When is a difference a disability? (Part 2)

Definitions and labels are tricky things.  The word handicapped is rarely used any more because of the negative connotations associated with it.  At one time, however, it was considered a positive replacement for the words lame or crippled.  Now handicapped has largely been replaced by disabled.  This change was even reflected in legislation in the United States when the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA)  was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990.  If you are under the impression that that term disabled has mostly positive connotations, however, watch the first few minutes of this TED Talk by Aimee Mullins:

One can see that there is a tendency for the terms which replace politically incorrect terms to become tainted by the connotations of the previous ones. Steven Pinker refers to this as "the Euphemism Treadmill." It shows up clearly in the progression of terms used for persons with physical handicaps, where terms like physically challenged, differently abled, and people with disabilities have been proposed to replace the term disabled.  A similar progression has occurred in the terms used to describe cognitive or developmental delays, with the terms idiot, imbecile, and moron being replaced by mentally retarded.  That term eventually also became pejorative and was replaced with others like mentally challenged, intellectual disability, learning difficulties, and special education.  If we take history to be our guide, it seems quite possible that these new, politically correct terms will also become the insults of tomorrow.  I know that I already hear the terms special and different often being used in a mocking tone.

I don't believe that it is just the negative associations of the words themselves, however, that lead to their replacement.  I agree with Aimee that the words themselves can have qualities that lead us to think and act a certain way.  As she explains:

"It's about what we believe about people when we name them with these words.  It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values."

I am sympathetic to the values and intentions behind the more recent terminology. I also understand that they also have their limitations.

There has been an attempt, with words like difficulties and challenged, to move away from emphasis on the absence of ability towards language which allows possibility.  That seems very promising to me.  Are these terms specific enough, however?  Do they sufficiently express the extent of the impact of more severe conditions on the lives of affected individuals?  Not all those who are affected agree.

I also can also appreciate the desire to use People-first Language, (i.e. people with disabilities) rather than use language that emphasizes the disability (i.e. disabled person).  I also know that this language has been criticized for separating the person's identity from their trait or condition (by using the word with in-between the person and the condition), implying that trait is somehow bad or lesser.  This doesn't sit well with those who wish to identify with their distinctive traits, such as those who identify with the Deaf culture and the Autism Rights Movement. Others criticize  the term as being awkward and thus drawing undue negative attention to the condition.

Either way, one can see that it is a challenge to find terms which adequately communicate the intended meaning without conveying unintended negative ones.

In both the terms people with disabilities and intellectual disabilities, you can also see that it has been hard to leave the term disability completely behind.  It has been carefully defined in law and in documents by various jurisdictions and organizations.   In the United States, for example, IDEA remains in force, having been updated and revised a couple of times, and the term disability has become all tied up with issues of funding and qualifications and requirements for programs and equipment. This is also true in many other countries.  It seems to me, then, that it has become less a decision of whether or not to use terms like disabled and disability, but when and how to use them sensitively and respectfully.

In the mean time, Aimee has come up with her own way of handling the issue.  She uses disable in its verb form, and she makes up her own improved thesaurus entry:

Disable, (verb). 

To crush a spirit, to withdraw hope, to deflate curiosity, to promote an inability to see beauty, to deprive of imagination. To make abject.
Ant. to make poss-able

When is a difference a disability? (Part 1)

Dean Zimmer may not be a household name, but he is a great rock and roll drummer.  His drumming style is tight, passionate and musical, and apparently his band has opened for Foghat, Eddie Money, Paul Rogers, Styx, Kansas and Thin Lizzy.  He also has a physical condition that some would call a disability.  Watch him play in this 6-minute documentary, "Drummer Wanted," and see whether or not you would classify him as person with a disability:

 

"He is not handicapped - he is different," 

says his bandmate Rick Abbott.  Dean certainly is different from most drummers.  He holds the sticks differently and has them strapped to his arms.  He moves his body a lot more while playing, rather than just moving his arms and legs.  According to Rick, Dean's limitations contribute to his unique sound.  But is his condition a handicap?  According to the Oxford Dictionaries website definition,

a handicap is "a condition that markedly restricts a person’s ability to function physically, mentally, or socially."  

Is Dean's functioning markedly restricted?  It sure doesn't stop him from playing the drums!  Yes, Dean uses a wheelchair to get around much of the time.  According to The Los Angeles Times, he has a rare congenital disorder called arthrogryposis that makes it difficult to move his joints.  In the video, however, we see Dean driving, climbing, moving around and setting up his drum kit.  Rick claims that Dean can do anything anyone else can do, although it sometimes takes him longer.  I must admit that I had some difficulty understanding some of what Dean was saying at first, but I was able to understand him pretty well on second listen.

Does any of that meet the definition of handicapped?

Whose responsibility is it?

The other night I heard one of my sons watching a YouTube video that I had seen in one of my classes recently.   In it, 18 year old Texas student Jeff Bliss lectures his teacher about her classroom practices. “If you would just get up and teach ‘em instead of handing them a frickin packet," Jeff complains, "there’s kids in here who don’t learn like that."  Jeff goes on to say that “You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin heart. You can’t expect a kid to change if all you do is just tell them.”  The video went viral and sparked a lot of discussion about teaching practices and about student and teacher roles.  A lot of the debate centered on whether it is mostly a teacher's responsibility to be get kids excited about learning or whether students need to take more responsibility for their own learning. 

When I asked my son what he thought about the video, he admitted that there had been times where he had felt a lot like Jeff.  We talked a bit about those times.  It wasn't long, however, before he started telling me about a particular teacher whom  he really admired.  That teacher had not just covered content but had taught the learning strategies and study skills that he needed to remember and utilize the content.  He came out of that class feeling more confident as a student.  He wished that he had had that teacher earlier because he was sure that it would have helped him to have been more successful in his other classes.  I don't know if that is what Jeff Bliss meant exactly by "touch his freakin heart," but it must be something like that.  I couldn't help but feel that that teacher's willingness to do whatever it takes to help students be successful lead, in turn, to students being more willing and able to take more responsibility for their own learning.  It just isn't an either/or proposition.

As a Classroom Support Teacher (CST) for the last seven years, one of my main tasks has been to help teachers to come up with goals for students with Individual Program Plans (IPPs).  On almost every one, teachers either want to explicitly create a goal page for "greater student independence" or they work the words "independence" or "independently" into other goals.  One of the most common concerns expressed is that students will become dependent on the assistants, accommodations or support that I am recommending.  We are big on this independence thing.  During these conversations with teachers, I talk a lot about "scaffolding" student learning and of withdrawing that scaffolding over time.  I talk about explicitly planning for this withdrawal and about teaching the skills needed for greater independence.  I wonder, though, if I need to talk more about the importance of student success and growth in confidence.  If we withdraw supports too quickly or deny them all together, we reduce the chances for success and therefore reduce likelihood of students taking more responsibility for their learning.

And what about those students who might need certain supports for the rest of their lives?  Is there a problem with that?  I need my glasses to support my vision and pencil and paper to support my memory.  I will likely always need them.  Do these "crutches" make me more or less independent?  I still use a spell-checker and calculator.  Using these tools helps me to be more successful and gives me greater confidence in performing tasks that are difficult for me.  I have become quite masterful at using them, in fact, and I would argue that my performance on writing and mathematics tasks with these supports has been able to develop far beyond what it would have if I had never had access to them.

It could even be argued that writing itself is a "support" for our mind and our memory.  In Plato's  Phaedrus, Socrates argued that writing weakens the mind and the memory and the relationship between teacher and learner.  He's got a point. In fact, when Jeff Bliss criticizes his teacher for handing kids a "packet" instead of getting up and teaching them, he is making a similar argument.   A book (or a "packet") can't respond to questions or ask them.  It can't form a relationship.  On the other hand, print is has been extremely helpful in preserving and distributing knowledge well beyond what was possible through oral means alone.  I wouldn't be writing this blog post if I didn't believe in the value of print.  People today often make similar criticisms of digital technologies, arguing that they destroy traditional literacy.  I disagree, but I think we do need to use them critically and deliberately, specifically teaching the skills needed to use them successfully.

We need to be clear about our goals, not just about digital technologies or just for students with IPPs, but for all of our students.  If we want students who are independent learners and who take responsibility for their own learning, we need to plan for that.  There may be a number of different ways of wording it, but I think that the Universal Design for Learning folks over at CAST have got it pretty close when they state that:

“The goal of education in the 21st century is not simply the mastery of content knowledge or use of new technologies. It is the mastery of the learning process. Education should help turn novice learners into expert learners—individuals who want to learn, who know how to learn strategically, and who, in their own highly individual and flexible ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning.”  CAST UDL Guidelienes 2.0 

This won't just happen automatically for all students if we focus exclusively on covering subject content.  We must also take responsibility for teaching students how to learn successfully and for helping them to develop a desire to learn and a confidence in their ability to learn.  We have to stop treating this as a threat to the development of student responsibility, and see it instead as the necessary prerequisite.  In the end, we would do well to remember that:

“You want a kid to change and start doing better? You gotta touch his freakin heart."

Why "Keeping Differences in Mind"?

Welcome to "Keeping Differences in Mind."  This blog was created to explore the connections between education, inclusion, and neuroscience.   At the center of this exploration is the reality of the profound differences between the students in our classes.  I will try to examine those differences in light of current neuroscience and in terms of the implications they have for inclusive educational practice.

The truth is, in the education field we can easily get caught up in subject content and techniques and forget to take student differences fully into account.  Because of my studies in inclusive education and neuroscience, as well as my years of working as a classroom support teacher, I see myself as bearing a particular responsibility to help my colleagues to keep student differences in mind.  Many of the posts that I will share here will have that focus.  I know that I need those constant reminders myself.  The day to day pressures of teaching can lead us to do what we have always done and keep us from looking at alternatives.  I would be most satisfied if these posts could provide that reminder for others as well as myself.

The initial motivation for this blog was more personal, however.  At the time of starting this blog, I had just completed 2 years of a 3 year Masters in Education program with a focus on Inclusive Education and Neuroscience.  The courses drew from a variety of different perspectives and raised a number of interesting questions.  In the rush of completing that coursework, there wasn't always adequate time to reflect on those questions and integrate the insights from those perspectives into my daily practice.  I wanted another crack at them; another chance to process and reflect on them.  I know that if I don't, the inertia of doing "what I've always done" will tend to drag me back into the ruts I have followed for so long.  I know that I can do better and that we as a teaching profession can do better in the ways we talk about and respond to student differences.

I know too that many of the topics I discuss here will show up in my my final capstone paper for my MEd.  In that respect, these posts are sort of a dry run; a rehearsal of how I might string some of the ideas together.  I am under no illusions that they are fully formed articles, fit for publication in peer-reviewed journals.  Your input, dear reader, would be most valuable in refining those ideas and helping me to ground them in the reality of actual teaching practice.

Finally, there is another way of looking at the title "Keeping Differences in Mind" which I hope will become clear through my posts.  It is a more literal reading of the title.  You might think of "differences in mind"  as referring to differences in cognitive processes or "ways of thinking," and "keeping" as "maintaining" or "preserving."  Too often, in education, we have looked at cognitive differences through the lens of disability, rather than difference.  We have looked at them as things to be fixed or overcome, rather than as things to be valued.   This is a whole topic unto itself, and I will undoubtedly blog more about it, but I need to state upfront that I will be approaching the issue of student difference with a bias towards valuing diversity rather than overcoming it.  I have an intuition that this can be done while continuing to encourage change and growth within individuals.  I do understand that the working out of this balance in real life situations and individual circumstances can be most challenging.  Through these posts, however, I hope to show that it is possible and even desirable to do so.

Who do you have in mind?

 Broadwater State School class of 1929

As we approach the new school year, I have a couple of questions for my teaching colleagues: Who do you have in mind when you are designing your lessons and unit plans for this coming year?  Do you plan mostly for the "average student" in your class?  Isn't that the best way to make sure your lessons will be appropriate for the greatest number of students?

This way of thinking assumes that academic ability is a single quality whose distribution in the population more or less falls on the bell curve.  If that is true, most kids should be "average learners" and if we design our learning environments for them, we should meet the needs of the majority.  We should then just have a few "gifted kids" and a few "special ed kids" for whom we need to make adaptations and modifications.

Over the last few years, however, I have become more and more skeptical of this model. For one thing, teachers keep telling me that their classes are full of needy kids.  At first, it was tempting to assume that they were just exaggerating or panicking; perhaps they were hoping to get more assistant time and support.  I reminded myself that by the end of each year, most of these students do achieve within the acceptable range on our standardized provincial exams.  Those results likely even fell on a bell curve.

But then I started listening more closely to what teachers were actually telling me.  They had concrete evidence of the challenges faced by so many of their students: English Language Learners, difficulties with decoding text, interrupted formal education, ADHD, difficulties with abstract thinking, challenging behaviours, lack of motivation, atypical social skill development, lack of number concept, etc.  They also told me that most of these students had some areas where they didn't seem needy or disabled at all, but where they fit in well or even showed considerable strength compared to peers.  In other words, most of these students were only needy at certain times or in certain contexts.  Rather than classes with mostly "normal kids" and a few "needy" ones, they described classes where the "normal" students had needs that often fell outside the average range and where students who were coded or identified as special needs could often achieve at or above the norm in certain contexts or with the right tools or supports.

Through my studies for my Masters, and particularly in my neuroscience classes, I have become more and more aware of the incredible complexity of the brain and the processes involved in learning.  I have come to appreciate that there is actually a tremendous amount of variability in brain structure and development and in student learning.  Students vary from one another in their interests, traits, abilities, and experiences, of course.  But within each individual, there is also a great variety of strengths and weaknesses in each of these domains.  It seems to me that "the average learner" doesn't really exist, and that we need to adjust our thinking if we are to meet the needs of the students we do have.

In his writings, talks, and videos, Todd Rose presents some powerful analogies to help us understand these issues.  His analogies are drawn from outside the education world; in "The Myth of Average" Todd uses the example of fighter jet cockpits and in "Variability Matters" he uses shoe sizes and Rubiks Cubes. In each case, however, he makes the point that we need to recognize and design for human variability in learning.  He explains why doing so helps to meet the needs of individuals and develop their talents.  He also argues that designing to the edges, rather than to the average, creates the best results for individuals as well as for society.  Take a few minutes to watch his videos; I think you will find them enjoyable and thought provoking.

So what has any of this got to do with classroom teaching?  As we teachers prepare for the new school year, we are setting up classrooms, gathering resources, making year plans and unit plans, and thinking about the classroom routines and strategies that we will be using.  Whether we recognize it or not, these are design issues.  We are designing learning environments and experiences.  If we design those environments and experiences for "the average learner," we are essentially designing them for nobody.  If we design them with the flexibility needed to reach the edges of student variability in our classes, we are far more likely to help all of the students in our classes to be successful.  But these design decisions are best made from the very beginning, rather than trying to adapt and modify lessons and units designed for "the average learner."

So who do you have in mind as you are preparing for the coming school year?