Case #1 Jimmy

The purpose of this assignment is for you to apply and contextualize your understanding of disability in school contexts from an intersectional perspective. 

The Case:

            Ten-year-old Jimmy Martinez and his mother live in a single-wide trailer ten miles up-river from the nearest small town. The town of Fir Grove has a population of less than 8,000 people and has been in steady economic and social decline since the timber mills and associated industries began closing some twenty years ago.

 Jimmy and his mother, Susan, recently returned to the Fir Grove area after living in a much larger city to the north where Susan had worked as housekeeper at a hotel. Their move to the rural area outside of Fir Grove happened because Jimmy’s father was sent back to prison due to a parole violation. The judge told Susan that her husband’s release date would be no less than twenty-four months from his date of sentencing. With her husband in prison, Susan was not able to afford the rent on the family’s apartment. Susan’s mother had recently died and left Susan the run-down single-wide trailer on two acres near Fir Grove.

Susan took a job at a local fast-food restaurant and works evenings and odd-hour shifts. She has done her best to make ends meet while caring for herself and Jimmy. The family does not have a car, so Susan gets a ride to town with a neighbor, or she walks a mile to the main road and hitch-hikes. The family does not have a working washing machine or clothes dryer in their home. Every two-to-three weeks, Susan loads laundry into a backpack and makes her way to town to do laundry. On these trips she also does her shopping for groceries and household supplies. 

Jimmy’s older brother Mathew is in and out of the home. He is twelve years older than Jimmy. Matt dropped-out of high school in the ninth grade and spent time in the state youth authority corrections system for theft and property crimes. He was recently released on probation from the adult corrections system and is living with friends and sometimes with Jimmy and Susan. Susan has seen what her older son has lived through and is concerned that Jimmy will, “End up in the same way as his brother and father.” When Jimmy is not in school and when she needs to go into town, Susan has no other choice but to leave Jimmy in the care of his older brother.

The area where the Martinez family lives is on the school district boundary. This means that Susan can decide to enroll Jimmy in school in Fir Grove or in Big Creek. The Big Creek School is a one-room schoolhouse and serves students and families in grades six through ten. Either school is an hour bus ride away for Jimmy. 

Up to this point, Jimmy had mixed experiences with schooling. Jimmy has demonstrated exceptionally strong skills in both science and mathematics. He is readily able to connect his interest in the outdoors to his learning in science. His mathematics problem solving skills have been determined to be at an advanced level for his age. According to his teachers, Jimmy has struggled with literacy and social-emotional functioning. Jimmy has tried hard to learn the alphabet and basic components of reading and literacy. Reading is particularly difficult for him because in his mind the letters and the sounds never really seem to match-up. To him, in one context sounds go with a letter, but in another the sounds did not go together. Jimmy saw his mom reading the new paper in the mornings, but she always seemed too tired to read to him. Jimmy understands that his classmates are ahead of him academically and it seems to him that his lack of reading ability only got him into trouble with his teachers. The literacy teacher at his most recent school would often use a dismissive tone and roll his eyes when Jimmy made a mistake while reading aloud.

Jimmy has had a hard time making and maintaining positive relationships with peers and teachers. He feels left out of play and he sees teachers as trying to “fix” him when he struggles. Jimmy is beginning to believe that school was not for him and that he does not fit in.

Susan heard from a friend that the school in Fir Grove may be able to meet Jimmy’s learning needs and has more resources than the school in Big Creek. The school in Fir Grove is also close to her work and to stores and the laundromat. She believed that having Jimmy in school closer to her work and the things the family needs may be the best option.

Jimmy’s transition to his new school was a difficult one. The kids in town were different than him and he felt like he didn’t fit in. He was the only person of color in his class. His clothes were mostly hand-me-downs from his older brother and his father and were too big for him. His clothes were also not always clean like the other kid’s clothes were because he did not have laundry at home and he played in the forest and the creeks when he had free time. The other kids in his class all wore tennis- shoes and he wore hiking boots or his brother's old cowboy boots. On the playground and on the bus his peers often called him “dirty” and would use racial slurs against him. He tried hard to ignore these things, but he felt ashamed and excluded.

Half-way through the academic year, Jimmy’s teacher Mr. Kerns called Jimmy’s mother and said that he was deeply concerned about Jimmy’s academic progress and also that Jimmy’s behavior was problematic. During a recent literacy lesson, Jimmy had told Mr. Kerns, “Go Fuck yourself !!!!” Jimmy was immediately sent to the principal’s office where he explained that Mr. Kerns gave him dirty looks and made him feel bad when he did not know a word that was in the book. That same week, while waiting for the bus after school, Jimmy pushed another student to the ground because he said that the student was calling him a “beaner.” When questioned by the bus driver Jimmy flew into a rage and punched a window in the bus and broke it.  

Given his history of academic and social struggles Mr. Kerns and the school principal told Susan that her son needed to be evaluated for special education and that he is likely a person with both a learning disability and a behavioral disorder. Susan wanted to help her son, so she consented to the special education evaluation. Even though she did not feel “right” about it, she thought it was likely the best way to get her son the support that he needed. After the evaluation was complete, the school team determined that Jimmy was a student with a specific learning disability in the area of reading and that he should receive special education services outside of the general curriculum for one-hour per-day. Once in place these services seemed to be effective. However, Jimmy was becoming increasingly disruptive in class and continued to have social conflicts with peers and teachers. 

By the time spring break had come, Jimmy was skipping school and spending days exploring the banks of nearby reservoir and fishing. He would tell his mother that he was going to catch the bus for school, but instead he would cut through the forest and never look back.

The school called Susan and said that they were going to suspend Jimmy for his disruptive classroom behaviors and that they wanted her to come to the school and sign paperwork related to this matter and also talk about Jimmy’s attendance. Susan understood that her son had difficulties learning and that he had been in trouble with peers and teachers alike, but she also knew Jimmy to be a kind, resilient, observant child.  Instead of meeting the school’s request she decided to pull Jimmy out of school for the remainder of the academic year and home school him. Home schooling proved to be too difficult given her uneven work schedule. As a result, Jimmy spent most the last three months of his fifth-grade year playing in the forest and fishing at the reservoir. During that time, a neighbor up the road gave him a box of old nature and sports magazines which Jimmy loved. Reading them was really hard for him, but he worked at it and felt good about what he was learning and accomplishing. He also kept a notebook full of drawings and descriptions of the fish he caught and the plants and animals he saw in the forest. 

When summer came to an end, Susan enrolled Jimmy at the one-room schoolhouse in Big Creek. Jimmy was not happy about going back to school, but promised his mother that he would give it a try. Instead of being in a school of 200 students, he would now be in a school of 15.          

Case-Method

Through your work, I would like you to focus not on “getting the answers” to the questions “correct”, but instead focus on how you arrive at possible solutions. What you should be working to do is to create reasoned responses that are supported by evidence. Here are some steps that your team may find useful in the problem-solving process (Knackendoffel, 1996):

• Define the issue/problem
• Identify a range of possible solutions using evidence from the case and/or effective teaching practices that promote inclusion.
• Select the best possible solution(s)
• Develop a plan for changing teaching practice(s)
• Identify criteria by which your team would know that your plan is working successfully.

Questions

1. How does poverty effect the kinds of opportunities that Jimmy and Susan have for making a life that is secure?
2. What is the relationship between Jimmy’s behavior at school and the instruction that he is receiving?
3. How might teacher’s perceptions of Jimmy influence their decisions to refer him to special education? 
4. If you were Jimmy’s new teacher at Big Creek what might you do to create an instructional environment that builds on his strengths and promotes his well-being?

Paper Writing Equivalent: Using Metaphor, Art, and Mixed Media

There is a tendency in schooling to focus on traditional tools rather than contemporary ones. This tendency has several liabilities: 1) it does not prepare learners for their future; 2) it limits the range of content and teaching methods that can be implemented; 3) it restricts learners ability to express knowledge about content (assessment); and, most importantly, 4) it constricts the kinds of learners who can be successful. Current media tools provide a more flexible and accessible toolkit with which learners can more successfully take part in their learning and articulate what they know. Unless a lesson is focused on learning to use a specific tool (e.g., learning to draw with a compass), curricula should allow many alternatives. Like any craftsman, learners should learn to use tools that are an optimal match between their abilities and the demands of the task (CAST, UDL Guidelines, Expression & Communication, 2020).

In alignment with UDL, I am providing you with the following option(s) for written expression in all assignments for the quarter. The following guidelines are provided and are based on the scholarship of teaching and learning from Vanderbilt University (2020).

Construction and Composition of Assignments

• Reflect on the assigned concept, text, media, focusing on what you consider to be the most significant components and the prompts provided.
• Think of way to represent how you make sense of the concept, text, and or media. This may include any form of expression you choose. For example, create a metaphor, art piece, digital recording, photographic representation, poetry, etc.
• Clarity and depth are important.
• Provide an explication of your creative work that interprets it for others, clearly explaining your work and all of its details, with specific attention to how it captures the significant components of the concept, text, and media in the assignment.

 Criteria for Evaluating Creative Work

 Clarity

• Is it made clear to those interacting your creative piece, what the work is supposed to represent?

Accuracy

• Are details from the course materials used to construct your work accurately reflected?

Complexity

• Does your creative work and the accompanying explication reflect the complexity of the concept, text, and or media that the assignment is based on?

Comprehensiveness

• Does your creative work as articulated fully represent the concept, text, and or media that the assignment is based on?
• Knowing that our interpretations of concept, text, and or media in some way incomplete, is there anything that your work did not address that is essential to others understanding the vehicle that you have created to express the assignment.

Unity & Synthesis

• Does your creative work and its explication present a focused image that integrates as many ideas as possible from the course materials?
• Does your creative work and its explication present a set or sequence of discrete but related ideas, or does it document integrative synthesized thinking that brings multiple ideas into a singular focus?