Nicholas Garcia's List: Middle School SS Resources

• Therefore, the provision of uninhibited access to any educational curriculum is not only an inherent human right but an obligation of the teacher and the school  Differentiated Instruction as a Pedagogy of Liberation • 67system as a means of ensuring the preservation of a “level playing field” for all individuals.
• Therefore, the provision of uninhibited access to any educational curriculum is not only an inherent human right but an obligation of the teacher and the school  Differentiated Instruction as a Pedagogy of Liberation • 67system as a means of ensuring the preservation of a “level playing field” for all individuals.
• Since a considerable percentage of students are either officially classified or regarded as having disabilities, different modes of curriculum presentation and instruction are necessary to enhance such students’ ac-cessibility to information without sacrificing the integrity of the curriculum.
• Failure to do so creates an instructional stratification between students with and without dis-abilities.
• ractices of differentiated instruction
• empower
• unctional part of the community
• students
• The general education classroom is increasingly including students with intellec-tual, processing, memory, modality (visual/hearing), and/or mobility disabilities (Worrell, 2008).
• According to Darder (1995) the fundamental commitment of critical educa-tors is to transform those conditions that perpetuate human injustice and inequity.
• Any system which deliberately tries to discourage critical consciousness is guilty of oppressive violence. Any school which does not foster students’ capacity for critical inquiry is guilty of violent oppression”
• Therefore, the provision of uninhibited access to any educational curriculum is not only an inherent human right but an obligation of the teacher and the school
• system as a means of ensuring the preservation of a “level playing field” for all individuals.
• herefore, from the perspective of differentiated instruction, it is unimportant which disabil-ity classification is conferred upon the student, but only what actual needs demand meeting in the classroom to enhance and enable the accessibility of all curricula, and determining how such needs will be met.
• onversely, the interactional model approaches disability from the perspec-tive that disability occurs only as a result of an incompatibility between occur-ring environmental demand(s) and one’s ability to meet such demand(s); not as an organic deficiency.
• herefore, this perspective proposes that a disability is only manifested in a situa-tion in which an individual cannot meet the demands of the environment in its current (whether natural or unnatural) state as a result of a particular challenge, rendering accessibility to or negotiation within the environment either signifi-cantly difficult or completely inaccessible
• disability is only such as a result of an incompatibility of environment and demand
• herefore, from the interactional perspective, the environment can indeed be differentiated or modified according to the individual’s need in order to amel-iorate (if not eliminate) the incompatibility with the demand.
• Failure to appropriately differentiate or modify inevitably leads to a predetermined imprisonment within one’s disability in an unforgiving and inaccessible environment.
• This same concept holds true on a classroom curricular level as well, in which there are countless examples of how such a situation could develop and instruc-tion could be appropriately differentiated. For example, a student with a memory disability may receive color-coded cues enabling him or her to match the relevant parts of the story to a later comprehension question and/or discussion, a student with a vocabulary disability may receive texts with technical terms replaced by simplified language, or a student with a more severe intellectual disability will be posed a majority of “lower level” thinking questions
• differentiation is not
• To do so will increase these students’ exposure to the very environ-ment to which he or she is, by right, accessible in such a way as to move beyond simple “exposure” to the mainstream, but toward opportunities to actually engage in the curriculum to whatever degree possible, socially or academically. Such effective differentiation and inclusion will also distinctly increase the awareness of their classmates that such participation is not only possible, but natural and imperative (Shah et al., 2005).
• only beneficial, but imperative
• The most liberating can here be defined as the environment in which all resources are available and all needs may be met to provide the fullest accessibility to all stimuli and demands present (similar to the intended definition of the least restrictive environment).
• the public school is not intended to serve the public, but rather to create the public (Postman, 1995, p.18). As such, these students must be brought up in an environment that moves beyond just tolerating differentiation, but man-dating its practice in all areas of life and society.
• Such differentiated instruction is the only real means of meeting the cause of social justice for individuals with disabilities, and facilitating a pedagogy of liber-ation not just for the students with disabilities themselves, but also for their class-mates who now have an opportunity to share a learning space with individuals that may not have been there before

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