How Bad do I Want it???

This question keeps seeping into my mind and some days I don't have an answer for it.  Those are the days like today when I get a text from a stranger with a picture of my daughter winning her first award for good grades at school- a ceremony I was not at because I am home in front of my computer typing away ANOTHER paper that counts for nothing more than a grade.  It seeps into my mind when I am told by the same daughter on our walk to school that she is acting out because "you never have time to play with me anymore" or when I sit for hours "playing" with my children but can't focus on anything other than the building anxiety of what I am not doing for my PhDness.

But then visions of Burton Blatt's Christmas in Purgatory pass through my mind.  And statistics of homeless, incarcerated and jobless youth with disabilities flash in my mind like lightning bolts.  I picture the kids down the hall, forgotten by all their peers, who do crafts in high school and take separate busses on far away "field trips" to the Y with someone else dressing them, deciding what they will eat and even wiping their "$*&#S" because the teachers and leaders of that school deemed separate as equal.

I picture their moms and dad's trusting a system that separates children based on constructed ability lines and I think to myself, "No, I do not want it that bad, but WE NEED IT THAT BAD!"

And that folks, is why I push forward.  I swallow my perfect mommy syndrome pride and I sacrifice.  My kids sacrifice.  My husband sacrifices and by gosh my wardrobe sacrifices.  But we, the people of the global world, need a voice that amplifies not my own voice, but that of the separated and marginalized voices of our communities.  So I continue......  do you?

Watch this.....

Sir Ken Robinson speaks about standardization and loss of divergent thinking- calling for a change in education paradigms

Feds tweak with education for kids with disabilities....

I'm not sure how this one snuck by me, but the Feds are asking our opinion and I think many of you should share.......

It's looking as though the feds are ready to revamp part of the regulations governing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act- the law that gives states money to educate students with disabilities and also the law that mandates how they should do it via regulations.  Therefore, the "regs" tend to be the most important part of the law, for kids anyway.  I urge you to read on and submit your responses ASAP.  Click the link below for all the details.- Happy politicking :)

News

Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

On September 6, 2011, the Department announced a notice of proposed rulemaking to amend the IDEA Part B regulations. Changes are being proposed to the regulations regarding when a State or local educational agency seeks to use a child's or parent's public benefits or insurance (e.g., Medicaid) to pay for Part B services. Note that this document has been delivered to the Office of the Federal Register but has not yet been scheduled for publication. The official version of this document is the document that is published in the Federal Register. Download as a Word document or as a PDF.

Here is what I've come to know during my 3 + years.....

We know nothing of what we think we know because everything we know is clouded by that which we think we know (that which we hold in our own, biased and bound, hands).

We, I suppose, is human kind.  If that helps clear anything up.  I'm still working with this thought, but it keeps creeping into my subconscious, almost becoming omnipresent.

Let me give you an example....

Last semester I spent an entire course becoming an "expert" on ethnography.  I read every book "I" could find (along with the guidance of my professor of course).  I read Fetterman, Madison, Van Maan, Carspecken, Clifford & Marcus, Foley, and Bernard. I conducted a pilot ethnography, wrote a how-to guide, and gave an expert presentation.  I knew this stuff. I was proud- still am- of myself.  To some degree it was a turning point for me.  I began to visualize myself as a researcher, an ethnographer.  It sat well and "fit".

Not surprisingly I continued my development and enrolled in an ethnography course this semester.  I love it.  I am reading all about ethnography and get to conduct another "mini" version of an ethnography in a local community.  I couldn't ask for anything more.  However, the books I read now are historic and seminal ethnographic pieces conducted in various Urban American Cities throughout the mid 1900's through today, but they NEVER appeared in my "expert" literature from last semester.  They are written by African American Scholars: W.E.B Cu Bois (1899), Drake & Cayton (1945), Langston Gwaltney (1993), and Pattillo-McCoy (1999); and disappointingly no one questioned their omission from my expert products. I was professing expertise without true representation of the whole ethnographic story.  Had I stopped my quest last semester my expertise, while well informed and in good standing with the indicators "we" look for in experts, would have remained skewed and biased.

 How many other things in life have I not allowed the quest for knowledge and full understanding to continue?

What about you?

Get outside of my comfort zone, get outside of my comfort zone, get outside of my comfort zone…..

This is the mantra I have to keep chanting in my head this semester. 

I’ve been working in schools since I crossed over into adulthood.  I’ve taught in “inner city” schools in Chicago and Milwaukee and even suburban schools.  I’m comfortable in schools, as the teacher/mentor to children.  That is my comfort zone.

Through my current and past work with schools I’ve grown to understand that it is so very critical to be connected with the surrounding neighborhoods, even this I embraced…. as the teacher.  I would walk the streets, hold parent-teacher conferences in local family owned restaurants or even bus stops and even join in local community events at every chance I got- but I had an agenda, my own agenda.  I was “the teacher”.

This semester is different though- I keep going to my roots and thinking up a way to be in the schools, in a power position of the teacher or something similar, but I don’t want to do this.  I want to embrace and move past my power position as a white, female teacher/mentor/leader.  

I want to be guided by the community.  I just don’t know how!?!?!?!  

I’m finding myself nervous, unsure and even feeling physiological symptoms of anxiousness.  You know: the butterflies, shortness of breathe, …  

But I’m committed and by gosh I will find a way to get out of my comfort zone and learn from the community- not ask the community to learn from me.

Dissertation

This seems to be the topic everyone is talking about- when will you begin? what will you do?  where will you do it?????

I guess this means I need to start seriously thinking about it.

Don't you all understand that as a mother, wife, student, research and instructor I LIVE IN THE MOMENT?!?!?!


Who has time to think about something that can't happen for AT LEAST A YEAR?

I guess it's time to find the time........... HELP!


No really, help me.  If anyone has suggestions of texts, articles, web resources, words of wisdom and inspiration, etc... on how to kick start a dissertation please share.  I have a few I will begin to think about in the next week or so, but welcome new ideas.

Happy hunting.

Someone stole my thunder...

Or, maybe I'm trying to steal there's?

What am I talking about, you ask?

I'm talking about my continuum of services policy analysis project that has consumed my mind and body for the last 6 months.  I found a book, published in 1999 by James Kauffman (a name-stay in the field of special education) and Jean Crockett (a past special education center/segregated school administrator): The Least Restrictive Environment (LRE): Its origins and Interpretations in Special Education, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

I am only kidding about the thunder stealing.  In reality it has been my best find yet.  I got it for $0.02 on Amazon (no that is not a typo and makes me go back to my earlier question of topic relevance) but am quite happy to have found it.

The text is a complete report of a large historical analysis of the LRE (least restrictive environment) requirement in the federal legislation guiding special education service delivery.  The authors did much of what I intend and am currently working to do: content analysis of the law and hearings, interviews with key stakeholders in the policy development and implementation process, and even captures the dilemma of service delivery and place decisions in special education. WOW- this surely will serve to be quite helpful.

Stolen or not, I'm thankful for the found thunder!

(On an aside, of which I will write more later, the 3 of us come from QUITE different perspectives.  I am finding myself getting angrier and angrier as I complete the book... be a good little researcher and keep your biases at bay Ms. Unplugged.)