Special Education classrooms are a melting pot of students who are creative, innovative, and waiting for an opportunity to shine. These are the generalized qualities the students come with as their hard-wired gifts. Students all still need to learn how to read through direct, explicit and systematic instruction, and that will only happen through effective literacy instruction that is culturally responsive and teacher training. Literacy should be the great equalizer for students to become academically independent. Not every student will get exposed to quality literacy instruction which pushes them to reach their full potential or positions them to achieve their freedom. However, it should be at the top of the list for educators, policymakers and administrators to train teachers to excel in literacy instruction. Although the demographics of classrooms are changing to reflect increasingly diverse students, what remains unknown in Special Education is why there is a persi...
In seventh grade, my teacher announced that we would be reading aloud. Each student was assigned a passage. I was fifth. As the first students read, I wasn’t listening for meaning. I was preparing to survive. My body reacted before my thoughts—heat, tension, panic. When my turn came, I swore loudly enough to be removed from the classroom. Being sent to the office felt like relief. At the time, the incident was recorded as misconduct. Decades later, I understand it differently: the convergence of undiagnosed dyslexia, racialized expectations, and school practices that treated reading speed as intelligence and hesitation as defiance. That moment—and many others like it—became central to my doctoral research on race, disability, giftedness, and literacy. When Research Reaches the Wrong People My dissertation passed committee review. It was published. It was cited. And yet a contradiction became impossible to ignore. The students, families, and...
For the lower-level processors (i.e., orthographic & phonological), Moats (2020) asserts that “one can use phonic or dictionary symbols to transcribe the phonetic properties of words, but the disadvantage of such a phonic representation system is that many speech sounds must then be presented with letter combinations…” (pg. 32). We will be analyzing the word divergent in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary 11th edition pg. 365. www.stockvault.net The phonetic transcription \ də-ˈvər-jənt , dī- \ . Note: these variants are based on geographical location and dialects, and for the purposes of this word, I will use the second transcription dī. 1st sound 2nd sound 3rd sound 4th sound 5th sound 6th sound 7th sound 8th sound Phonemes /ī/ /j/ /ə/ Graphemes D i v er g e n t These points address what we hear and see when ...
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