Talking Point #9

Kliewer, Citizenship In School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome

1. "Success in life requires an ability to form relationships with others who make up the web of community. Though many of us have a certain level of control over who we meet and interact with, none of us can come close to claiming complete control. So we must learn to work with others..." (Kliewer)

This quote reminded me of Oaks' article about tracking. Tracking systems are restricting and harmful. They marginalize all students, especially those labeled with disabilities. It places individuals in classes with others with the same "label" of intelligence. Not only does this stereotypes students abilities and put a cap on their expectations, it keeps them isolated from people who learn differently. The process of sorting people disables them from seeing, thinking, or acting a different way. It makes people close-minded and unaware of other perspectives. This leads to a number of issues that we have focused on in FNED, particularly the issues of privilege that Johnson focuses on in his article. FNED has opened my eyes to how narrow my world was growing up in South Kingstown. Unfortunately, I had no control over the environment that I was raised in, as does any other child. Every location has a different amount of diversity, every school is run differently, and every child is exposed to different things. As delpit proved, people from different races and, more importantly classes, are raised differently by their parents and treated differently by teachers. Most of our beliefs are solely based upon our personal experiences. If we are kept from situations to learn from people who are different from us, we will never understand how our beliefs compare. Before people can be the change, as Johnson hopes, to inequalities in the world, they must first be exposed, aware, and understanding of the issues and of others points of view.

2. "Shayne and her associates worked to create a context that supported all children's full participation. Shayne explained: 'It's not like they come here to be labeled, or to believe the label. We're all here-kids, teachers, parents, whoever- it's about all of us working together, playing together, being together, and that's what learning is." (Kliewer)

Shayne's classroom is a diverse setting with students of different ages and levels of ability. Her focus is to make sure that all students are equal participants in the class and all have the opportunity to learn from one another. She makes sure not to isolate the children labeled with disabilities in her classroom; she does not view this tactic as beneficial to either the disabled students or the rest of the class. Shayne's classroom is oppositely structured from a tracked classroom where students are sorted by their levels of ability. In this classroom, students become aware and comfortable with diversity and will grow to be much more understanding of people who are different from them. This quote also reminded me of something Professor Bogad mentioned the other day. Our classroom is not tracked. We are all asked to participate equally and we are not limited to where we sit, what we say, etc. Shayne's classroom reminded me a lot of Professor Bogad's classroom in terms of the diversity and yet strong sense of community.

3. "Community acceptance requires opportunity for individual participation in a group, but opportunity cannot exist outside of community acceptance." (Kliewer)

I had to read this quote over a few times in order to fully understand it but once I did I found it to be very powerful. Like with many other issues of inequality, our society is facing the issue of lack of acceptance of people with disabilities. Many people have used disabled people as a source of humor and have grown to use words like "retarded" in a derogatory form. In order to transform this issue into communal acceptance, we must first understand the issues, accept these people and their differences, and allow them back into the community as active participants rather than outsiders. The issue with this process, which the author rose in the article, is that communal acceptance and individual participation in a group go hand in hand; one cannot happen before the other. It is a very difficult change to accomplish which is why it is such a slow moving process. Opening our eyes to others and learning to be accepting of differences is truly the only way to begin this process of change. Shayne's classroom is a perfect example of both community acceptance and individual participation in the group. All students are active participants and are so because everyone in the class views one another as equal; equally accepted and equally important to the group. The class works as a team rather than a separation system where students are labeled by their expected capabilities.

I found this article to be extremely powerful. Like Dr. Bogad had warned, I found the first few pages to be tricky to read but the second half to flow very well. I think it is important that we read Oak's article prior to this one in order to have a background of negative situations to compare the more positive situations mentioned in this article. The two articles contrasted each other very well and I found that after reading Oak's piece I was curious to know many things that this article was able to answer for me; my main question being what makes a classroom that is not tracked so successful?

This article related very closely to some of the other authors read so far in FNED. Like I have previously mentioned, I found it useful to have a strong understanding of Johnson's ideas of privilege, lack of privilege, and the concept of being the change. I also found it important to have an understanding of Delpit's claims relating to the differences in learning and teaching styles of people from different social classes. Most of all, this article related to Oak's piece on tracking. Tracking is a very different approach from what is focused on in this piece. This article spends a lot of time focusing on school as a democracy and as a community. This article proved, to me personally, that there are other (better) ways to structure schools besides tracking. Even though there are debatable advantages to tracking schools, there are a number of other situations where students are not being marginalized and sorted by any means. Rather than seeking to categorize students, this idea of community allows children to act individually as equal citizens, equal participants in the classroom.

Below is a clip from the movie The Ringer. This is just one example of how the media has used people with disabilities for a source of humor.