Notes from related articles
Inclusive Education:
- Inclusive education means that all students attend and are welcomed by their neighbourhood schools in age-appropriate, regular classes and are supported to learn, contribute and participate in all aspects of the life of the school.
- Inclusive education is about how we develop and design our schools, classrooms, programs and activities so that all students learn and participate together.
Neurodiversity paradigm:
- suggests that we take the positive attitudes and beliefs that most people hold about biodiversity and cultural diversity and apply them to differences among human brains. We don’t look at a calla lily and say that it has “petal deficit disorder”; we appreciate its beautiful shape.
- It is an umbrella term that encompasses neurocognitive differences such as:
- Auditory Processing Disorder: affects how sound that travels unimpeded through the ear is processed & interpreted by the brain
- Language Processing Disorder: affects attaching meaning to sound groups that form words, sentences and stories.
- Visual Perception Deficit affects: the understanding of information that a person sees, or the ability to draw or copy.
- Non-Verbal learning disabilities: affects interpreting nonverbal cues like facial expressions or body language and may have poor coordination.
- Dyslexia: affects reading and related language-based processing skills.
- Dyscalculia: affects a person’s ability to understand numbers and learn math facts.
- Executive functioning disorder: affects, planning, organization, strategizing, attention to details and managing time and space.
- Disorders related to memory: impair the ability to store and retrieve information required to carry out tasks.
- Dysgraphia: affects a person’s handwriting ability and fine motor skills.
- Dyspraxia: causes problems with movement and coordination, language and speech.
- ADHD: includes difficulty staying focused and paying attention, controlling behavior and hyperactivity.
- Autism spectrum disorders
- Tourette’s syndrome
- Anxiety
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Depression
- intellectual disability
Focusing on assets and strengths:
- Individuals with autism, for example, appear to do better than typically developing people on the Embedded Figures Test, which requires focusing on small details within more complex patterns (Baron-Cohen, 1998). They also tend to be systemizers rather than empathizers: They have a fascination with logical structures
Students with dyslexia often demonstrate superior artistic abilities (Appleyard, 1997). In another study, people with dyslexia showed a capacity to identify impossible three-dimensional objects (like those made famous by the artist M. C. Escher) more quickly and with greater efficiency than a matched group of typically developing individuals (Karolyi, Winner, Gray, & Sherman, 2003).
Students with learning disabilities also often show higher-than-average entrepreneurial ability. A survey of U.S. businesspeople, for example, indicated that one-third of entrepreneurs reported having dyslexia, compared with only one percent of middle managers in large corporations (Warren, 2008).
- Many kids with ADHD, for example, have a tendency to seek novelty, an important prerequisite for creative behavior (Cramond, 1995).
- Children with bipolar disorder have scored higher than other children on a popular test of creative thinking (Simeonova, Chang, Strong, & Ketter, 2005).
- People with Williams syndrome often show welldeveloped musical capacities and interests (Levitin et al., 2004).
- Children with intellectual disabilities often have strengths related to the emotions and personality—Down syndrome, for example, has been referred to as “Prince Charming syndrome” because of the friendly attitude and disarming smiles of many people with this genetic difference (Dykens, 2006).
Positive Niche Construction:
- Once we recognize the strengths of individuals with special needs, we can start to create positive environments within which they can thrive; “the least restrictive environment.”
- We need to find ways to collect positive information about these individuals' strengths in order to provide personalized learning options, e.g. strength inventories, journals, work samples, list of accomplishments, etc.
Strength based learning strategies:
- Who are these learners? How do they learn best? What strengths, cultural backgrounds, learning styles, and interests do they bring to the learning situation? What forms of communication do they use? How do they execute a plan for learning? What are their talents?
- Once the individual strengths are known, we can design learning options that are tailored to their individual needs. e.g. student with autism will probably do better with small details than with the big picture, a teacher can design lessons that begin with concrete examples and then move toward generalities. Understanding that students with ADHD are often more playful and physical than their peers enables teachers to create learning strategies that integrate games, role-play, and hands-on exploration into academic lessons. Realizing that students with learning disabilities may often show artistic tendencies, a teacher can integrate drawing, cartooning, or other art-related activities into reading and writing assignments.
- holding Neurodiversity Fair at school " where both typically developing kids and kids with various learning differences would showcase their gifts and strengths through art, plays, musical performances, sports, and other creative channels
- for students, create a classroom curriculum on the importance of diversity (in general) and neurodiversity (in particular) for creating positive changes in the world
- Presuming competence is a vital communicative ideal. It is the starting point for interactions that honor “another human being . . . as a true equal” (Zurcher, 2013), particularly interactions involving neurodivergent individuals who may be nonspeaking or labeled ‘low-functioning.’
Considering alternative learning methods:
Provide multiple means of representation, action & expression and engagement to enable individuals with learning differences receive, process, recall and communicate information:
- Verbal - Lingusitic
- Naturalistic
- Logical - Mathematical
- Visual - Spacial
- Musical - Rhytmic
- Kinaesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
Think about who might be excluded in each stage of a learning process:
- Input (getting information into brain)
- Auditory Perception
- Visual Perception
- Non-Verbal Communication
- Integration (making sense of information)
- Sequencing
- Abstraction
- Organization
- Memory (storing and retrieving information)
- Working Memory
- Short-Term Memory
- Long-Term Memory
- Auditory Memory
- Visual Memory
- Output (getting this information back out)
- Language (spontaneous or on demand)
- Motor Skills (fine motor or gross motor)
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