Journal Part Three - March 16th

Challenging Views Towards Inclusive Education of Disabled Students (Horn - 2009)

"What we let happen to our most vulnerable citizens speaks to our moral fibre as a society. Whether we mean to teach them or not, our children absorb those lessons and carry them into subsequent generations."

        I struggled with this reading because inclusive education is something that I am passionate about and I can't imagine a school like this. I chose this quote to start with because I think that it encapsulates the essence of the article. This article is centered around the controversy of the Woodlands School which was exclusively for students with exceptionalities. This school was overcrowded and under-resourced, which bread chronic neglect and abuse of the students that went there. The school was eventually closed down in 1996 due to all of these terrible problems and with the help of a small persistent group of families advocating for their children. I believe that this quote sums up what a school like this is teaching children - that it is okay to "shove" the students who have exceptionalities to the outside and not have them participate in mainstream schooling. I hold the belief that students with exceptionalities should be included in schools with their peers because we can all learn from each other. They have the right to learn from their peers just like their peers should learn from them. Incorporating students with exceptionalities may be a challenge for classroom teachers with 30 other students but it allows for expansion of your own knowledge and helps facilitate student success.

        I have had a lot of experience with the two different sides of inclusive education. My brother being a student with a TBI [traumatic brain injury] I have seen him be a victim of both sides. Throughout his schooling he tended to be shipped off somewhere new and NEVER had an IIP in place. I know that these types of documents existed throughout his time so I now wonder why one was never in place. When my he was in younger grades only one single teacher (from when he was in K-6) acknowledged that he had different needs than his peers and actively tried to help differentiate her instruction. This is where I saw him fall victim to the inclusion side of this articles argument. Once he reached the middle years (7/8) he was essentially shipped off to another school where he was placed in a special needs class. This school was not anywhere near to our home and was the only place in Prince Albert at the time that had any specialized programming. This is where the exclusive education started and his teacher obviously held preconceived notions about their students. I had mentioned in class that one of his teachers had told my parents that he would never be able to drive. It was his teacher in grade 7/8 that said this (be reminded that this teacher had special training for classes like this). This reading just reminded me that students, like my brother, have been somewhat (or extremely) neglected by the education system because it was "too hard" or "too much work" to deal with. I do not believe that students with exceptionalities should be shoved to the margins because other students see that and subliminally take that message that doing so is okay. If we as teachers push these students with exceptionalities to the margins of our classroom and our schools and then eventually out of our schools (for example schools like the Woodlands School) the other students will see this and think that it is acceptable. Having students with exceptionalities in our classrooms can help us learn about different learning styles and how to adapt to individual students needs. Having a variety of levels and needs in the classroom allows students to learn form one another and you are more prepared to encounter people of varying abilities and personalities outside of the classroom. This type of thinking reminds me of our EDUC 302 class where we discussed inclusion and its advantages. I (fairly obviously) have strong feelings about these types of schools because of my experiences and it blows me away that in this day and age there is any movement for anything other than inclusion. It really shocked me that there is another push in BC to have a school just for autistic children - I do not agree and think that there is a place for every child in mainstream schools.
         Obviously, this article hit close to home with me and topics like these have a strong impact on my teaching practice. I believe that all students in the classroom can learn from each other and if a student does not absolutely need to be taken out for special assistance they should not be. I do understand that there are cases where students need to get caught up and need the extra help but students should spend most their of their time in the home classroom. There obviously has to be a happy medium that is best for the student - somewhere between being in a school like Woodlands and being in the home classroom 100% of the time. Children can learn so much from one another and I think that this is something that I will be addressing in my future classrooms. I always try to get students of different levels working together and students of the same level working together: all expanding their knowledge. This will all be simultaneous with teaching about the discrimination of people who are not the "normal" - no matter what age a student is at, they can understand that everyone is different and has different skills.

 Seeing, Hearing, and Talking Race: Lessons for White Teachers from Four Teachers of Color (Michie - 2007) 

 

 "As a White person and a recent transplant from the South, I had just as much, if not more, to learn about the context of my teaching: the lived experiences of my students and their families, the social and economic landscape of the school's neighborhood, and the ways my work with urban kids would be impacted by issues of culture, language, class, and race."

        This reading helped me to understand what I still need to learn because it brought up many issues that I am still uncomfortable with myself. This article discusses the story of a White male teacher who teaches on the south side of Chicago and his struggles with addressing the affects of race in the classroom, school, and community. The quote above outlines what he knew he had to try and understand. I think that he knew, as a knew new White teacher, in a school with many different races represented he would have some gaps in knowledge but I don't think it was until he started that he knew how large the gap would be. Instead of teaching being all lesson planning and only addressing the bare minimum he had to delve deeper into the issues of race with his students. He states that there are several lessons that you can learn from teachers of color if you listen to the vast knowledge that they have to offer. They suggest things such as - examine whiteness, be honest about your gaps and commit to learning more, clarify your purposes for teaching, challenge your students and don't pity them, and (I think) most importantly: be resilient. Changes in regards to teaching within a community that you are unfamiliar with will not and cannot happen overnight. If, like me, you want to try to address the issue of race in the classroom, it is important to be resilient and keep learning because there will always be new ways to address and combat the issues that race present to your students.

        When this article mentioned examining whiteness as a way to further your own knowledge it made me reflect on the whiteness I see in my own life, specifically in the school I am student teaching in. Upon reading this article and having the discussion of examples of whiteness in class, I realized that I cannot think of one teacher at my school that is not white (one student teacher but of the paid teachers... none). There are EAs at my school that are of color but none of the teachers... this surprised me because the school that I am at has so many different cultures represented in the students, yet, not a lot of diversity among staff. Just like we said in class - this is not a bad OR a good thing but it is just something to note. This is not to say that I have not had a good learning experience student teaching - quite the opposite. I have learned a lot about different cultures through my time student teaching that I was not aware of or exposed to before. I also really liked that being resilient was one of the lessons that they thought teachers of color should know. This was one of the points that really resonated with me. As someone who is becoming a teacher, I think that I can sometimes have unrealistic expectations of the changes that I want to make in the futures of my students. Even though I know that no change in the classroom (realistically) can happen overnight this is a point that I need to remind myself of. Learning about all these ways that teachers have incorporated social justice into their classroom is fantastic but whether or not I can actually do this in the long run... sometimes I am not sure. I know there are many tools out there to help teachers do so and a wealth of resources out there but this can all be overwhelming - especially to a new teacher like me. I know that this kind of change can't just happen overnight but as a new teacher I don't know where to start. I don't want to be "one of those teachers" that says "I'm colour blind" but I also don't know how long it will take me to become someone who does take those extra steps to teach the effects of racism and doesn't just try to get through the curriculum.
        I know that this kind of thing takes time and it will take a while to get to a place where social justice can be a main focus but I think that just opening a dialogue can be a good starting point for teachers who are just starting out. I would like to think of myself as a very open minded person - so incorporating different opinions into classroom discussions seems like a good place to start. Starting by just addressing the issues that come up within your classroom (I think) is a reasonable place to start for a beginner teacher. Asking the questions like "why do you think that?" and "do you know that to be true?" can be good places to get a discussion going with students about the issues that race present in the classroom, school as a whole, and the community. Obviously the issue of addressing whiteness will come up at the forefront of my teaching being a white person but addressing that can also open up that dialogue. Due to this whiteness though, I have experienced privilege and may not be able to connect to some students and their experiences. I hope, that in my teaching practice I can find common ground and try to understand any type of oppression or discrimination that my students may have experienced and keep an open mind throughout the process. If I am not able to connect experiences to my own I fear that I won't be able to properly discuss or even facilitate discussions on the topic at hand. Addressing the issue of race is fairly daunting and overwhelming to a beginner like me but hopefully with time it will become a somewhat comfortable issue to address.

500 Feet of Respect - Queering a study of the criminal justice system (Kelley - 2014) 

"After many contemplative subway rides, I decided to create a course that would allow kids like Ty and Stormy to hear one another and take action against their common experience: entrapment, disenfranchisement, and targeted criminalization."

"The act of making the choices and seeing the consequences allowed the students to see the workings of a system. [...] As we debriefed the activity, students confronted a chilling truth: No matter what you do, chances are you'll end up in the same place."

        I felt empowered by this reading mainly because this teacher addressed the link between school and students feeling misunderstood and oppressed, and gave some of the practical ideas he used to help his students understand each other. This teacher thought that he was nurturing an accepting environment in the classroom but after an incident of two students fighting, his opinion changed. These students were fighting (as I see it) mainly because they did not understand each other, though they both experienced discrimination and oppression in previous schools they did not see how they were similar, just how they were different. This article gave some practical ideas on how to bring the issue of race into the classroom and help students relate to each other. It also really shed light on how you can tie different types of experiences together. I really liked that this particular teacher used a negative event within the school and tried to help the students learn from it. I think that this is something that can be done within the school instead of just blind punishment or counseling that goes nowhere. I found it interesting that this specific fight caused the teacher to reflect what he was actually presenting in the class and he took the steps to make the changes necessary to help the problems. This is an example of breaking the cycle of telling these students that they are "bad" because they are in a transfer school and have done bad things - just because they made bad choices when they were young doesn't mean that they've given up on education altogether. This author in particular did an amazing job with his class bringing people from different backgrounds together to help understand each other by addressing both sexual orientation and race simultaneously was truly impressive.

        Although I did like the content of this article, I did find it hard to relate to because I have never been in any situation like the students or the teacher in this article. I have noticed that (like in this article) it seems that the minority makes up the majority of people who are incarcerated. Only through hearing news stories and reading have I found this out though. These statistics are astounding to me, and it is crazy that it has been like this for so long. The closest experience that I can think of that relates to this is seeing people get in trouble in elementary school. In this article it touched on when certain students in school get branded as "bad kids" it is hard to get out of that cycle. I saw this type of thing happening throughout elementary school (even though these students were not coming from juvenile detention centers). Once my fellow students were branded as those students that got in trouble (I was never that student - so I only saw this happening from the outside) they seemed to keep getting in trouble. Throughout elementary school there were always the same kids getting in trouble and it really never seemed to change. I wonder if this is the same cycle that the story refers to or like the other article discusses - this could be the pipeline and the type of cycle that is landing certain kids in trouble - and that there is a connection between these cycles of structural determinism and incarceration rates. When students are told their over and over that they are not good kids and no matter what they do they can't seem to break the cycle they may give up and like the quote I picked out says - no matter what you do you'll always end up in the same place, so why try?

        I think that this article and my experiences can help inform my practice as a teacher. Thinking about students getting so much flack at school that they kind of give up on education makes me incredibly sad and frustrated that this can happen to oppressed groups. Students of any race, of any ability, of any sexual orientation, and of any religion deserve to be in a place where they get the education they need - whatever their goals may be in life. Like I discussed in my first entry, I am a big advocate for inclusion and I am always interested in learning about new perspectives so hopefully through these views that have been shaped by my experience I can provide a safe place for my students to grow and succeed as learners. Making a place that students feel safe and can share will take time and a lot of effort but committing to create a place like this (like the author did) will pay off for students in the long run and engage them to get an education that they value.