“I'm Writing to Teach Those Who Do Not Know”: Making the Case for Inclusive Pedagogy that Values Difference and Capitalizes on Students' Expertise

In this chapter, I draw on data from a classroom in which an urban third grade teacher, already teaching with a stance toward literacy as a social practice, created an inclusive learning context aligned with social constructivist views of inclusion. Social constructivist views situate disabilities as naturally occurring differences among learners within the complex context of school culture. Such a view provides a counter-narrative to more traditional deficit (medical model) perspectives that situate disabilities in the minds and bodies of students (Dudley-Marling and Burns, Global Education Review 1:14-31, 2014). I analyze a subset of transcribed video, classroom artifacts, and student work collected from an ethnographic study of classroom literacy practices connected to an urban gardening project (Paugh and Moran, Language Arts 90:253-267, 2013). A social constructivist perspective frames this case study in highlighting the classroom participation and writing development of a child who has been identified by the school as being severely learning disabled. This student's learning is documented as an outgrowth of his participation in a curriculum that is engaging and flexible, and that includes student choice as to the purposes of, and audiences for, their writing. In this environment, the child and his peers are positioned as experts who are asked to challenge themselves to learn the structures and functions of language to achieve their writing goals. Through his participation, this child is positioned and positions himself as an expert gardener and writer, while attaining clear growth in his procedural writing ability. This case provides evidence for explicit, differentiated writing instruction through a project-based workshop model. It indicates that a student who has been identified as supposedly disabled can be re-identified and challenged as a learner along with peers in a collective learning environment as an alternative to more dominant school structures that separate children with disabilities from peers and from a rich high expectation curriculum (Dudley-Marling, C., & Michaels, S. (2012). Introduction. In C. Dudley-Marling & S. Michaels. The power of high expectations curricula: Helping all students succeed with powerful learning (pp. 1-11). Teachers College Press.).