True Participation

You may be interested in reading John W. Lloyd's Beyond Access: Improving Success where he says:

On the educational front, one of the factors to which many disability rights organizations regularly point is the poor outcomes for students with disabilities after graduation from high school. The litany of unfavorable comparisons between students with disabilities and their not-disabled peers is familiar to many: higher unemployment, less frequent enrollment in post-secondary schools, more frequent contact with and incarceration by law-enforcement officials, etc. These are clearly outcomes that we would not only like to see improved, but also they are improvements that would auger well for our society (e.g., emphasizing the abilities of individuals) and economy (e.g., lower unemployment).

He goes on to advocate for special education to address success, not mere access to participation in the adult world. I agree that this is the critical issue: Just building the bridges doesn't mean that people will know how to use them. In my own reflections on my past encounters with Michigan Rehabilitation Services, this has been a difficult concept to communicate. I find it puzzling that we (K-12 special educators) often offer accommodations to students with Learning Disabilities without planning instruction on how to use these accommodations to successfully level the playing field.

Picture of Alpha Smart Dana on Renaissance Learning Website

I remember when students with writing problems were offered AlphaSmarts to compensate for poor handwriting, poor spelling, note-taking, a lack of word-processing equipment at home, slow writing production, a lack of written composition skills and so on. Our local county chapter of the LDA held a meeting about tools and accommodations, and one family member told me that her grandchild had been given one of those, but no one at the school had any idea how to download and print what she had written on it. What a total waste of resources!! The student got very little benefit out of the AlphaSmart, even though she'd put the time in on her assignments. But, the staff at her school didn't have the training or information to make this a useful and powerful tool for her.

Around the same time, I had borrowed an AlphaSmart from the county Assistive Technology Consultant and, after playing with it for an hour or so, figured out how to upload files onto my computer, and how to print directly from my dot-matrix printer. I also learned how to spell-check, change fonts and line spacing, and cut and paste text. Here I was, thinking how useful this tool was, while at the same time, a whole school had convinced parents that the AlphaSmart was an anachronism, and chose not to use it (or anything else) that might address the problems of access and successful accommodation.

In the interim, the AT Consultant continued to recommend the AlphaSmart to other students at the same school, resulting in a great deal of acrimony between her and the staff at the school, without any resolution. What started as a small problem of poor communication blossomed into a full-blown bickering match between the school staff, parents, and the county consultant. No gains were made for the kids for whom this could have been most helpful. Most of the students waited until they were in high school to access computers in their computer lab, purchase a low-end computer for home use. The most fortunate of these students were given used laptops that their parents bought for them. This, of course, violates one of the primary tenets of FAPE--that the supports and services provided in a public school would be FREE and appropriate. If, in order to have full-time access to the necessary supports and services, a student has to purchase a laptop, or a calculator, or any other tool: how is that "free"? If special education under IDEA ends upon graduation from high school, how have we fulfilled our obligation to the student to maximize access and participation, if we never show students how to independently use the tools and accommodations we recommend? It's a little like someone throwing a kid into a swimming pool and telling them, "Okay, I provided the water, it's your job to learn how to swim in it!"

Technology seems to progress at the speed of light. Now, an AlphaSmart is truly an anachronism. Tablets such as the iPad2 and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, with touchscreens, and lightweight, with more bells and whistles than anyone could imagine, make it so much easier for us to get intuitive technology into the hands of young people so that their playing fields are more level now, than ever before.  But, if we only hand them the tools, without showing them what they can do, we might as well just hand them a rock and a stick.

Creativity and Foresight for Strategic Enrichment

by Kathleen Kosobud, for LDA of Michigan

I was e-mailed by a fellow traveler in disability advocacy, Liz Bauer, a former member of the Michigan Board of Education and a continuing activist in "getting it done fairly" for kids with disabilities. 

She wrote on behalf of a mother who was asking her for guidance to help her 12 year old daughter who is entering 8th grade and, like her mother, has challenges with dyslexia.  She was asking for resources so her daughter could complete American History as an independent study. The mother said: "I wish to jump start her 8th grade [year] with enthusiasm, success, and encouragement that we are intelligent women who can master this with a smile and confidence!"

Well, I may have overlooked her request for a resource that would allow her daughter to get credit for a course over the summer, but I think that I may have fulfilled the spirit of her request, and made a broader statement about what summer experiences can do for kids who struggle to learn during the school year:

If I were still teaching in a middle school, I'd be gathering resources to build the background vocabulary and experience of my 8th graders.  In a "true" middle school model,  we integrated all content across the curriculum, so the idea of studying American History in the absence of studies of scientific thought and discovery, literature, and the arts is sometimes difficult for my interdisciplinary brain to wrap itself around. 

For 8th graders in Michigan, US History is defined in time--from the Age of Exploration to the Civil War.  It's an arbitrary limit, and it encompasses a great deal of "dusty" content, so the real trick is making it personal--building connections that make one appreciate how we got to where we are.  Here are the grade level content expectations for 8th grade social studies.

My inclination would be to go looking for documentaries (http://www.pbs.org/, and http://www.learner.org/ are two teacher resources I might use), fictionalized accounts of historical periods in film (check with your local youth librarian for videos in their collections), audio books of appeal to middle schoolers (check with your local youth librarian or sign up for Bookshare for delivery of online books to your computer at http://www.bookshare.org/), visits to area museums, forts, historic sites, and virtual tours (http://www.thwt.org/virtualtours.htm) to access as much of the time encompassed in 8th grade US History as possible.  One author who is very popular with middle schoolers is Avi--who is himself dyslexic and a real history buff.  His fiction really can draw you into the period.

A big consideration: because it is a real drag to be passively learning at any time (especially summer), I would think about projects to make things come alive--crafts, cooking, model-making, creating videos or slide shows online, etc.  If you are near historic sites, make visits and learn from their visitor guides (the people who are on staff, not the pamphlets) what happened in Michigan at a given period of time. Visit Greenfield Village and spend some time in different periods of history all in a day--churn butter, watch glass blowing, learn to make ribbon roses for the latest of looks in hats, etc.  Some libraries offer free or reduced passes to these attractions around southeastern Michigan so you may be able to save money and see some pretty interesting sites.

Good luck and enjoy your adventures in history this summer.

I think back to summers with my own two children, who often needed to recover from school over the summer.  I looked for recreation programs, camps, and other experiences that tapped into their interests and talents. I looked for opportunities for friendship-building through their interests.  I always kept in mind that this was their summer vacation, not an extension of the school year.

I'm sharing this with readers of this blog because sharing my thoughts and ideas is a way of spreading the word that there is a better world for all of us who learn differently, teach differently, and may not always feel included.


May you have a good summer with your children, too!