Over the holidays I spent a lot of time reading and watching\nmovies. My mind craved novelty and weirdness which led me down a wonderful\nrabbit hole of Spanish language films (yes, they were subtitled).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also read a book more aligned with my non-weird interests\ncalled The End of Average: How we Succeed\nin a World That Values Sameness <\/em>by Todd Rose (2016). The author explores\nthe enslavement we suffer at the hands of standardization and preoccupation\nwith the average. As a person who has spent her career working with,\nresearching, and hearing stories from folks who don\u2019t fall into the average and\nfeel the struggle with marginalization, this book held so many poignant\npassages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, I am going to share a sad story that turns out well but\nwhile it is sad, please be patient because it will illustrate Todd Rose\u2019s point\nabout Essentialists and Contextualists very well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was doing my doctoral work at SFU, I ran a reading\nprogram on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. It was an upper-level class for\na group of pre-service teachers; it was my job to teach theories of reading and\nlanguage acquisition and then coach students through an intensive eight-week\npracticum in which they worked one-on-one with a struggling reader to improve\ndecoding and comprehension. The first day I was approached by a little girl who\nwalked up to me assertively and said, \u201cNobody can teach me to read. But they\nsaid that you might. Can you teach me to read?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat grade are you in?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. She was in grade 3. The backstory from the teacher was a\nstruggling family, substance abuse issues, everybody tried but it was pointless\netc. etc. I\u2019d see, one teacher said. I was told a few times not to get my hopes\nup. Keep your expectations low so you don\u2019t get disappointed. She\u2019ll cry, even.\nShe wants to read so badly but she just can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the sad part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s sad because she was only 8 and she was begging to read\nbut what was saddest was the Essentialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEssentialist thinking is both a consequence and a cause of\ntyping: if we know someone\u2019s personality traits, we believe we can classify\nthem as a particular type. And if we know someone belongs to a particular type,\nwe believe we can form conclusions about their personality and behavior.\u201d\n(Rose, 2016, p. 101).<\/p>\n\n\n\n She is a child who:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cannot Focus<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cannot Behave At School<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gets In Trouble<\/p>\n\n\n\n Probably Has An Intellectual Disability<\/p>\n\n\n\n What this essentialist thinking meant was that all these\ncharacteristics added up to a child who would probably never read, learn, or\namount to much because as much as you try, those traits, those features, just\nadd up to a kid who is not going to make it. And in fact, it\u2019s sad for both the\nteacher AND the little girl. No teacher likes feeling blocked and frustrated\nand at the end of their rope. Likewise, no student likes to feel it\u2019s the end\nof the line and finally, despite everybody\u2019s best efforts, nothing can be done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nobody likes to feel unhelpable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Todd Rose contrasts Essentialism with the Context Principle\nor if\/then signatures<\/em> which hold that\ntalent and ability must be understood in juxtaposition to the situation; given\na different context, we can see a whole host of behaviors emerge and recede.\nThe kid who can\u2019t sit in a reading circle at school can be held rapt reading on\nthe sofa next to his Grandma. The child who is quiet and withdrawn at school\nbecomes gregarious when she goes to swimming lessons. Our personalities,\ntraits, and behaviors may seem stable but in fact change and change quite\ndramatically from context to context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contextualists tune into the setting \u2013 you want to see a\nchange in learning? Change the context!<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sad part of the story is over. The best part is next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My job as the instructor of the course was not to teach the\nkids in the program myself, but to support pre-service teachers in teaching the\nkids. So I had a very special job for a very special student because I was\nabout to craft a context<\/em>. I selected\nthe student I thought would work well with our 8 year old. She was soft and\npatient, she had asked keen questions in class about the impact of poverty on\nliteracy, and had shared my peculiar interest in vowel sounds (key for reading\nintervention). I had a quiet word with her, explained we were going to go above\nand beyond to work on emotion regulation, attachment, and of course, phonemic\nawareness and phonics. Each session started with warm hellos and holding hands\nto walk over to the reading desk. The sessions were highly structured,\nencouraging, and everybody was forbidden to consider failure. Failure would\nnever be on the radar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our little girl got frustrated and cried sometimes and<\/em> she slowly learned to read. After\ntwo weeks she knew her alphabet. After three more weeks she knew all the vowel\nsounds and started stringing sounds together to make words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSEANNA, I CAN READ, I CAN READ! WATCH!\u201d I looked at her\nstudent teacher who was quietly beaming. \u201cIt\u2019s true,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What followed was a horrible debacle about what would happen\nafter the reading program finished but I worked some magic, the student teacher\ncontinued with the little girl for another year, and got her well on her way,\nalmost caught up to her grade four peers by the following year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were other tragedies in that class that semester and\nif I had to identify situations in which I became a Contextualist, how I\nlearned to string together if\/then signatures, this would certainly be a\nfrontrunner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I enjoy UDL because it allows me to look at and design\ncontext.<\/p>\n\n\n\n UDL is the opportunity to draw your attention away from your\ntraits as a teacher and their traits as students and look instead on how we can\ncreate, shape, and change contexts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we asked students what strong engagement feels like\nto them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we create groups differently?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we manipulate the pacing of information?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we prioritize listening?<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we design for ways of asking deep questions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we remember that people are complex and have different\nbehaviors in different settings then we are provided the opportunity to imagine\na set of circumstances where the learning behaviors that dismay us may change\nor disappear. We may craft a setting for\nthe emergence of really amazing learning. In the words of Dr. Rose, \u201conly equal\nfit creates equal opportunity\u201d (p. 187). As an instructor, you have the capacity\nto make things fit. Your enormous power and privilege is the chance to design\ncontext. And as always, if you get stuck, you know where to find me. Being able\nto jump into context creation with you is my enormous privilege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rose, L.T. (2016). The End\nof Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness.<\/em> Toronto: Harper\nCollins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the holidays I spent a lot of time reading and watching movies. My mind craved novelty and weirdness which led me down a wonderful rabbit hole of Spanish language films (yes, they were subtitled). I also read a book more aligned with my non-weird interests called The End of Average: How we Succeed in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","iawp_total_views":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-universal-design-for-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.wordpress.kpu.ca\/tlcommons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}