Bria's FNED blog!

On October 10th, the class was required to attend the Student-Centered Research Collaborative. It was held at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, RI. I learned quite a few new things, but I will mention those later. The first thing I would like to mention is at the start of my day. I arrived fifteen minutes early, and parked in the Providence Place Mall parking garage, to avoid parking in the wrong place, traffic, etc. I ended up getting lost,  due to the fact that the mall was closed. My initial plan was to go through the mall and find the Biltmore that way, but I had to go another way that I wasn't familiar with, and ended up getting lost. Fast forward to when I finally find the hotel. Im already late, and am informed that it's on the seventeenth floor. Okay, no big deal. I didn't know, though, that there were multiple workshops, and that the class was scattered all over the place. So I walked into one conference, and there were all adults. I sit there, patiently and ...

ARGUMENT In this article, Oakes argues that there is uneven opportunities for students in the classroom, and how this is not fair, especially to the students that require more academic help. To start off, Oakes states that classes are obviously divided, especially in high school. They are divided by intelligence, into honors, into AP, or into comp and average classes. By expressing this concern, it is clear that Oakes has a problem with the way classes are run. She feels as though classes that need more attention, such as the special needs and comprehension classes, have some of the lesser qualified teachers, and there is an overall "I don't care" about these students. Through her argument, she is saying that there needs to be a change. She is asking why some students deserve any less of a chance than their more "intelligent" counterparts. She also addresses some places in which she is torn. By integrating these two student groups together, the quicker lea...

The first author I can relate to my placement at Robert L Bailey is Garcia's "Translanguaging". Translanguaging, unlike Garcia's piece, focuses on how bilingualism can be a good, beneficial thing for children. With the time I've spent at this school, I can see how that would be the case. To start off, in my classroom, there are things called "centers". During these centers, the children can choose dramatic play, math center, drawing center, painting center, and so on and so forth. One particular day, a few weeks back, I was in the "dramatic play" area with a group of children. Two girls in particular, however, stood out to me. For the sake of this, we will call them C and L. L was playing with fake foods and was naming them in Spanish, and giving instructions on how to cook them in Spanish. I'm a non-spanish speaker, and I never even took the language in high school. So, what she was saying was completely foreign to me. She finally started...

REFLECTION Firstly, I feel very connected with the subject of these pieces. Both articles focus around students learning with disabilities, specifically Down syndrome in the first. As an intended elementary ed major, with a planned content major in special education, this subject speaks closely to my heart. Also, it was interesting to read and learn about their social skills and how they learn. Perhaps it will help give me an insight into just how students with Down syndrome function in a school setting. Christopher Kliewer " Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome" : This texts gives a more broad approach as to how students with down syndrome learn, while mentioning a few students in particular. The author focuses on Shoshone, a parent run school for kids with Down syndrome. In this school, the author points out that students with down syndrome don't really communicate well using words. However, they communicate by being there for each other, withou...

SUMMARY/ARGUMENT Podcast: Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter at the New York times, is the speaker in this podcast. In this podcast, she speaks about her experience with segregation in the schools she was investigating in Durham, North Carolina. During her studies, she found that many “bad” school, which were usually lower class and minorities, very seldom caught ip to the “good schools”, usually upper class and white. However, something that she did find was that, the more schools intergrated white and black students together, the less there was such of a gap between the good and bad reputation of the schools. Back in 1971, black students’ test scores were 39 points lower than their white counterparts. However, fast forward nearly 20 years to 1988, and their scores were now only 19 points lower According to Hannah-Jones, this is because of the introduction of intergration. The takeaway meaning behind this podcast is the idea of intergration, segregation, and how the in...