Another important piece of Dunn’s article was her emphasis on using new technology to help break down barriers for students. This made me think a lot about my own experiences working with students. For the past four summers, I worked in a summer program for special needs students, and saw a lot of cool ways technology was used as a vehicle for communication. One non-verbal student used a touch-pad that allowed him to communicate when he was hungry, needed to go to the bathroom, wanted to play etc. It allowed him to communicate and express himself in a way he was otherwise unable to do. So cool!

I also loved Dunn’s comments about Universal Design:

“If accessibility were more a part of our cultural consciousness, if inclusiveness were something we didn’t always have to be reminded about, if disability were seen as a part of ‘normal’ life, our buildings and classrooms would not need so much expensive retrofitting and people wouldn’t need to have to ask not to be excluded. Buildings would be more usable by more people from the beginning, which is the main idea behind Universal Design.”

What a wonderful vision for the world!

 

 

 

Teachers as Friends

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What really came through to me in both of this week’s readings was the need for teachers to be more empathetic–the way a friend (or really any caring individual) acts. A friend gets to know you. As a corollary to that, a friend knows what your interests are and how you work best, and probably what you could be better at too. But a friend would never be rude and callous enough to just tell you what you’re bad at. If they did, they wouldn’t be your friend very long. Instead, knowing you and acknowledging your shortcomings, I think most friends usually try to help you slowly improve in your less-than-shining areas by helping you along and focusing on what you already have. Think about the first time you went to a school dance and you didn’t know how to dance and so you embarrassed yourself. Did your dance-savvy friend ridicule you? Make you feel lesser? No. Of course not. That’s not how friends behave. Friends work together. They’re in the same boat, both working for mutual benefit.

But all too often that’s just how teachers behave. Maybe not with such harsh terms as ridicule, but doesn’t the result often feel the same? Think back to the teachers you hated, and why. Did they roll their eyes when you asked a stupid question, almost as if you were an annoying underling who just couldn’t seem to get it right?

In my experience, the teachers who got the most respect from their students–and the ones who got the most hard, sincere work out of their students–were the ones who treated their students like equals and like people they sincerely cared about. And what’s most interesting to me is that it seems like if a teacher starts from this point, only good things can follow. It seemed to me that most of the points in Dunn’s article essentially stemmed out an attempt to be more compassionate towards disabled students; to empathize with them and see their perspectives and insights as valuable, the way a friend would.

Now of course this is overly simplistic (we clearly shouldn’t be too involved in students’ personal lives), but I just wanted to expand upon an insight Mitchell made because I think it’s a useful way of re-imagining the role of a teacher in the classroom and I think it’s a really useful perspective to start from.

 

Constructing a Positive Learning Environment

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After reading “Looking for a struggle: Exploring the emotions of a middle school reader” by Cheri Foster Triplett and “Re-Seeing (Dis)Ability: Ten Suggestions” by Patricia A. Dunn, I was struck by the similarities between the two articles. Dunn “challenges us to think about disability as socially constructed: that many barriers encountered by people with disabilities are not the ‘fault’ of their disability per se, but are rather a result of the ways they’re treated in society” (Dunn 14). Triplett’s case study demonstrates that we can conceptualize struggling readers in a similar manner. Literacy thus becomes a socially constructed phenomenon that is not the sole responsibility of the students, parents, or teacher, but rather the result of the interactions between these different social frameworks.

Thinking of literacy in this way really made me consider what a teacher can do to shape and manipulate the social environment of his or her classroom. Although Mitchell, the student from Triplett’s article, states that he enjoys classes when teachers appear to like what the are teaching, I do not think that just enjoying one’s subject matter is enough. Teachers need to actively foster an educational environment that accommodates all students. But how does one accomplish this task? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to that question. Part of me wants to say that educators must employ the Principles of Universal Design, get to know their students personally, and consistently validate and incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into the curriculum. However, I realize that saying is easier than implementing. These three teaching principles seem to be, in some incarnation or another, the solution for everything.

Although achieving a classroom that incorporates all these elements may be difficult, I think that the readings don’t indicate that educators need to be successful in all these respects. My take away is that, regardless of how this is accomplished, teachers have a duty to shift a student away from a negative perception of his or her abilities to be a student.  Perhaps Mitchell is right: if teachers construct a positive space for learning, then the finer points will follow.

Curb Cuts and Ramps

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Having read the Dunn article I just wanted to comment briefly on the idea of using technologies designed to make life easier for those with disabilities to benefit all students in the classroom.  The example of curb cuts and ramps being put in place in more and more locations in order to accommodate those using wheelchairs proved to be very enlightening.  It seems fairly mundane but one rarely considers that these changes put in place for those with disabilities have easily benefited everyone, from mothers with strollers to teenagers on skateboards.

It seems logical that disability technologies could be used in a similar way in the classroom, to both accommodate and involve students with disabilities and at the same time to benefit the learning of all students.  These technologies such as voice recognition technology and audio texts can accommodate disabled students while also widening the learned literacy of all students.  These technologies also force teachers to widen their view of what is considered reading and writing as well as what is considered student competency and achievement.  When teachers widen their views they are much more able to work towards the recognition and improvement of the abilities of all students.

That Damn Five Paragraph Essay

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In Ray’s article, she says at one point, “The struggle to organize and make everything work together is there anew every time. It is an essential part of the writing process”. This quote really stuck with me. Writing is so often taught in the five paragraph essay structure, and as Ray points out, that kind of writing doesn’t exist in the world outside of school. I was always taught the five paragraph essay, and for a long time, being good at it was super convenient. Writing that way provides you with a rigid structure. It makes the writing process a matter of filling in the blanks. Start with a general statement. Narrow it down to your thesis. Topic sentence, example, reasoning. Topic sentence, example, reasoning. Topic sentence, example, reasoning. Restate your thesis. Work back to something general. Done. Writing this was also made the process of reading more like a word-search. When I read, I tried to find the right content to fill in the blanks in my essay.

When I got to Vassar I really struggled to write well. I knew that writing five paragraph essays wasn’t going to cut it. Instead of changing the structure of my writing, though, I just added paragraphs. I started writing ten paragraph essays, simply adding more meat in between the intro and conclusion. This still didn’t work. After reading this article, I realized that the reason for my inability to adapt was that I was being given a rigid structure to write in. The most exciting and challenging part of writing, for me, is taking all of my ideas, all of the patterns I noticed in a text, all of my connections to other texts, and find a way to connect them all. Instead of finding quotes and putting them into an already determined structure, you have to take an extra step, do more work, and build that structure yourself. Writing like this embodies the kind of processing we do all the time. We move through the world taking the things we see and think and restructuring our ideologies to make everything fit. When we write like that, the process of writing mirrors the process of living. Being able to “organize and make everything work together” is useful in every field, and I think that teaching writing in a way that encourages students to build their own structures and find creative, alternative ways to organize their argument can get students more engaged and make the writing process more genuinely productive.