Questão de Educação e Pedagogia

What Are Classrooms Like for Students with Learning Disabilities? Common classroom conditions can and do affect many students adversely to some degree, at one time or another, in one way or other, but some students are especially vulnerable to classrooms' hazards (e.g., children of poverty, non-native speakers, those with attention deficits). Students with learning disabilities are among the most vulnerable at chronic risk for "not learning" under the aforementioned conditions, for long term academic and social problems, and for lifelong debilitating side effects of their classroom experiences. Classrooms can be perilous in a number of ways for students with learning disabilities. [...] Another barrier is the common belief that "including" students with learning disabilities is fundamentally a matter of ensuring that the student "fits in". By and large, teachers in general education classrooms aim for their 7 students with learning disabilities to be well accepted, for them to feel comfortable and to "not stick out." This translates into not wanting to treat them differently — a problematic predicament, to say the least! To even begin approaching these students' learning needs requires treating them considerably differently. [...] There is a prevailing belief that treating students differently is somehow detrimental — either bad for the individual, not good for the group, or both voiced with particular concern for "fairness." This "fairness doctrine" has the ring of one of those cultural assumptions, worthy of closer examination, given the unfair facts of classroom life. In actual practice, neither instruction nor discipline is evenhanded in classrooms, differing along lines of gender, race, class, and more. Different students are, in fact, treated substantially differently in all classrooms. [...] In fact, fairness, in the sense of sameness of instruction, or equity of instruction, or even in the sense of "each challenged to near capacity," is not very operative in classrooms, certainly not as much as we might like to think. So, why the staunch resistance to purposefully treating the Dans, the Joses and the others differently, resistance in the name of fairness? I'll hazard that this concern, voiced by many teachers, has to do with some implicit "rules of the game" that have been handed down via the culture of schools and probably also by the culture at large. School participants, enculturated beings, "feel" when these rules are being violated, and will commonly rush to uphold them even when they are not in the best interests either of the individual learner or the "rest of the class." Put another way, for classrooms to more fully accommodate students with learning disabilities, it may well take a cultural shift in the current way of "doing school," a more fundamental shift in how the enterprise operates overall, not only for those few. Now that is a tall order and one requiring approaches from multiple directions. Garnett, K. (2010). Thinking About Inclusion and Learning Disabilities: A Teachers Guide, pp 7-12. Division of Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children.