Welcome to my Blog
My name is Beth Sparks. I’m a Learning and Enrichment Teacher in Cougar Canyon Elementary in Delta, British Columbia. This year I teach 36 diverse youngsters who are not-yet meeting grade-level expectations in one or more of the language arts (reading, listening, writing, speaking). Eighty percent of those students are in Kindergarten through Grade 3. The other twenty percent are intermediate students with written output difficulties. An Education Assistant works with me in the Learning and Enrichment Centre and we teach students in daily, focused, intense, one-to-one, and small-group classes. I also work with interested teachers planning, modeling, and co-teaching in-class writing lessons.
Over the past decade with the Delta school district I’ve worked to remove obstacles to learning for diverse students. I worked with colleagues in 1997 to bring MathStretch, a district-wide program for children with a passion for math, online. MathStretch was previously a face-to-face program and parents were responsible for driving a child to and from the Resource Centre for lessons. Students without transportation were not included–regardless of their creative math ability. In 1998 I piloted WriteStretch, an asynchronous writing salon in cyberspace. For the next six years, I taught young writers in Kindergarten through Grade 4 in a WriteStretch salon I named “Ben Wicks Salon,” after the Canadian cartoonist and philanthropist. WriteStretch now has students in grades 1 -12. Computer technology transformed educational environments for students and teachers in these Stretch programs by creating opportunities that did not exist previously.
I also turned increasingly to computer technology to remove obstacles to learning for students who were struggling in school because classrooms were dominated by print (e.g., textbooks, literature, worksheets, tests). I started teaching at Cougar Canyon with no computer. Nevertheless, I learned to advocate for diverse students and the school purchased two banks of DreamWriters for designated students receiving learning and enrichment support.
It was, however, the Computers for Schools Project (http://www.cfsbc.ca/) that really got the ball rolling. Working with the principal, the Learning and Enrichment program obtained two dozen computers. Some stayed in the Learning and Enrichment Centres and others were designated for particular students to use in their classrooms. Soon all teachers got on the bandwagon and asked for a computer in their classrooms. We even replaced the ancient computers in the computer lab with the slightly newer equipment from Computers for Schools (486s). In fact, Cougar Canyon had more Computers for Schools equipment than any other school in the province! Then I learned how to beg shamelessly for software (Dragon Naturally Speaking, Balanced Literacy, Earobics, Kurzweil, CoWriter, WriteOutloud, Simon SIO, WordMaker, etc.).
Online in 2003, I read about Universal Design for Learning. The complete text of Teaching every student in the digital Age: Universal Design for Learning (Rose & Meyer, 2002) is available at www.cast.org),. UDL is a unique framework for “reshaping” education by making the curriculum, from the outset, accessible for all students. It resonated. UDL is based on two decades of educational research into the nature of learning, new digital media, and effective teaching; together with data from new brain-imaging techniques (fMRI) of the learning brain. In 2005-2006 I was team leader for the Cougar Canyon, Hewlett-Packard Technology for Teaching Grant. Our successful proposal was entitled: Is it that I can’t learn? Or is it that you can’t teach? To date, Cougar Canyon is the only school in BC to receive that prestigious award. The theoretical and practical framework for the project was Universal, or inclusive, Design for Learning. This project provided the opportunity to turn from teaching students to use technology to support their learning (assistive technology, to learning how to use technology to teach diverse students. UDL transformed my own teaching. I now teach language arts using innately flexible digital resources (including online materials from around the world) that I present on a SmartBoard, Karaoke machine, individual desktop stations, listening centres, etc.).
Before becoming a learning assistance teacher, I was a classroom teacher in Alberta and British Columbia, a District Coordinator for Gifted Programs in Delta, and a teacher educator in English Language Arts and Gifted Education, at the Universities of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), Calgary; and British Columbia. I belong to a number of educational groups and I sit on several committees. I am the Past President of the British Columbia Learning Assistance Teachers’ Provincial Specialist Association, and President of the Delta Learning Assistance Teachers’ Local Specialist Association. I sit on a number of district and provincial committees, and I am an associate in the BC Universal Design for Learning Pilot 2007-2008. Because I’m interested in sharing ideas I also speak at provincial, national, and international conferences.
In 1993 I earned a Ph.D. at the University of Calgary, and my dissertation is entitled: A Hermeneutic Turn to Giftedness as Possibility. Common to all my work in education is the belief in the educational possibilities of all learners, adults as well as children. Life is constituted by possibilities, and the first possibility is the gift of life itself. Becoming gifted is what happens when we make the most of those possibilities that life presents. Becoming gifted–striving for personal excellence– is, therefore, a common human possibility. Inclusion, belonging together, becomes possible on that common ground.
I am passionate about inclusive education. Over the past 15 years surveys of teachers’ attitudes toward inclusion show that most B.C. teachers believe in inclusion (Siegel & Ladyman, 2001; Naylor, 2002). But believing that children belong together in their neighbourhood schools is not enough. The data show that a growing number of teachers: do not feel prepared to teach the diverse students in their classrooms, are frustrated by the daily work required to adapt and modify the curriculum and learning environment for individual students with diverse learning differences, and are, moreover, concerned by a general lack of awareness of such practical teaching issues.
The mandated policy of integration cannot lead to inclusion. Integration is a barrier that blocks the move to inclusion. This issue will receive further attention in this blog but briefly, the word “integration” recalls the socio-historic exclusion and segregation of students who differed from what was considered “normal.” Integration is the step that follows de-segregation and the return of those students into the mainstream–the monolithic mainstream that was inappropriate and unsuited for them in the first place. The point I am making is that the Procrustean mainstream education system, whether 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or today was not designed to teach all children. Incremental changes to the mainstream will not change that reality. Inclusion requires something qualitatively different.
Some school organizations, educational environments and instructional approaches are more likely than others to create conditions for inclusion. Universal Design for Learning is a portal to inclusion. Please add your voice to the Sharing Ideas forum on this blog, contributing to discussions on UDL and creating conditions for inclusion in our classrooms.
Cheers,
Sparkie
