Promising Practice Workshops

Workshop Number 1

My first workshop was about "Hearing Empathy" which honestly I could not even tell you what I learned. He was going on and on and on about things that I could not even articulate because he was ALL over the place. I sat there with Taylor and Alex from class and the three of us were just like excuse me what is happening. He was trying to talk to us about simulations but honestly I do not know where he was going with the talk. He did a stimulation on one person who was listening to people saying negative things while the speaker of the workshop was asking him questions that he had to answer. This was to show us that when people are talking down to you it is hard to understand and think of answers to questions you are being asked. 

Out of this workshop I understood from that stimulation that when students are having a tough time understand things that are going on that instead of yelling at them you need to talk to them nicely and try to get them to understand everything that is happening. 


This relates to Delpit in a way because without knowing that you should not yell at your students to get them to do better than you're going to run a terrible classroom. Also this relates to August because when a student does not feel like they are in a safe environment they are not going to perform well in the classroom. 

Workshop Number 2

My second workshop was better than my first but still kind of boring. It was called "Youth Action of All Abilities" this workshop was about youth and the actions that they take to try and include students and youth with disabilities and to just get youth in general involved with things as well. They did focus a lot about the history that went along with disabilities which was in a way a little bit boring but I still thought it was interesting to see how much respect and support these students and even people with disabilities have now that they did not have back in the past. They also discusses different events that happen for students with disabilities and the things that go on around here that we could get involved in. They really just discussed the ways that people can get out there along with getting the youth more involved as well. They just went into detail about different situations that disabled people have to deal with and they really just want more people to get involved and help out as much as they can and they want people to learn.

I did enjoy this workshop because I want to be a special education teacher so for me this was interesting to learn about. Obviously I wish they did talk more about the organizations and events than the actual history of disabilities but either way I was able to learn a lot and walk away with new information. For me being a teacher for children with disabilities I can try to get them involved with as many things as possible so that they get the experience as other kids and this way the other kids can get experience meeting there peers who may have a disability.

I think that August would support this workshop because they are trying to create a safe environment for both students with and without disabilities and they want to include everyone to come together. They are encouraging the youth to learn more about students with disabilities and they want to include them to help out as much as they can. They are trying to make a place where all youth can feel included and apart of something. 

Kliewer

"Schools have traditionally taken a narrow position when defining and judging students intellect (Gardner, 1983). The presence of a thoughtful mind has been linked to patterns of behavioral and communicative conformity associated with competence in logical-mathmatical thinking and linguistic skills."

This quote explains how children with special needs have a small chance of learning things the way other students do because of the ways that schools are set up. This quote shows how a "thoughtful mind" grows and thinks and this happens to those students who are more willing to learn and able to learn in a "normal" way. The schools support this because most schools keep the students with disabilities separated from the other students and that is how my school was as well. They have the students with disabilities completely separated from the other students in the regular classrooms. 

"Acknowledging students with Down Syndrome as thoughtful, creative, and interested learners with personal identities that distinguish them from all other people suggest and individual value that enhances any context containing the child."

This quote explains that teachers need to realize that students who may have a disability still are an individual that wants to learn and who has all of these characteristics. Just because a students has a disability should not hold them back from being thoughtful and being themselves and trying to learn. Although they may have a harder time doing this things they should still have every right to try and have the access to those teachers who are willing to help them accomplish these things. 

"Educating all children together reconfigures the representation of Down syndrome from burden toward citizenship."

I agree with this quote every strongly because I believe that we should teach more in schools about students with disabilities because when children see these people who may have a disability they stare or point. They are not educated enough on how people are different. I understand that this is a way for children to seem interesting and they want to learn more so I feel like a big step would be to teach about these things in school and make it more own. This way people with disabilities can feel more connected and feel like citizens instead of a burden.

Literacy with an Attitude

Throughout Finn's article he discusses different literacy and how it connects to education and how that all has came together. Finn discusses this by including different classrooms because we learn it every single day. Literacy is sometimes challenging whereas other times not so challenging. Some students Finn was explaining would have complication trying to connect with their work and they had a hard time completing it. As a teacher I believe Finn wants people to realize that they need to make sure depending on what grade they teach they need to make their work accordingly. They need to make sure that the work the students are given is not to easy and also no so challenging because they do not receive anything out of that. There is always going to be a challenge with having to do this but Finn makes it known that it has to be done. Finn connected all of this to lower class, working class and higher class schools and in all of these they still have the same types of challenges. Finn also explains how sometimes with lower or working class school the teachers except that some of the students do not want to do well or really just do not care. This is not the case, in fact some of these students are either confused or completely lost on the things they need to do.

If I was to connect it to my service learning a lot of the students have Spanish speaking parents. This would become a problem if the students had homework that they did not understand if their parents could not help them because it is in English and may be confusing to them. When this happens and the students goes back into class the next way and the teacher is trying to go onto the next activity that student falls behind and now it seems like they don't care because they did not complete the homework.

This is where literacy is a huge problem, to some it comes easily but to others it is complicated. This is also where the teachers need to step up and make sure that they stay connected to their students and make sure that they are not falling behind and if they do fall behind they get the help that they need.

Project

Sorry I am a little late with posting this but,

Delpit: The students know that when they are coming back from there music and other classes that they get a chance to go to the bathroom get water and then they are to get in the classroom and sit down and take out there math books when the teachers tell them too.

August: The teacher last week was handing out little goodie bags to the students for halloween and inside they each got a pencil, a halloween easer and a little thing of candy. One little boy got a pink pencil and the little girls were telling him it was a girl color which at the time I did not realize. It was not until the little boy looked at me and asked me to come over to them and he said "do you think that pink is only a girl color?" and I said "no I believe that all colors are boy and girl colors." The little boy was so happy I had said that and the two little girls looked at me with confusing and couldn't believe I said that. After that I asked the girls why they thought pink was only a girl color and they told me that they see more girls wear it than boys do. When I asked if it was okay if boys wore pink they told me that they could wear it sometimes. I think it is interesting even at such a young age they realize that these things are the "norms".

Kahne and Westheimer: As of right now I believe that what we are doing for this service learning project it falls under the charity because it seems like we are not there enough to make a huge change on these kids lives. Although we want to and we are all trying our best to it seems like we are mainly going to change ourselves. We do not go into these schools expecting the children to be giving us back anything from us trying to help them out we go in there trying to gain experience.