Professor Patricia Dunn believes children with Learning Disabilities (LD) are often silenced about their experiences in school and interactions with educators. Students with LD tend to drop out of high school early or never go to college due to a lack of service support from families and teachers. Dunn conducted interviews with three college students with LD about their experiences in the school environment and “how having a learning disability affects their lives” (Dunn, 99). One of the interviewees was Nick, who is a criminal justice major and had worked with Dunn in the Writing Center. Nick discussed with Dunn about his experiences throughout high school and into college and how it had shaped him today. In elementary
“I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.” (www.doonething.org). Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts on August 13, 1818. Her parents, Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews, were abolitionists and Congregationalists. Stone retained their anti-slavery opinions but rejected the Congregationalist Church after it criticized abolitionists. Along with her anti-slavery attitude, Lucy Stone also pursued a higher education. She completed local schools at the age of sixteen and saved money until she could attend a term at Mount Holyoke Seminary five years later. In 1843, Stone enrolled at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College). With her graduation in 1847, she became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a bachelor’s degree. However, Lucy Stone was not done expressing her abolitionist and feminist beliefs to the public (anb.org).
Lavoie’s workshop provokes an emotional response. After viewing life through the eyes of a child with special needs, I cannot help but have a more significant understanding of what people, especially children with disabilities, must deal with every day, everywhere. During the many years that I have worked with children with various disabilities, I have encountered each of the topics discussed in Lavoie’s workshop and agree with the points he makes regarding children with disabilities. Particularly impacting the way I interact with my students are the topics concerning: anxiety, reading comprehension, and fairness.
To live in a world without human connection, is to live an empty and meaningless life. Both Karen Armstrong, and Robert Thurman, highlight the necessity of human contact throughout their essays. In his text “Wisdom,” Robert Thurman shows us the path to discover the selflessness of what we believe is our true and actual self. He claims that no matter how hard one might try to find themselves, they will only find a rigid, fixated self. But when we finally accept our selflessness and turn away from our egos, we can become compassionate and experience the void, which he defines as a free and boundless self. Additionally, Karen Armstrong debates that the universe is driven by concepts such as “Being,” and “Brahman,” which both represent the ultimate
Our abilities are often what we use to define our worth. Whether we fail or succeed our future lifestyle is open to our discretion; however, we fail to realize outside influences have the ability to cripple us. One way in which this is true is through the education system. If we fail to meet the average or typical standards of others we often mark ourselves as useless. Children, and adults, facing adversity in literacy see this as a daily struggle no matter what their individual disability is. In “Dyslexia” by Eileen Simpson, and “The Library Card”, by Richard Wright, details are what define their disabilities to their audiences. Through the descriptions presented in “Dyslexia”, we have the ability to place ourselves into Simpson’s point of view; meanwhile, in “The Library Card” it is easy to draw a connection between this story and the struggle of those in slave narratives such as the one written by Frederick Douglass.
In 2011, Donna Hicks wrote her book Dignity: The Essential Role It Plays in Resolving Conflict. Hicks’ Ph.D. in educational psychology and twenty years of experience in international conflict resolution allowed her to write this text about psychological injuries to a person 's sense of self-worth. In her text, Donna Hicks discusses the damaging effects a negative authoritative figure could have, especially on young children and their dignity. Also mentioned is how impressionable children can be and how those impressions can follow them into adulthood. The author’s intended audience appears to be anyone interested in remedying their psychological injuries and improving their sense of self-appreciation. Hicks’ reasoning for composing this text
Sills, Caryl K. "Success for learning disabled writers across the curriculum." College Teaching 43 (Spring 95): 66-72.
Students with learning disabilities can learn; each student has his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Educators must continue to focus on the strengths of each student and building on them, creating a stronger student and person. Identifying the weakness is at the core of getting a student help with their learning disability, but after this initial identification and placement, the focus should shift to the strengths and adjusting the student’s schoolwork to reflect these strengths. For instance, if a student is weak in reading but has wonderful group interaction skills and is good with his or her hands, the students' reading tasks should then be shifted to reflect these st...
Students with learning disabilities have to search for a school that has the usual opportunities and amenities that fit their personality while also providing the services required by their learning disability and style. The student also needs to find a school where the people providing these services will be dedicated to helping them and fighting for the student’s rights under the American Disabilities Act.
The Impression of Life on her Works’ Leslie Marmon Silko for more than two decades has been enriching Native American literature through her poetry, novels, short stories, and essays. Her fertile imagination and vivid writing continues to impress both critics and readers alike. Influences in Silko's life are abundant in her work. She includes childhood memories, experiences with racism, Pueblo beliefs, family history, and traditional storytelling. Prominent in many of her works is the perspective of her mixed ethnicity. She explores ethnic identity and cultural values through her literature. Often the reader is taught about the lessons, values, and heritage of early cultures. Leslie Marmon grew up attaching herself, in memory and imagination, to the village and then to the land around it; and because this is Laguna land, many of the stories she grew up with were stories from the Keresan oral tradition, the stories of her father's people and their shared history. In her art as in her life, Silko has continued to maintain her identity with the story of the people of Kawaika, the People of the Beautiful Lake. The story of Laguna, like the biography of Silko and the fictional lives of her novels' protagonists, has always been a story of contact, departure, and recovery. “My father had wandered over all the hills and mesas around Laguna when he was a child; I started roaming those same mesas and hills when I was nine years old. At eleven I rode away on my horse, and explored places my father and uncle could not have reached on foot. I carried with me the feeling I'd acquired from listening to the old stories, that the land all around me was teeming with creatures that were related to human beings and to me.” ("Interior and Exterior Lan...
Radley, M. (2009). Understanding the social exclusion and stalled welfare of citizens with learning disabilities. Disability and Society, 23(4): 489-501.
Patricia Hill Collins outlines the existence of three different dimensions of gender oppression: institutional, symbolic, and individual. The institutional dimension consists of systemic relationship of domination structured through social institutions, such as government, the workplace or education institutions. In other words, this dimension explains “who has the power”. This is completely related to a patriarchal society. Patriarchy is the manifestation and institutionalism of male dominance. This means that men hold power in all institutions, while women are denied the access to this power. The symbolic dimension of oppression is based on widespread socially sanctioned ideologies used to justify relations of domination. It reflects inequality
Learning disabilities are generally defined as significant difficulties in the acquisition and use of listening, speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, or mathematical abilities (Michaels 1997; Ohler, Levinson, and Barker 1996). There are a number of types as well as major individual differences in severity, impact, and age of onset (Cummings, Maddux, and Casey 2000; Hitchings and Retish 2000). “There is no single story to tell about outcomes of students with disabilities” (Blackorby and Wagner 1997, p. 58). Many people with LD have succeeded in the workplace, often as entrepreneurs, and recent legislation is intended to ease the process of disclosing a disability and obtaining on-the-job accommodations (Brown and Gerber 1994). Adults with LD are employed at the same rate as those without disabilities, but many are underemployed—in part-time, entry-level, minimum-wage jobs (Blackorby and Wa...
Kate Manners, an intelligent, funny, eight-year-old with cerebal palsy is an example of a disabled child striving for her opportunity in a regular classroom. Sometimes it takes a very large key to open even a small door (Baldrige, 1). Individual with Disabilities Act (IDEA) was the key to her door of education. After attending the Schreiber Pediatric Center in Lancaster for children with disabilities, her parents, professors, and therapists, felt that she was ready for the public school system. The recommendation of the multi-disciplinary evaluation team from Rohrerstown Elementary in the Hemfield School District in Lancaster was for her to attend a kindergarten class in another school that provides support and student aid for those students not ready to attend a regular kindergarten class. After one y...
People often look at their learning disabilities as an excuse for their actions and never try to overcome them; however, my school offered and I took advantage of the methods to do more than simply succeed, and while many individuals ignored advice and techniques, I moved from the bottom twenty-five percent and into a world where the idea of reading and writing no longer strikes fear in me. My evolving system of accommodating and conjuring, along with my desire for success, has granted me this gift and allowed me to surpass every mentally challenging goal I set myself and dispel any chains that my dyslexia held on
Whether born from ignorance, fear, misunderstanding, or hate, society’s attitudes limit people from experiencing and appreciating the full potential a person with a disability can achieve. This treatment is unfair, unnecessary, and against the law (Purdie). Discrimination against people with disabilities is one of the greatest social injustices in the country today. Essential changes are needed in society’s basic outlook in order for people with disabilities to have an equal opportunity to succeed in life. To begin with, full inclusion in the education system for people with disabilities should be the first of many steps that are needed to correct the social injustices that people with disabilities currently face.