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'Who is teacher?'

I just read this exquisite piece by Kari Wagner-Peck, above with son Thorin, 8. Thorin attended Grade 1 at public school last year in Portland, Me. Kari is a fabulous writer who blogs at A typical son about raising her son with Down syndrome. Make sure to bookmark her blog. She always has a unique perspective. I can't wait for the next one in this series! Louise

By Kari Wagner-Peck

We started homeschooling or unschooling or what you might call practising loving and respectful learning in September.

This is the beginning of the next chapter in our lives. How we got to THAT is a whole other story I have not wanted to write about. Expect a post on that soon entitled something like: It Was Not Just One Reason.

When I explained to Thorin we were homeschooling he had two questions. The first was easy to answer:

“I call you Kari?”

“If that’s important to you, sure you can,” I said.

“Thanks you, Mom.”

The second question was difficult and painful and probably at the heart of learning at home:

“Who the teacher?” he asked.

“No one is the teacher,” I said.

“No! Who the teacher?”

“We could both be the teacher?”

“No!”

“We are both the student?” I offered.

“No! Who the teacher!” he screamed.

“You need to learn reading, writing and math. I have to figure out how to help you by learning how to help you. Confusing, right?”

Silence.

“Thorin, I am not sure what I am doing, yet.”

“No!!!!!!!!”

“I am your mom. I am learning, too. I don’t want to be a teacher. I want us to be a team.”

Silence.

“Can we be a team? See if that is okay?”

Long silence.

“Can we try?” I asked.

“Okay, Kari.”

THEY say start with what your child loves. So, Thorin and I are writing a book together. My co-author and illustrator (see below) does not want to share anything but the central characters in our story although we have a title, character names and a plot. As a team member I have to honour his request.

Thorin’s word use has quadrupled, reading and math levels have increased more in two months than the entire first grade. Most importantly he is happy again.

I have learned that the greatest teacher is: belief.

Expect more on all of IT.

Illustrations by Thorin.

Why I chose a 'special' school for my child

By Anchel Krishna

Having a child means making lots of decisions. When you have a child with special needs, you make decisions on top of decisions.

Last year, as my husband and I prepared for our daughter, Syona, to enter junior kindergarten we had a big decision to make: Enrol Syona at our local school or in a specialized three-year program that incorporated the standard curriculum with additional supports and therapies.

The local school meant a connection to our community—to other parents and kids who live close by. The special program meant three extra years to give our daughter a head start with smaller classes and therapists and teachers looking for ways to incorporate therapy into her day-to-day activities vs just setting up supports for her.

We participated in transition meetings, made lists, weighed the pros and cons and decided to enrol Syona in the specialized program.

One of my biggest fears as Syona’s mom is that people will look at her physical disabilities and communication challenges and underestimate her abilities. I’ve seen and heard how quickly and easily that happens in the school system. I figure three years of the specialized program—and the reports from teachers and therapists it'll generate—as well as opportunities for Syona to progress and mature will prepare her to transition well to our neighbourhood school.

Syona’s had a strong start so far in the specialized program. Despite the long commute, she has a great bus driver and has made some strong relationships with the kids on her bus. This is a great way for her to start and end the day. She has a wonderful and warm classroom team who truly care for her.

There have been tears (lots of tears). But that was to be expected. Syona’s an only child who spent the summer with her grandparents and several caregivers. She does a lot of one-on-one therapy. Up until this point, almost every adult in her life has provided her with undivided attention. At school, she’s learning to be a little more independent, play by herself and with her peers and, yes, that sometimes means a few tears. I know Syona will power through them and thrive at school.

When Syona comes home from a long day and asks to go to the park and I have to say no—because there's only just enough time to have dinner and a bath before bed—I wonder if we made the right decision.

But when she comes home and tells me about going swimming, or riding an adapted bike for the first time, I know we’ve done the right thing. As parents we make the best decisions we can at any given moment. I’m looking forward to what the next three years will bring.

Anchel Krishna is manager of communications at the Children's Treatment Network. She recommends these two CTN e-bulletins on Transitions to school and Special needs and the school system. Anchel blogs about special-needs parenting at Today's Parent.

Free to move, free to learn

By Louise Kinross

For three months researcher Coralee McLaren watched 20 kindergarten children play in the Bloorview School—some with disabilities and some without—to study the relationship between how they moved and their physical environment.

Recent brain research shows that when children are free to move naturally they interact with objects and features of their environment in a way that promotes learning.

But what does this mean for children with disabilities whose mobility is restricted?

“What we discovered was that not only do the physical features of the class elicit creative ways of moving, but movement itself, and the children’s interactions and how they move together, generates new ways of moving,” says Coralee, a professional dancer who was studying the children for her PhD thesis in nursing. “By watching the other children move, or being caught up in the physical energy of their movement, the children with disabilities were drawn into different groupings and found non-habitual ways of moving where they experimented with their bodies.”

Even when children aren’t moving, research suggests that watching peers at play can trigger brain responses similar to those activated when children are playing themselves.

The findings could have implications for how classrooms are designed and provide additional evidence for the benefits of inclusive education.

Coralee, who watched and filmed the kindergarten children’s unguided play and interviewed them about it, was fascinated by how the children used objects to change the way they moved and their environment.

For example, they modified a pretend cockpit chair in a mock space station set up by teacher Paul Alcamo.

“It was a scooped chair with a base that was detachable to give you the feeling you’re flying in a rocket,” Coralee says. “When they discovered they could take the chair apart they turned it into all sorts of things. They’d get rid of the base and make a teeter totter and hook up levers and straps, and they’d tip the seat like it was a swivel chair, and they’d use the base to climb over and around. Some of the children that used wheelchairs and walkers abandoned them and crawled, using the floor and the shelves to propel themselves around the space, to integrate with their peers and experiment with the chair.”

In addition to the pretend centre, Coralee looked at how other physical elements of the class—the chairs, the space between tables, the pathway that connects two sides of the class and the wheelchairs and walkers themselves—generated movement.

“I asked one little non-disabled boy ‘If you had a choice to move any way that you wanted to in the class, how would you move?’ He said he wanted a wheelchair like his friend because he can move so fast and I can’t move that fast. The chair became a non-issue because it was the speed and capability of his friend that the boy found remarkable.”

Coralee and scientist Barbara Gibson just received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to co-lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers on a three-year study that will use artistic and scientific methods to build on this doctoral research. Coralee is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Bloorview Research Institute, housed at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto.

In the first year of the Moving Together study, researchers will develop a dance-play event that integrates objects and choreographed movements to try to elicit some of the creative encounters Coralee observed in Bloorview's reverse-integration kindergarten. Children’s muscle and brain responses will be tracked.

In the second year, children at a school for physical disability will participate in this dance event with peers without disability.

In the third year, the dance-play event will be performed by children with diverse abilities in an immersive live theatre lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. “We’ll measure neurologically and physiologically what’s happening with children when they’re moving in this space in an artistic way, and we’ll also measure the responses of the audience.”

Coralee says the findings could inform how integrated classrooms, hospitals and medical clinics are designed. “We want to tease out this social piece of how movement itself incites movement. What is it about children moving together that starts to change their movement? How do children with disabilities start to move differently simply by being integrated and moving with their peers?”

Illustration by Jana Osterman.

Two solitudes

By Louise Kinross

In the last couple of days I've seen parents argue for two radically different visions of how to educate children with disabilities.

In this piece in The New York Times' Motherlode blog the mother of a 10-year-old with an intellectual disability who can't speak says that children like her daughter need special, separate schools. "Alongside her peers with disabilities, she's thriving in a rich, complete school community," writes Margaret Storey, who says she's surprised to describe herself as a "segregationist."

Storey writes about how mainstream classes can become "exclusive and stigmatizing" for children with profound disabilities because they don't have the resources to hire highly-trained staff to provide one-on-one support. "Abstractions about inclusion may fail to comprehend my daughter's needs," she writes.

We still need separate schools, Storey says, and they need to be well-funded.

Yesterday in a new Ted Talk called Disabling Segregation, filmmaker Dan Habib, father to a Grade 8 son with cerebral palsy, says that all children with disabilities should be taught in general education classrooms.

Habib notes that in the U.S., 56 per cent of students with intellectual or developmental disabilities spend their entire day in a self-contained class or separate school.

This flies in the face of 35 years of research, he says, that show that disabled kids who are included in general education classes have better outcomes socially, academically and behaviourally and do better after they graduate.

Equally important, Habib says, is that studies show improved grades and social benefits for typical kids who learn alongside peers with disabilities.

What do you think?

Read the Motherlode piece and listen to Dan Habib's talk and let us know.

Mama and Dad

'Who is teacher?'

Why I chose a 'special' school for my child

Free to move, free to learn

Two solitudes

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