Welcome to Week 6

Welcome to Week 6 of our course! We're wrapping up - can you believe it? It has truly been exciting for me to work with all of you this summer session, to learn about your experiences, learn from your ideas, and engage with you. For our final week, we'll be tackling disability.

Disability

Those of you who have taken or will take a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in your program will have a much more thorough course on it, but I wanted to make sure we raised the topic in this course too. Thinking about intersectionality as a framework, disability is another area where the compounding influences of additional facets of identity have a huge effect on students. And as I mentioned with working with English Language Learners, we don't want our courses to give the impression that we've "handled" a topic and moved on - as it sends a message that particular dimensions of our students are just "add ons" rather than central to their learning. 

Disability is a critical topic because there are both legal and ethical dimensions. On the one hand, there are laws that ensure minimum address of students' needs - which are discussed in the reading. There's also the ethics of working with our students, in which we may decide that meeting the legal standard is not sufficient for ensuring equity in our classrooms. 

To-do List

We'll be addressing these issues through reading and discussion.

1) Read the readings under "Readings" in this week's module. 

2) By Wednesday at 11:59pm, write a 250-word post in response to each question. 

3) By Saturday at 11:59pm, post three substantive follow-up comments to each question. These could be in response to classmates' posts or their comments on your posts. Substantive means more than "I agree" or "I disagree"; a substantive comment engages thoughtfully with your classmates' ideas in relation to the reading and the course material. (If you need a word count, around 100 words is a good rubric for writing a substantive response.)

4) Note, there is no reflection due this week.

I'm looking forward to seeing you on the discussion boards!