Introduction
For my final project for TE 448, I chose to focus on the inclusion of children with disabilities in the general education community. As a future special educator, I am going to need to make sure that I include appropriate diverse literature in my classroom library. As we have learned all semester, it is very important for literature to be both a mirror and a window into the life of the reader. Children need to be able to see characters in the literature that display similar qualities to them. It is so vital that children are able to relate to the books they are reading. It is equally important that the literature children are reading have the ability to teach them something about other people in their lives, including their fellow classmates.
The books I chose to focus on in my project portray students with disabilities in a positive light. Even though the main characters in each of these books have some sort of disability, the books are great resources for any child, no matter what their disability status may be. All of these books explore the strengths and uniqueness of students with disabilities. They will be a great way for students to learn acceptance of individuals who are either very similar or somewhat different than they are. Many of these books focused on the friendships that prevail among students with disabilities. I am very excited that I have had the opportunity to do this project, because it has got me thinking about the types of books I would like to include in my classroom in the future. I have learned how to properly evaluate literature and will know how to be sure I am including the highest quality of literature in my classroom.
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Maggie:
ReplyDeleteI am really excited about your presentation tomorrow. One thing I really admire about the books that you chose to research include children with all sorts of disabilities because students without disabilities and students with disabilities can learn about other children. It never really crosses my mind how there are different categories of disabilities, and in the past I have viewed them all as the same. However, this is not the case and each student's disability needs to be acknowledged in the classroom.
One question, do you plan on including poor representations of students with disabilities in literature? If so, how would you introduce it to students? I know in TE 448 we talked about highlighting some of the biases in children's literature...so it may be a tool for some substantive classroom discussions.