relevance for future classroom

As a special education major, the students in my future classroom will all be living some form of disability that influences their identity. This webinar reminds me that these disabilities are not the only part, or even the majority part, of my students’ identities. It will be just as important for me to create spaces for their wonderful little identities as it would be for their neuro- and physio-typical peers. Additionally, this webinar was useful in challenging what type of ally I can be for my future students. I realized that despite by best interests, I tend to fall into the all for altruism’s sake. I focus deeply on helping the students immediately in my care, and less so on the broader cause. This webinar has helped me reconfigure how I approach special education in my classroom AND OUTSIDE OF IT. I feel that I am on the way to truly decentralizing myself so that I can appropriately use my own abilities and privileges to challenge systems that would adversely affect the lives of my future students with special needs.

This webinar, to me, falls under the ISTE standards for learner, leader, and collaborator. Obviously, I learned several new things in this webinar, which, ostensibly, should help me improve as a future educator for students with special needs. Moreover, I was able to connect and thus indirectly collaborate with the facilitators of this webinar. I can now take my new learning into my future vocation to collaborate with and possible lead my future teaching peers towards being more social justirce oriented.