Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing down syndrome Kliewer

"He tells the most amazing stories. I know you've heard him. But he'll just [she made a series of babbling sounds] -like that. And he'll be acting it out, incredibly dramatic, and you'll have absolutely no idea waht he's saying. Nothing. Zero. Nothing. There's not one intelligible word in there. But I know him. And I'd say, from knowing him watching him here, at home, that it's all story-related. The first time I tried reading Where the Wild Things Are, which is his favorite book, he couldn't sit. He had to be up, dancing in the middle of the circle, acting it out. He just couldn't resist. He could not help himself. It got all the kids going. We were all Wild Things and it just came alive!"pg203

"Schools ahve traditionally taken a narrow position when defining and judging student intellect. The presence of a thoughful mind has been linked to patterns of behavioral and communicative conformity associated with competence in logical-mathematical thinking and linguistic skills. Assessments of how well a student conforms to expectations(measurements through which students come to be defined either as smart or as lacking intellect) tend to focus teacher attention on the child's adeptness at responding to classroom-based math and language tasks.These evaluation instruments supposedly measure either a student's understanding of a transmitted knowledge base (hence, preexisting one) related to math and language, or the students ability to discover the knowledge base through carefully contrived activities."pg 205

"Educating all children together reconfigures the representation of Down syndrome from burden toward citizenship. "pg 213

"One can visualize ther reconceptualization of Down syndrome and disability by returning to the metaphor of the gap first describe in Chapter 3.Community banishment of students with Down syndrome stems from their lack of behavioral and communicative conformity to school standards that form the parameters of intellectual normality."

COMMENT


This is another case of someone not being efficient enough in school. If these people would realize the work load they are placing on these students it would be a different matter. Standardize testing has become priority when in all actuality yes the intelligent level of students is important but the reason why they are doing poorly in the first place is because the testing has taken over.
In stead of making school fun and stimulating and actually making these children want to go to class and learn they are making it a place of dread and boredom. These are children not adults, we can't just sit them in a classroom and tell them to sit there and do this work. They need to be engaged in hands on visual audio classwork. Get them motivated and then the standardized testing scores will skyrocket. Make the material that is priority on the testing fun and these children will understand it. We can't be labelling students anything but students, but doing so we are setting them up to fail.