Diversity vs. Inclusion
After reading the three articles for the week, I was immediately drawn into the article regarding issues with disabilities. I feel as though issues around ability and inclusion have arose many times within my teaching career. As I was reading the article, I thought back to a TedTalk I had watched last year. I have posted it below. It is short, but very powerful, and was done by a kid!
Having discussions about ability levels and special needs with young children is very difficult. Where I teach, the expectation for all students is to walk in the hallways and stay at a level 0, silent. I teach first grade. One day this year, a CIP student was running and screaming down the hallway as my students were going to the restroom. My students all began to gasp and tell me that a boy was running and screaming. In the moment, I wasn't sure how or if I should address that that was normal for that student, and it is alright if he wasn't following school wide expectations. As we walked back to our classroom, I was still frantically pondering how to appropriately address the matter. I play Howard B. Wigglebottom videos, cheesy cartoons to teach different character skills, during morning meeting sometimes. I decided to play a Howard B. Wigglebottom video about special needs. I have added it below :). After the video, I told me kids that they are able to communicate with their words and the student that was screaming is a non-verbal student so he communicates with others using different sounds. We had a discussion about how everyone is different and everyone has different needs. I felt like our discussion went really well, for the age and grade level of my students.
To tie this back to the other articles for the week, as educators and people in general, we need to ensure that everyone's voice is heard and that everyone feels as though they belong. I often hear how important diversity is in education, but inclusion is more important. Having different races, abilities, genders, and languages is wonderful, but allowing every race, ability level, gender, and language to be heard and included is more important.
Questions:
How can we ensure that everyone is included?
How do we have difficult discussions with our students?
Since I feel that it is important for everyone to be included when it comes to being educated, I also have to examine the goals of education for students. I think one of the main goals is to help them have a good quality of life. Naturally, this desire for the enhanced quality extends from socialization to academics, and everything in between. Accepting differences in people is a good practice when the differences may fall in a superficial category such as appearance or individual behaviors that I might be unfamiliar or "strange" like wearing mismatched shoes. Ultimately, I don't think these are going to affect anyone one way or the other. However, when the differences, particularly in behaviors, may endanger others, or in the case of students, ultimately exclude them from having the best life that they can have there may be a problem.
ReplyDeleteIn the classroom and school, if all students have certain expectations in behavior as well as learning, then there should not be different ones for students that are having difficulty meeting them, for whatever reason. Yet, this does not mean that certain adaptations such as methods of behavior modification, differentiated instruction, and plain old patience should not be applied. As a sub who occasionally has elementary students, I have been with students who see students not meeting expectations, whether special needs or not, I tell them that the student is having a rough moment, that we are all "works in progress,"that we are all on different roads, yet, I like how they are meeting the expectations and to keep up the good work or something to that effect.
Sandy, the point of behaviors - such a hot topic in schools now. As a former Emotional Disabilities teacher I see both points so well. There are so many issues that come together to create the difficult decision of how do we best serve these students while preserving the learning environment. I certainly feel the Least Restrictive environment comes into play under Special Education Law and wonder how it will change as we seem to have more and more students being serviced in our schools with significant and unsafe behaviors.
DeleteI always wonder if this is where we will draw the line at differentiation? How far can we differentiate for students that require a different learning environment? How do we support those students without a special education diagnosis? How does trauma fit into differentiating? So many questions and I love the discussions surrounding all of it!
When I was in China, actually we barely have the "diversity and inclusive" concept in our school. We talked about "all-round development" and "quality education". To compare with American schools, I started realized that in some conditions it is impossible to achieve an inclusive educational environment perfectly. From my perspective, the first component of inclusive class is the number of students. As a teacher it is easier to me to care of all student in my class if it's a small class that has students lower than 20. Student numbers of a class in China is usually around 50-60. However, a class time is usually about 45 minutes. Imagine that, how difficult it is that you need to try to care about more than 50 kids during 45 minutes with teaching.
ReplyDeleteFor your second question, I totally agree with the cartoon way. Cartoon videos are usually easy to accepted by kids. Instead of explaining in our words, I think using educational videos is much more easy and acceptable to young kids. Additionally, for me I think I will try to imagine how would it feel like if I was that student who had inherent behavioral issue. Then I will tell student how I feel and to let them try to feel it by themselves, to understand the difficulty and difference.
Wow Yunlu, I could not even imagine being responsible for teaching that many kids. I picture it in mind being similar to a college class where the students are just sitting in an audience looking at the instructor. It seems that the children in China are more comfortable with a more structured environment where they don't have to have as much interaction. I've also worked with kids from Africa and they seem to be a little more disciplined or reserved than our American kids as well.
DeleteLatonia,
DeleteI think you made a point. School in China usually lack of innovation and more about structured class environment. There are many teaching aims in the China schools. especially secondary schools. Because of students need to face with the high school/college admission exams at the end of their middle/high school, teachers usually expect to finish all textbooks contents in two years. Then the last year is only use for practicing. Which is.. not exciting. Lol
I have actually had similar experiences to yours and struggle to find the best way to address the situation. We have our students with special needs join us for social studies and science. We work really hard to front load our students and give them the skills necessary to be helpful. What I find hard is explaining the differences between typical and atypical students without making it seem like us and them. How do you explain autism to 8 and 9 year olds.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that has helped is literature and discussing the traits of the characters in our books. Our students participated in a novel study for the book Wonder. We were able to have engaging and deep conversations about the book in the book and relate it back to the students at our school. We have also had parents come to school and talk to our kids. I have noticed that when students have and understanding of special needs and interact with students who have special needs, they not only become more helpful, they almost become protective over the students.
Sabbath, I love using books to discuss differences and traits of characters just like traits of classmates! I think it's such a great way to connect everyone in the room. I agree, when students have an understanding and open dialogue about differences they really start to develop an empathy for those unlike themselves.
DeleteAre there any specific books you use? I worked with a teacher once that had an excellent book for this purpose, but I forget the name of it now.
I think this is all too often a concern of all of us! Am I teaching this correctly? Did I offend anyone? Was I correct? Can my students understand he or she is different than the kid doing ___________ (in your example running down the hallway screaming)? At the end of the day, I think when we work on fair versus equitable we address this issue head-on and with language everyone can understand. When kids are used to ideas, curriculum, and even expectations being differentiated but the goal is we are all working toward growth we see students be more accepting.
ReplyDeleteI've been a special educator my whole career and I've worked with ENL within my SPED population meaning I've differentiated the differentiated! It's tough, it comes with barriers and questions, but handling them with honesty and education is the best way to help students understand the idea of fair versus equitable. I don't always get it right, but I try to learn from those mistakes. When I see someone else doing something great, I try to learn - that's what we want for our students, too.
I was wondering about how to teach with SPED kids can be considered as "inclusive". Because of in China, SPED is another branch of the education field. Normally we don't need to study about SPED to be a teacher except in a special school. As i study in here, I notice that SPED is a class that every teacher need to learn. I was surprised and felt like we need to do the same thing in China. Even we barely need to face with kid that with special needs, it is still important to us to teach our kids about different people and how to understand them.
DeleteKristyn, I agree that there are so many questions surrounding how educators should respond to behaviors of students that are extreme and if the pendulum will swing away from the Least Restrictive environment to the opposite. At one point when I taught at Tech there were different provisions set up for students who had behavioral problems who were not viewed to be SPED, or or have emotional challenges. Thinking about this arrangement, it was a type ot on campus alternative school for them.They were housed in an isolated area and strictly treated. They also had to do everything as a group, including going to the cafeteria and having lunch. However, this was not a permanent arrangement and the students could return to the general campus with improvement. The situation was ambivalent in that they did not have licensed teachers working with them and they did very boring assignments (copying articles from encyclopedias, etc, but on the other hand, the teaching assistant who worked with them made them so miserable that most of them quickly corrected their behavior and had no intention of returning to the alternative setting. The school did this for about a year. Overall, I think teaching has become more challenging in working with all types of students.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I have worked with SPED students where the goal has been to ease them into working in a regular classroom by degrees and I've witnessed some success as some students no longer need to be in a restrictive environment. Unfortunately, I have also seen some students regress as they have moved from school to school. At one IPS school, that has a special program for SPED students, I have seen students running wild and "cursing like sailors" with little or no effort to correct them. The curriculum is also weak. When I'm at this particular school I feel badly because I know their behaviors would improve and they would thrive at a couple of other IPS schools where principals,teachers and assistants would not tolerate their behavior and have more rigorous academic activities for them. At this point, to me. inclusion seems far off for them.
In my introduction to special education class, we read an article titled "Inclusion: Has it gone too far?". The authors discuss if general education is right for all students. In our society, we want to be so positive when it comes to education and push the No Child Left Behind agenda that we forget to really think about what's best for the child. We do things because it sounds like the right thing to do. I work in the special education department at the high school, and I see how we push kids who have severe disabilities into general education classrooms and it has caused so much frustration among the teachers and support staff. There is a lot of class disruption on top of their personal care needs. It's not that they don't care about the students, but they just feel they would be better served in another environment.
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