A Conscious Connection

Inclusion is a topic that is consistently on my mind as an educator because I intend and seek ways that all my students have the experience of belonging , building their confidence and loving learning . Inclusion has also been on my mind as a holistic health graduate student, and more and more these days I am discovering the intrinsic connections between my learnings and teachings. This in many ways adds to what I bring into the classroom. In my holistic health studies, my research partners and I have been working on a qualitative thesis project regarding the healing and coping with Historical Trauma. From an Indigenous Paradigm, we sought to listen and record stories during a focus group circle gathering. Fortunately one of my research partners is Native, and my other partner and I consider ourselves advocates. Coming from a humble and connected viewpoint, the focus group circle was a remarkable experience for us as researchers to really feel included in community. We invit...

If you look at this picture below it gives a good indication of the language present in our classroom--and what is communicated to our students daily. This is a corner of the classroom that holds most of our math routines and daily written objectives. Moreover it became a prompt for me to think reflectively about the power of language and how to access it. This is a snapshot our ESL teacher took during a recent math lesson. We have been teaching cooperatively during these afternoon lessons, and when she showed me this picture after the day, I could have an outside perspective about how the lesson was going. From my angle I could see that most of our kindergarteners were engaged in this fairly challenging lesson about using drawings to represent number sentences. However from this picture I realized my bilingual friend sitting to the right of me (left in picture), was easily tuned out to the conversational lesson. Later I held up the board for all to see, but for a coup...