The dignity of choice

In my real life I am a resource teacher. That means that I work part of the day teaching grade one kids how to read, part of the day teaching language arts or math to small groups or whole classes, and part of the day with special needs kids.

Each year I only work with three or four special needs kids. Some are hearing impaired, mentally handicapped, severely learning disabled, and this year a 12 year old girl with Down's syndrome. I see her two or three periods a week and the aide is with her the rest of the week.

It has been one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career to work with children like her. She has the vocabulary of a 3 year old, largely unintelligible speech and reads at an early grade one level. She has limited intellectual potential even for her diagnosis.

However, she is absolutely delightful to be with. She has a wonderful sense of humour and enjoys books more than any other child I can remember. She talks to the characters and anticipates what will happen on the next page. Of course, she knows what will happen on the next page because she reads every book at least 20 times.

As she reads, the letters stimulate her to pronounce the sounds better. She can now make most of the sounds one needs to speak English. This was a big struggle for her, but she loves associating each letter with the alphabet chart on the wall. She loves each animal, E for elephant and so on. You get the picture.

Her programme consists of reading, and writing, mostly single words or up to three words at a time. This is very difficult for her. She also has to learn to count out items matching quantity with a number. She loves music and PE. She has a computer and can use great phonics websites and programmes. Starfall.com is a big hit.

But the big success is the snack event. On Tuesday, we read a book about food, breakfast, or fruit or how to make a milkshake, or something like that. On Thursday, she makes a list and goes shopping with her aide.

On Friday, she prepares the food with her aide, and then she serves it to a group of students who are working on a class newspaper. She passes around the food and we all have a taste. For example, one time we put out pieces of three fruit, strawberries, banana coins, and grapes. Then we talk about which fruit we like the best.

On a chartstand there is a bar graph with the three different fruit along the bottom. Each student puts a happy face in the column above the fruit that they like best. Then we see which food was the most popular. We photograph the chart and we put it in the newspaper. Some students also learn how to turn the chart into an Excel chart.

The learning goals for the Down's syndrome child are to have her identify and express her choice or personal preference. The student also learns appropriate group behaviour and how to act as hostess and leader of the group. She plans, buys and prepares the food. She cleans up. She passes the food around and passes the pen for other students to record their choice. It is her event.

Experiencing and expressing personal autonomy is essential to psychological health. These students are more than just trainable. We do not train even a child of the most limited ability as if she were anything less than fully human. She also has the experience of being the leader of the group. She controls the pace and responses. We each need the experience of functioning as a leader. We ask this for all of us, that we would also be able to experience and express choice in ways that are respectful of other people.