Co-enrollment..
In the past few weeks, I read many of my colleagues' blogs, articles, and discussions about inclusion, technology, assessment, and the classroom environment. Each component contributes to each individual child's strengths and weakness. Each component offers advantages and disadvantages. Because I am a strong advocate of promoting American Sign Language (ASL) as a language pathway for all children to learn and use until they learn how to speak/or continue to use ASL if they do not have verbal ability, I want to present a discussion and new insight on Co-enrollment.
Before I get into the purpose of co-enrollment, I would like to discuss what we know about children with disabilities and children without disabilities. We often see children at child development centers and there is almost no children with disabilities there. Why is that? Children with disabilities are often at home with a caregiver or at a residential school/day school that provides services for children with disabilities and that usually mean the young children are far away from home and their families.
What is co-enrollment? Is it same as inclusion? Co-enrollment is a bigger picture of inclusion conception. Co-enrollment classroom has two teachers (co-teachers). Both or one of them are fluent in ASL and one of them teaches in spoken English. The students in the classroom are hearing, deaf, and hard of hearing. This concept is relatively new and gradually increasing across the global. There is not sufficient research to support the results of this program, not enough to determine if it is beneficial program. The social between deaf/hard of hearing and hearing peers seem to increase in positive ways, which means that children show acceptance toward one another regardless of his or her abilities.
Since co-enrollment is relative new in education system, I am intrigued to learn more and possibly support this model. What are your thoughts? This kind of education will require parental involvement, assessment, technology, inclusion, and classroom environment to meet this new idea.
Chrissy,
ReplyDeleteI loved your post! You have truly opened my eyes to the deaf community. I do believe that having co-enrollment in child care centers would be an amazing concept. We use to have a center in my community years ago that was for children that were deaf/hard of hearing but children that could hear perfectly okay were also allowed to enroll. Because state funding was cut and that funding was what the center used to stay in business, sad to say the center had to close. But I went to tour the center and in every classroom there were 2 teachers and they both knew ASL and a couple of the teachers were also deaf/hard of hearing. I loved seeing the children that could hear fine use ASL with the teachers and students.
I think it has been programed in everyone's mind the importance of learning another language, such as Spanish, that no one views ASL as a language that should be learned, too.
I know you also mentioned something about not seeing children with disabilities in centers. I can tell you with all the years I have worked in child care I have only known of 2 children that I have cared for with disabilities. I believe that many families are scared to immerse their child into a "typical" child care setting if their child has a disability. The parents feel as if the educators or school will not be able to meet their child's needs. I really think that is sad for the child because the child ends up being "sheltered" in a center that only provides care to children with disabilities or they have a nanny provide care for them in their home. I think having children with disabilities in a setting with typically developing children can have many positive benefits. The biggest benefit is typically developing children being able to be exposed to children that are different then them. I have a niece that has disabilities and because my daughters were around her quite a bit at a young age, they could see that my niece was different than them but they were not afraid to be around her or play with her or even grab her hand and pull her around while they played.
Really cool discussion Chrissy!