Assistive Technologies - Case Study Critique

Content and Context:
classroom management in 5th and 6th grade;
major issue: how can the teacher meet individual needs of the students?

Types of disabilities/exceptionalities encountered:
learning disabilities (4 students); Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (2 students); Mental Retardition (1 student); low reading level.

Modifications, Accommodations, and/or Strategies used to address disability/exceptionality:
commitment of a special education teacher; special summer school on teacher´s collaboration; cooperative learning groups focused on the "Jigsaw Strategy" (expert group); constructivist teaching ("Venn Diagram"); performance based assessment.

Technologies used:
"Universal Design Learning" as a guide and ressource for lesson planning; "Guided Notes" for students that have a difficult time following lecture or assigned reading; "e-Reader" to read content from the Internet, word processing files, scanned-in text or typed-in text, enhancing text by adding spoken voice, visual highlighting; Creating a "Rubric" (assessment form to translate the achievement of the students) that helps students to understand what they learn, provides information for a portfolio for use by parents and teachers.

Comment/Question:
How should these strategies and technologies enable the disabled students to be successful in school???

Language Development Essay

Iman Soltani

Tera Ray

Language Development

08/13/2010

In his newspaper article “We Should Cherish Our Children’s Freedom to Think” author Kie Ho comments on the growing trend of people in the United States complaining about the quality of their educational system. Born and raised in Indonesia himself, Ho describes his own school experience as having been much different from what his son would eventually be provided with after migrating to America. Taking a look at the issue from this vantage point, Ho advises us to reconsider the characteristic virtue of US education, emphasizing strongly how it guarantees and even encourages and supports its students’ freedom, particularly the freedom of self-expression, which Ho considers to be the “most important measurement … in the studies of the quality of education in this century” (114). Although I would agree with Ho’s view to a certain extent, it remains nevertheless a subjective and oversimplified view on an otherwise complex issue. In the following I shall try to identify weak and inconclusive points in his argumentation.

Challenging those critics who are on a state of alert concerning the US education system, Ho initially couches his main counter-argument in a question: “If American education is so tragically inferior, why is it that this is still the country of innovation?” (113). While the question at first seems to be employed as part of a very effective strategy to establish a kind of premise on which the author can build his persuasive argument, it yet fails to have the desired rhetoric effect shortly after, as the following paragraph presents only a rather bland example to strengthen the overall argument. Trying to illustrate what he sees as the answer to the above-mentioned question, Ho recounts a personal experience “on an excursion to the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, where the work of schoolchildren was on exhibit.” (113)

This account is to give evidence of how a public school in the city of Laguna Beach, California, had provided its students “with opportunities and direction to fulfill their creativity” (113). However, not only is it a personal account of a single school’s way of doing things in one specific district – hence not possibly representative for the United States education system as a whole – but what makes the example even more inconclusive is that it does not say anything about the school’s specific curricular focus on creativity. In this sense, it would be not unusual for any school to have special art classes and projects, as this has always been a strong pillar of education in cultures all around the world. But apart from that, what exactly is the example supposed to say about an American school’s distinct curriculum when the works of those children were on exhibit in a museum – the very place where art is cultivated and preserved anyway? Even if the argument was to say that the US nourishes a well-developed exchange between the different educational and cultural institutions, it still would be a weak point made, since this is equally true for most European and Asian countries (at least I have personally experienced it both as a student and teacher in Germany, France, Portugal, and also the Netherlands, whose Dutch education system has left a strong influence in Indonesia due to its history of colonization).

Ho basically continues his line of argumentation by giving short examples of how American students are encouraged to express themselves freely, and how the differences in educational contents and methods may look like as opposed to non-American school systems that are said to attach importance more to their students’ “dedication and obedience” than to having them “experiment freely with ideas” (113). Again, he generalizes his son’s school experience and his own one, respectively, as being representative for one system in its entirety. For readers that are not familiar with the American education system, this view on things is more than misleading, since the Unites States, just like Germany, also belong to the few nations on earth with a rich diversity of school types and state-dependent control of education, which obviously will not have all schools follow one identical pattern.

In his closing argument Ho makes a very interesting point in saying that it would be difficult for “critics of American education” to understand the significance of freedom for education “because they are never deprived of it” (113). While this thought may be true for a majority of white Americans who have never had to face any form of repression in their own homeland, there will certainly be enough critics of the US education system who know very well what ‘freedom’ may mean – particularly parents of refugee families who may be concerned with their children being taught wrong notions of ‘freedom’ in American public schools. Furthermore, Ho also seems to ignore completely that he himself is in the position to reflect his own notion of ‘freedom’ only because he had experienced another system of education.

Some Interesting Podcasts Worth Checking Out

Hey people,

If you can spare a minute, please check out some of the following podcasts. They are more than exciting … and awesome, amazing … and stunning … yes, I would even go so far to say they’re incredibly tremendous – as a matter of fact, they’re just epic. ;)

To describe what the first one is about, I think it will become rather self-explanatory to just translate their slogan “Von Klugscheißern für Klugscheißer” – “from smartasses for smartasses.” The two hosts Shary Reeves and Ralph Caspers provide you with a bunch of knowledge that will help you practice your German while simultaneously updating your inner smart alec.

Check it out: “Wissen macht Ah!”

http://www.wdr.de/tv/wissenmachtah/sendungen/index.php5

The second one is called Mixery Raw Deluxe. It used to be a Hip Hop TV-show on the German music channel VIVA, which went online resorting to the podcast format after it had been cancelled on TV. The host Falk regularly interviews Hip Hop artists and other people that somehow feel affiliated to Hip Hop culture, mostly from Germany, but the rest of the world is also represented. I think for language learners it can be a very fascinating and edutaining resource, not only in order to learn more about the diversity and richness of German Hip Hop culture, but also to see how German youth language and slang talk may sound like – particularly the Hip Hop lingo of young Germans from a wide range of ethnic and social backgrounds.

I would especially recommend the following episodes from the archives:

http://www.mixeryrawdeluxe.tv/index.php/Broadcast/Archive/style/pastshow

15.02.10 “Torch im Interview”:

An interview with Torch, a pioneering emcee and probably the most important spokesperson of German Hip Hop culture. Being of Haitian descent himself, Torch talks about the Haiti earthquake that befell the country in January. This is a firsthand account of the catastrophic impact, since Torch has been there himself witnessing how most of his family members have lost everything they had.

15.02.10 “Interview mit Fleur Earth”:

Falk interviewing some friends of mine – experience some goooood German soul music by the duo Fleur Earth. Cologne represent!

Now if you want to meet a real challenge, just check out “Stimmen aus dem Fatihland.” This one is an audio clip broadcasted weekly on WDR Funkhaus Europa, a radio channel that embraces multiculturalism, approaching issues of integration from many different angles. The podcast “Stimmen aus dem Fatihland” is one of my favorite comedy shows on Funkhaus. Turkish German cabaret artist Fatih Cevikkollu does a hilarious impersonation of a German-speaking Brazilian named Joao, who loves commenting on life in Germany, his “Fatihland” (meaning ‘Vaterland’ = home country). Having a very strong Brazilian accent and making up a lot of transfer expressions from Brazilian into German, Joao comments on current social, political, and cultural events, always with a satirical twist. But before you get started, let me warn you – even native speakers of German may struggle to understand all of Joao’s expressions…so have a ball..!! ;)


Check it out: “Stimmen aus dem Fatihland”

http://www.wdr.de/radio/home/podcasts/channelausspielung.phtml?channel=fatihland

Teaching in America: Critical Pedagogy

The concept of critical pedagogy may be best described as an approach to instruction that attempts at generating a certain level of awareness among students in the classroom. In this sense, it may be concerned with a wide range of sociocultural and sociopolitical issues, while the focus is always on any forms of domination in various kinds of discourse. Drawing essentially on fundamental ideas of Marxist theory, such as the interdependency of one’s existence and consciousness, critical pedagogy is supposed to make students reflect their own worldviews and beliefs when being confronted with different ones. Developing a critical consciousness thus means challenging notions of ‘otherness’ – and ultimately also reconsidering and amending prevailing beliefs in order to allow for a holistic Weltanschauung.

Now it is rather common to encounter critical pedagogy in literature or cultural studies classes at the university level, as such courses inevitably deal with different types of texts that are located in the discourse matrix of ideology, race, class, nationality, gender, sexuality, et cetera. Obviously, the level of critical analysis and awareness raising will always depend on the respective teacher and his/her very own awareness of critical pedagogy, but, up to now during my studies at Dortmund University (Germany), I have had the privilege to learn from many an ardent advocate of critical pedagogy.

My fondest memory is from a course on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which our instructor basically just advised us to formulate our own definitions of terms like ‘freedom,’ ‘justice,’ ‘terrorism’ or ‘democracy.’ I found myself being deeply impressed by this little self-experiment, as it turned out to be pretty much impossible to find universal definitions for those words – any attempt would lead to a specification only in the wider framework of a particular ideology.

So what exactly do we mean when talking about ‘terrorists’ and ‘freedom fighters’? Nelson Mandela, for example, is considered an icon of the South African resistance and liberation struggle, who was sent to prison for 27 years because he fought for the freedom of his people, the black Africans who were massively oppressed under the apartheid regime of a minority of white Afrikaners. However, it was only in the late 1980s that the Western world actually started to acknowledge and vindicate him as a freedom fighter. Prior to that, he was considered simply a malevolent terrorist and therefore a political prisoner deserving his life sentence – a conviction hold not only by the Afrikaner government but interestingly enough also by most Western nations, especially the United States. Being the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, Mandela had engaged in terrorist activities in the 1960s, which in the course of the struggle would inevitably also claim many lives of civilians, thus designating him a terrorist de facto by international conventions. And as a matter of fact, it was not until July 2008 that Mandela and other ANC party members finally were allowed to enter the US without a special visa waiver from the US Secretary of State, only because the US government was still listing them as terrorists according to the old apartheid regime designation (incredibly enough, an exception had been made in all those years just for the UN headquarters in Manhattan).

When in 1994 apartheid was ultimately abolished and Mandela became president, the new black administration abandoned the option to prosecute apartheid perpetrators in retaliatory trials, as they were held by the Allied forces in Nuremberg after their victory over the Nazis. Instead, Mandela introduced an exemplary model of restorative justice to come to terms with the past: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose main objective was to provide disclosure about all the crimes that had been commited during apartheid, both by white and black people.

Reconsidering this little but still very significant example, one has to keep in mind that the South African experience could only open the world’s eyes for a second. True, our allegedly preconceived notions about such abstract terms as ‘freedom’ may have been challenged in that specific South African context, but the world has yet failed to apply this realization to other contexts – for instance, is it the Palestinian who fights for his freedom against Israeli occupation, or do the Israelis defend their freedom against Palestinian terror?

Language Technology Reflection 1

Last week, as our group was discussing the use of technology in the classroom, I realized that we all had very different ideas of what we actually understand as technological equipment. One of us associated technology with resources that are somehow electrically powered, somebody else had only digital media in mind, for example computers or the internet. The latter has certainly been the most significant form of teaching technology in the last ten years, as more and more schools tend to go digital, making sure they are equipped with state of the art computers and other digital devices necessary for the seemingly unstoppable IT changeover.

However, technology has always also been considered state of the art only in relation to its historical context. In this regard, even classic classroom equipment like blackboards and chalk – nowadays regarded as obsolete by many a student and teacher – represented a technological revolution for everybody at the time when they were invented. It made it possible for teachers in particular to put their teachings on record, thus using the blackboard as a medium to prolong their volatile voice. All kinds of technology used in the classroom can help us to amplify our voices audio-visually, or in most cases just visually, in order to stimulate our mental skills and facilitate both learning and teaching.

Language Development Journal 3

Kie Ho’s article “We should Cherish Our Children’s Freedom to Think” reminded me in many ways of our previous reading “Teach Knowledge, Not ‘Mental Skills.’” Both texts appeared in newspapers and address the issue of education in the US, albeit from opposite points of view. Their common denominator is that they both acknowledge deficits in the US education system in contrast to systems elsewhere in the world, as for instance in Europe and Asia. However, while their argumentations are similarly structured using concessions and counterarguments, they hold two strongly opposing views as how to respond to the issue.

Whereas Hirsch advocates an education reform that focuses on teaching core-knowledge rather than mental skills, Ho responds to such critical voices by putting their concerns into perspective. Challenging an allegedly harmful status quo of US education, he couches his main argument against it in a question: “If American education is so tragically inferior, why is it that this is still the country of innovation?” In my opinion, this question is rhetorically very well-positioned and also cleverly phrased. It exposes the reader to an idea they will most likely not be able to defy, not only due to it being a fact, but much more because it speaks to them on an affective level: the US is certainly still a country of innovation, and this is something that one can only be proud of as an American.

Ho employs the question as part of a very effective strategy to establish a kind of premise on which he can build his persuasive argument. His counterargument is that US education not only guarantees but also encourages and supports the freedom of self-expression for all its students already at an early age. Similar to the wording of the above-mentioned question, Ho amplifies his argument by emphasizing the notion of ‘freedom’ as the “most important measurement … in the studies of the quality of education” – again, just like the notion of ‘innovation,’ it is something abstract that affects particularly the American reader who can identify with such concepts, as they essentially represent their very Americanness. 

Language Development Journal 2

The text “Teach Knowledge, Not ‘Mental Skills’” by E. D. Hirsch originally appeared in the New York Times on the opinion page, which may explain my first reaction as I was reading it: I found it very unconventional for a newspaper text in terms of format and style. Throughout the text there are a lot of paragraphs that are actually no paragraphs (i.e. connected units of meaning indicated through indention) but only single sentences. It further appeared stylistically odd to me to begin two consecutive paragraphs with the word ‘because.’ While the repetition may have been a deliberate rhetoric decision in order to amplify the argument, I was taught in my English classes that causally subordinate clauses in sentence-initial position can begin with ‘since’ – but never with ‘because.’

Furthermore, while reading the text I found myself being quite irresolute about the actual difference between the notion of knowledge as opposed to mental skills, and why you should draw a distinction at all when it comes to teaching. I understand mental skills as something that human beings are genetically endowed with already, and which has the potential to be cultivated to highly complex degrees. Knowledge in contrast seems to be an infinitely variable amount of data that we are capable of both learning and self-creating through our constant interaction with the world. The mental skills are needed to process that data, as the acquisition of knowledge involves a set of complex cognitive processes, such as perception, association, learning, communication, and reasoning. However, knowledge and mental skills continuously also affect each other mutually, i.e. we develop our mental skills through the processing of knowledge, which enables us to learn and create new knowledge at an ever-increasing rate (of course only given if we sustain interacting with the world).

Hirsch argues that in the US, “typically, school guidelines are couched in terms of learning skills, rather than the content of learning.” His arguments are in favor of a education reform that focuses on an equalized “core of knowledge” among all schools, which is said to contribute to academic “excellence” and “fairness for all.” However, I cannot really see how one could focus on mental skills in the classroom without implementing any learning contents. The author’s argument does not seem to be about school guidelines lacking content learning, but rather about the wrong contents being cultivated – contents that are, contrary to the standardized core-knowledge, not useful enough for both the individual and collective learning experience. But who is to decide what knowledge should be general knowledge, significant enough for all students to be taught? Especially as we face an ever-increasing globalization of the world? In this sense, I find Hirsch’s position very problematic since any notions of one core of knowledge always entail rigid and normative truths that are implemented by the dominant culture’s institutions.