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Critical Pedagogy and Special Needs Students
I have been thinking about Critical Pedagogy in relation to various oppressed groups. If Critical Pedagogy advocates dialogue in its practice, how can we apply critical pedagogy with students with special needs?
Katherine
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Hello Katherine,
This is a very difficult and very important question. Much of the discourse surrounding CP presummes (as perhaps it should?) that each human has the capacity to live out her or his 'ontological vocation'. But this vocation appears to depend, ideally, upon the development of one's awareness or consciousness regarding one's own self/situation within history and embedded within the cultural, political, gendered, racial etc. context that we each find outselves in. no small task. What does this mean for people or students who do not appear able to think and/or communicate about such 'abstract' notions of power, politics etc. (e.g. a non-verbal autistic person). What if it is the case, as is rarely touched upon within progessive circles, that there are in fact contintuums of ability (sorry for the bad words :) ) relating to various aspects of cognition that exclude some poeple from participating in a conscientization process, contrary to what CP appears to presume of all people. Has there been much work done in this area? anyone?
Katherine, Rodney, & All,
What is dialogue? Is it limited to words that we speak or write down on paper? Dialogue can occur in many formats (art, movement, touch, music, presence, assistive technology, etc..) as can be noted from all of the different blogs on the site. What all dialogue must have in common is love (Freire's radical love) compassion, and humility with an overriding motivation for social justice. McLaren and Jaramillo (2007) state, "The longing for dignity and justice for others, as well as for ourselves, has been a primary motivation for critical educators worldwide to engage in the politics and practice of critical pedagogy" (p. 196).
Our concept of dialogue expands with critical pedagogy. What are all of the ways we might engage in dialogue with people? I ask this because I do not have the answers myself and it is an issue that I seek more knowledge for, especially given that I have a daughter with autism and I have seen her struggle with trying to communicate something she so desperately wants to say, but it stays locked up in her brain anyway, until she cries out in frustration.
We also need to expand how labels and diagnostics define people's capabilities; the ideal would be no labels at all. Setting limits based on a Cartiesian ontology is a tragic error and serves to keep people locked into confined spaces from which they might otherwise escape (Kincheloe, 2006). A perfect example is the IQ test and allowing it to tell us what a person cannot do. Kincheloe (2006) states, "Since the self is always in context and in process, no final delineation of a notion such as ability can be determined. Thus, we are released from the rugged cross of I.Q. and such hurtful and primitive colonial conceptions of 'intelligence'" (Contructing a Critical Ontology, para. 2). This requires us to step outside the boxes we have constructed and to look through different frameworks or lenses.
I hope the discussion continues, because this is an area that I, too, seek much more knowledge. How do we define dialogue?
Peace & Love,
Vanessa
References
Kincheloe, J. (2006). Critical ontology and indigenous ways of being: Forging a poscolonial curriculum. The Reading Room (on this site).
McLaren, P. & Jaramillo, N. (2007). Redagogy and praxis in the age of empire: Towards a new humanism. Rotterdam: Sense.
HI,
I am also interested in dialogue and the power of conversation. I found a few authors that define dialogue in their own way. Mary Jane Zander says that Dialogue is not just a matter of asking the right questions or understanding a teaching strategy but a matter of creating an environment in which the teaching relationship becomes on of open ended discovery.
Dialogue, to Burbules, requires time, committment and mutual respect. Even though respectful relationships often exist in schools, more often there is not enough time or willingness on both the teacher and students' parts to develop open and trusting exchange that characterize true dialogue.
According to Zander, dialogue is not discussion. A common scenario has the teacher asking questions to specifically lead students to a particular point of view. As opposed to dialogue, teacher led discussion can be one sided and limit students to make their own contributions.
For me, dialogue is truly an art form that requires patience and practise. After it happens in my classroom, I can feel a transformation, a shift in myself and the students. Sometimes, I fail miserably at it but i still keep on pursuing it with my students.
Gotta keep on tryin.
Angela
Angela,
Thank you so much for your reply! Wouldn't the classroom of Mary Jane Zander you described as an "open ended discovery" be such a perfect world to learn in! I can picture vibrant and active students researching their interests - engaging and sharing in dialogue - researching -taking each other to ever higher levels of knowledge in the process. When one gets to that point in learning, which I have from time to time, the learning continues to fuel more learning...and dialogue....and learning.
I relate totally to your view that dialogue is a form of art and one which I have failed at miserably at times, too! - it takes practice! I have bungled dialogue too many times to count - but in the end it is worth it to pick up the pieces, make amends, and continue with the dialogue.
What are the greatest rewards of dialogue, in your view? Is it the transformation you mention that you have witnessed and/or expperienced as a result? I also think that aspect is invigorating and exciting. For me, it almost becomes an addiction. But that is primarily because I see so much pain and suffering and wrong things in the world that I feel like we have to work quickly to resolve all of the problems, and it is so reassuring to see that a difference really can be made through a lot of little efforts by people working together. What transformation has had the most impact on your view of the importance of dialogue?
Thank you again for writing!
In Solidarity,
Vanessa
This is an excellent question Katherine. Based on my experience I feel that special needs individuals also have issues, they feel oppressed by our "functional society". Many special needs individuals have cognition that they are "different". Many know that they are excluded from the main stream in academically, physically and most importanly, socially. Knowing this, I also have many questions.
I have a child with special needs, she looks like all other kids, yet does not fit in. She is able to articulate, at her level, what she sees, what she feels and what others say about her and her inability to be like everyone else. She is fully aware that she does not fit. She is the "Other". Yes there are accommodations made for her at school, she has a full-time aid, yet she is still expected to fit the curriculum even though it is modified. What if there were a different approach, one which would allow her to work on what she feels is important?
Your question really hits home. As in The Art of Critical Pedagogy, Duncan-Andrade & Morrell (2008) p. 71-88 children are just plugged into the current educational system and expected to function, my daughter is a perfect example. As is explained by Duncan-Andrade & Morrel, "Schools are often illequipped to identigy and cultivate a person's organic intellectualism. The system needs to change in order to reach these special kids, "an effective implementation of critical pedagogy requires educators to disrupt pedagogical trends that ignore our most basic sensibilities about teaching and learning", we need to be looking at each child's potential individually. We need to act as guides to help them navigate the educational system, help them with social situations. Special needs individuals can do many things if they have facilitators to commit themselves.
I too want to learn more about critical pedagogy and special needs. Is there anything specific written on the topic?
thanks, Katherine, for bringing this topic up in class. It has stayed on my mind, because i care deeply about people with special needs. I found Rodney's comment most moving, as he described the real current situation in classrooms, and how they work out to be oppressive both to students and teachers. I had trouble with Karen's comment in the context of his, because no teacher can be 100 per cent their best in situations that are set ups for failure, but I cannot imagine that the solution would be for them (us) all to quit and say we couldn't handle it. Would anyone else be able to handle it better? and if we all resigned, would there be a more equitable and just situation created for the students we abandon? I don't know. And then again, perhaps! Janet and i had an interesting discussion about charity no completely unrelated to this topic. I understand the need to work on solving the underlying issues, but i cannot, in the meantime, refuse to give. Maybe it is because i am not yet doing anything significant to solve the underlying issue and so i am guilty of "false generosity"... Another thing complicating the connection between Rodney's and Karen's comments is that i feel teachers, like all people, also go through periods of strength and weakness, better and worse performance, and nobody (or at least nobody i know, and certainly not me) is at their best all the time...
I wanted to record my appreciation for Joe's perspective of the historical plight of people with special needs as oppressed, regardless of their ability to become emancipated. I think in my poorly articulated comment I was reacting more on an emotional level to my perception that all of a sudden we all seemed to be sounding (to my ears) so high and mighty, while speaking about extraordinarily complicated situations such as the daily sharing in the life of a person with special needs by teachers or family members. I honestly do think that sometimes one can get a bit carried away with talk and forget the humility that Freire so intensely preached and, according to those who met him, exemplified. Joe brought it back to the right place when he reminded us that we are all the oppressors, and no decision we make goes without consequences for others. I have not heard of, or organized myself, any public demonstration on behalf of the rights of people with physical or mental challenges, and the numbers Joe quoted in terms of the resources that get diverted to causes that have a much less clear link to justice (and go unquestioned for long periods of time, and I have also not demonstrated against) are just mind-boggling.
How did you feel after the class discussion? Did anyone else have interesting conclusions or thoughts to offer?
Hi Roseanna,
The discussion in class led me to take a good look at my teaching practises, the ones I deem successful as well as the ones that were a completely awful. It is the awful lessons that I am stuck on right now as I am trying to pin point when and why I acted as an oppressor in the artroom. Perhaps it was the way I spoke, way I formulated my questions or way that I unconscoiously tried to persuade students to a certain point of view. It is very easy to fall into a harmful situation when teaching students with any disabilities ,developmental delay because there may be a power issue that underlies the experinces.
Sometimes, I tape record my sessions just to check the dialogue that occurs in class. This technique keeps me aware of my own prejudices and lack of acknowlegdement because students will not always show me that I was in some way disrespectful. Other times, students will be in my face, confront me. In a way I prefer the confrontations to the passivity because those are the authentic in the moment reponses that I can respond to and grow from.
I know that I have said that I am fortunate to be an art teacher because I get to play with students's creative strenghts, and that I feel privilegded to teach a subject that can be so open ended. However I have had to go on a crusade for the teaching of a subject that has been associated with talent. Students would be afraid to express themselves visually because they thought they were not good at it. I challenged them that we are all artists in some way, we all choose a different meduium to express it. This is how I approach art making and it seems to work most of the time. Other times, I have to sit and reflect on what went wrong. It is those times that keep me motivated to do better.
Angela
I teach two critical pedagogy classes at UND that take up this issue, Multicultural Education (for the general population of students), and Multicultural Education with a Special Education Emphasis (for students in the Special Education program). Like Dave mentions, I try to have the class engage in a complex and critical way with the concept and practice of inclusion in relationship to simply mainstreaming students -- that inclusion is not geographical proximity but a set of core values and ideas about the nature and value of difference in community. I find Mara Sapon Shevin's work valuable in this respect.
While I do not take up questions like whether something resembling the Englightenment project makes sense for people with severe mental disabilities or whether critical pedagogy has foundational roots that are ableist, I do critical pedagogy by attempting to place multicultural and special education in critical relation to one another, to understand how forces that work against the emancipation of people in society have sought to blunt the potential of these fields, to recognize their histories and the present limitations that must be transcended, etc. One of the first things we have to come to understand is that so-called Special Education is part and parcel of Multicultural Education and that both have to be seen as erupting out of the grassroots movement for civil rights and social justice in the 20th century. The work of Christine Sleeter and Carl Grant is very helpful for generating critical discussions in this regard I find. This inevitably leads my classes back to their situation -- why do so many people teach Multicultural Education without focusing on disability issues, why does Special Education split itself off, why do the students take different classes, why do teachers of the general population and special educators often war with one another and are not more fully grounded in each other's knowledge?
The bottom line that my classes almost inevitably reach for themselves is that critical pedagogy gives us an entrance into understanding and taking up the historical limitations of the multicultural education movement, which includes disability and the growth of special education as itself a potentially limited structural form of inclusion.
Another major focus of my classes is the fact that students of low socioeconomic and minority status are blatantly OVER-represented in special education programs, being labeled handicapped, etc., and these are the very programs that often are themselves designed to be underfunded and ill-equipped to provide sound IEPs and the like. Then, we look at how this same demographic of students is blatantly UNDER-represented in gifted and talented programs. So we can call it white privilege or the social stratification of a class society or what have you, but this domain reveals clear material for critical pedagogy to go to work and relate the school to society as part of an emancipatory education that seeks a radically just and democratic society.
--------------------------
Richard Kahn, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations and Research
University of North Dakota
231 Centennial Drive, Stop 7189, ED 305
Grand Forks, ND 58202
Ph: 701-777-3431
http://richardkahn.org
Interestingly enough, I logged on today, with the intention of finding out if anyone was blogging about students with special needs. Then, I came across the above posts. First, there are many connotations that come to mind, when we even use the term "special needs." The term has come to refer to students who have some type of mental, emotional or cognitive disability. For example, in most of the post above we thought of those students who have been labeled as having a behavioral/emotional disability (BED), a learning disability (LD), mentally impaired (MI) or students living with autism. In other words, those students who first come to mind are those students who have low or borderline cognitive functioning. Because of the way the system is structured, most educators think of those with special needs, as those who need special accomodations, due to some type of deficit in social-emotional or intellectual functioning.
However, "students with special needs" includes any student who qualifies as meeting qualifications under Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), under U.S. federal law. Okay, that is a class in and of itself, so I want go into detail. A student with special needs is any student who has a Individualized Education Plan (IEP). In a world strife with educational controversy, sometimes it is too easy to only think of students with special needs as students who have some kind of cognitive development. For example, us critical pedagogues usually redirect the conversation to the overrepresentation of boys, low-income students, and racial/ethnic minority students in special education. We certainly have a fight here, especially knowing what we know about the validity of so-called IQ tests and the cultural biases in the tests. Moreover, students placed in special education are more likely to repeat a grade, dropout of school, and be suspended or expelled than those outside of special education. In a nutshell, we do have a fight on this front.
Nonetheless, we have a struggle on another front. For example, there are families and students out there who really support quality special education services. We can argue for days about the biases in the identification and placement process, but there are students who qualify and seek out special education programs for sincere reasons. For example, students who have physical or cognitive disability, due to trauma before or after birth, genetic and/or heriditary abnormalities, or other unidentified causality. For the sake of brevity, this was my reason for seeking out this post. How do we speak to, advocate for, and include students with special needs into the critical pedagogy classroom and curriculum? In previous post, some hinted at critical pedagogy's heavy reliance on dialogue. Well, what happens to those students who are hearing impaired? And, a new twist toward media studies, well what about those students who are visually impaired? Theatre arts? Well, what about those students who have a physical disability, speech or motor impairment?
The response to these questions are actually right in front of our nose. Critical pedagogy advocates for including ALL in the conversation, especially those whom are perceived as different (e.g. mentally, physically, emotionally, linguistically, religiously different). Communication is defined as the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing, or signs. Therefore, all humans are born with the capacity or means to communicate. This is true even if someone's or groups way of commicating is outside of the "norm." Just thirty years ago those labeled as being outside of the norm, may not have been in the same schools, let alone classrooms, as those determined to be NORMal. Individuals excluded just thirty years ago are now mainstreamed and a part of regular classroom instruction.
From a critical pedagogy standpoint, not only are we given permission, sort of speak, to speak openly and honestly about the deficits in current special education policy, placement, and curriculum, and be we too are given the responsibility of assuring that students who do seek such services are fully served and allowed to reach their full human potential. Also, to answer the tongue-and-cheek questions, I posed above, we can use all of the above mediums (e.g. theatre, drama, media, technology and dialogue) to incite the interest of students with diverse abilities and to advocate on behalf of students with special needs. Remember on ER when the lead doctor (a female) was on camera with a physical disability? Yes, we were so happy to see an abled-bodied person pretend to be physically different. "Oh, the world must be changing," the audience thought. Inclusive. Well, do you think the director went out to actively recruit someone living with a real physical disability to remember a script that required her to carry a chart and delegate responsibilities to other doctors? Okay, I digress.
In sum, critical pedagogy theorists reminds educators, students and pre-service teachers, and policymakers that to be differently-abled is to be a part of the norm. Moreover, imagine an educational system where all students were thought of as having special needs. To be different (i.e. diverse) would be absolutely normal. We are not at that place, yet. In closing, I am currently working with a student who has a visual impairment. The disability requires that I adapt my reading material into braille, prepare any handouts in advance, use a combination of teaching techniques (ex. explaining what I am writing on the board), and many verbal cues. Before meeting this student, I would print out handouts at the last minute, prepare my lecture driving into campus or decide two minutes before class to show a video. Also, I am the queen of animated hand gestures and facial cues. However, now responsible for teaching a student with a visual impairment, I am more conscious of being able to accomodate all of my students special needs.
We all learn differently from the next person, but we all have been "mainstreamed" into thinking we learn just like everybody else. We all want to feel a part of the norm, so we never mention that we want to learn differently (or that I want to teach differently). Therefore, I am actually looking forward to working with this student over the course of the semester, because it will challenge my pedagogy and help me think more consciously of my own movements, attitude, and teaching preferences. Freire discussed the teacher-student dichotomy in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In traditional classrooms and forms of teaching, the student and teacher are viewed as separate entities, with the teacher being all knowing and the student being the empty receptacle to be filled with knowledge. As someone committed to critical pedagogy and all of its possibilities, I do not view myself as separate from my student's abilities and learning needs. In that lecture room, I am his vision, his eyes, his sight. If he can't "see" what I am attempting to convey, that means I have failed to communicate effectively with him and all my students.
So, I leave today with this question, as I enter a new academic year: What am I doing to engage ALL of my students multiple ways of learning/knowing the physical and social world?
One Luv
Venus