Diversity Is Good.
"What a dull place our world would be if everyone were exactly alike!"
Special Education Is a Service, Not a Sentence.
"Special education is a service, not a place, and the purpose of the service is to
support learners in successfully achieving a general education."
No Double Standards.
"Without the knowledge (and education) that people with disabilities
are more similar to nondisabled people than different,
a double standard is easily created."
A General Education Shouldn't Need to Be Earned.
"America has a system whereby learners with special education needs are, in many cases,
identified, tested, labeled, and segregated before they ever have a chance to
function in in a general education environment."
Inclusion May Not Be Easier, But It's Better.
"True inclusion is the attitude that all students belong everywhere,
with everyone else, in the school community."
The Dignity of Risk Applies to All People.
"Without the dignity of risk, the student experiences constant care and supervision,
little opportunity to acquire important skills, and the promotion of
learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is the
worst disability of all."
Parents: The Gold Standard.
"It is part of any educator's job description to work very hard at
understanding the family dynamics that surround each
student he or she teaches."
Get Rid of Labels.
"Schools that take progressive approaches like avoiding labels... provide an effective education for every student learner."
Make Education Real.
"Teaching techniques for dealing with real life to all students is
mandatory if we are to create a caring and cooperative
next generation."
Disability Is Normal.
"Quality inclusive education for students in schools leads to a greater chance
of equality inclusive community participation for adults."
The F.A.T City Workshop
F: Frustration
A: Anxiety
T: Tension
The F.A.T. City Workshop is an experiment to show general education learners and teachers what it feels like to have a learning disability and what struggles they face everyday. It gave insight to some misconceptions about learning disabilities.
Learning disabilities do not just effect a student at school. It effects every aspect of the student's everyday lives. This workshop was put on to give insight on different areas that students with learning disabilities struggle in such as processing, risk taking, visual perception, reading comprehension, effect of visual perception, cognitive processing, and auditory/visual learners, that often go unrecognized by a general education teacher.
When the presenter showed the pictures of the woman at the vanity and the cow, I did not see either one of them. I stared at the blurry picture of the cow for so long and could not comprehend what I was looking at. When shown the picture of the woman at a vanity, I saw a skull, just as the audience did. It wasn't until the presenter clearly pointed out exactly what the picture was that I realized what each picture was. Although everyone can physically look at the same thing, it sometimes take someone to point out what exactly is in front of you. This literally opened my eyes to the effects of difficulties with visual perception.
Early in the video, the presenter would ask hard questions, or questions that just took time to think of a response to. He would scream and pressure the audience member to hurry and answer and if they could not, he would result in calling names or making them feel incapable of learning. While watching this take place, I too was trying to think of answers and was having trouble, and I wasn't the one on the spot. As the questions and tasks got harder, more detailed, and at a faster pace, I too got frustrated and felt a sense of anxiety as I found myself falling behind. I feel this is a very good video for not only for future educators, but also for future parents.
I learned that equal and fair are not the same thing. Fairness does not mean that all students are treated the same, but that each student gets what he or she needs to succeed.
Implementing it in the class:
I will use the information I learned from the video in various ways in the classroom. First, I need to remember that the greatest gift I can give a child with learning disabilities is time. For instance, a demand question/answer session with a child with learning disabilities can be frustrating, and often causes a great deal of anxiety and tension. I was able to experience that myself when watching the video and I felt the anxiety one would in that situation. I need to remember that these children often do not understand what they have done wrong if they have perceptual difficulties. To them, they think they are answering or responding correctly. It is not my job to yell and put a student down for not knowing the answer no matter how crazy their response may be. Adding more pressure to a student (with or without a disability) is going to cause tension and stress, which ends up hurting the student in the process. I also need to make sure that I do not react with children with these difficulties by telling them to look harder, bribe/reward them to get an answer, threaten them by telling them that I will take privileges away, and never blame the student for their behavior by telling them they are not trying hard enough. I should not tell them that the task they are struggling with is easy or ask them rhetorical questions. I should try to combine my lesson plans with both written and visual aids and directions so that all of my students will be able to understand.
I learned that equal and fair are not the same thing. Fairness does not mean that all students are treated the same, but that each student gets what he or she needs to succeed.
Implementing it in the class:
I will use the information I learned from the video in various ways in the classroom. First, I need to remember that the greatest gift I can give a child with learning disabilities is time. For instance, a demand question/answer session with a child with learning disabilities can be frustrating, and often causes a great deal of anxiety and tension. I was able to experience that myself when watching the video and I felt the anxiety one would in that situation. I need to remember that these children often do not understand what they have done wrong if they have perceptual difficulties. To them, they think they are answering or responding correctly. It is not my job to yell and put a student down for not knowing the answer no matter how crazy their response may be. Adding more pressure to a student (with or without a disability) is going to cause tension and stress, which ends up hurting the student in the process. I also need to make sure that I do not react with children with these difficulties by telling them to look harder, bribe/reward them to get an answer, threaten them by telling them that I will take privileges away, and never blame the student for their behavior by telling them they are not trying hard enough. I should not tell them that the task they are struggling with is easy or ask them rhetorical questions. I should try to combine my lesson plans with both written and visual aids and directions so that all of my students will be able to understand.