Kliewer – Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down syndrome

Quote:

1.       “Colleen Madison agreed with Shayne that no child was inherently an intellectual burden to a classroom; in fact, she argued, each student contributed a unique and potentially valuable dimension to the web of relationships that formed in a school community.”

-          I agree with this quote that special needs children bring something unique to the classroom. I think having a classroom that is diverse in this way helps both the “special” students and the others in communication and acceptability. How are we helping children socially if we segregate them because of differences in certain abilities? Having a mixed class teaches tolerance and also broadens these young kids to see and interact with people different than themselves on a daily basis. In some situations it can help in their teaching abilities, by helping another student who made need extra help.  

2.      

“I don’t tend to see Down syndrome as something. If you look at those kids running around the room, they’re incredibly different from each other. They’re different in terms of what their bodies are like, how they best communicate, what they’re like socially, their interests. And with those three kids in the room it would be hard to say, ‘This is how you should teach kids with Down syndrome.’ They’re not like that at all.”

-          From my experience working with many adults with Down syndrome, I know that their abilities (and themselves) are very different from one another. In the house I currently work in there were four men living there, two with Down syndrome (one of the men has recently passed).  They were definitely very different in almost every way. One guy, “Lenny” love to be waited on and babied. He needed to go out into the community everyday and explore. “Ron” however loves to be independent. He enjoys going out constantly but doesn’t care about it as much because he prefers to do something where all eyes are on him. Although they were only about 20 years apart, Ron acts much like a teenager while Lenny loved sitting back on his armchair looking like Hugh Hefner. I couldn’t have imagined teaching these men something in the same way because of how different they were.

3.       “When she enrolled in a regular public high school as a freshman, Christine’s individual Education Plan was passed on from her segregated school; it suggested that she had extremely poor motor control, low-level cognitive skills, low-level communication skills, a lack of adaptive skills, and aggressive “acting-out” behaviors. In the general curriculum of the regular high school, however, these images of defect were dramatically transformed.”

-          It seems to me that when viewed as different and told that they can’t achieve something, students either become disruptive and in angry individual or hold themselves back in what they can do, or both. Being labeled as having a disability or not, (as educators) teachers should continue to push every student to their full potential. This quote is a perfect example of how the educational system holds certain students back because of what they perceive to be a limit or handicap in their learning abilities. Treated as a regular high school student, Christine rose past what was said to be her limits and in my opinion became much more active in school than the average high school student.