Abstract:

Zelda Rood is an aspiring Inclusive education teacher. She is currently in her second year at Western and a senator for the Woodring College of Education. She has had experience being homeschooled and public schools seeing first hand how schools deal with students with disabilities.

Transcript:

MAGGIE: Hi, welcome back to Teaching Perspective. I’m here with Zelda Rood. Would you like to introduce yourself? 

ZELDA: 
Hi, my name is Zelda. I’m here a Woodring student. This is my second year in the program. I absolutely love it 
I’ve been special ed K-12. I just changed my major this week, which was crazy. I was previously in early childhood SPED, but decided to change it because it l lines with more of the jobs I want for the future. 
I chose my major because I want to help young children, zero to three or I want to help special needs adults from 18 to 22. 

MAGGIE: That is awesome. Okay, let’s jump right into the question. 
How are educators supposed to create and foster an inclusive and accessible classroom when we have our own implicit biases? 

ZELDA: Ooh. Okay, so when we think about bias, I believe that bias comes from personal experiences, from upbringing as people. 
And this includes people with a disability, especially. So when it comes to designing the classroom specifically, a teacher might look at their own classroom and think, oh, what did I have for my own childhood? And possibly put that into their classroom? 
But reality, it’s a little bit of exclusion because it’s not thinking about everyone in the picture. It’s mainly thinking about from lived past experiences, and that’s where bias can come in that is unconscious. So personally, I would consider universal design within classrooms that promote inclusivity within the classroom, and can also keep a little bit of what they liked in their classroom as well, but it can also promote inclusivity. 
Like an example might be I absolutely loved having this chair in the classroom. Well, what if the chair is too tall or what if the chair doesn’t allow for people to easily go onto the chair? It might be something to consider so.

MAGGIE:Yeah, awesome. How has inequality affected you and or your work inside and outside of the classroom? 

ZELDA: Oh, goodness. So inequality has affected me through school. So a little bit of a backstory, I was failing middle school about 10 years ago, and I had to be pulled out to be  homeschooled. And I had to be pulled out because of my special needs and like, I had depression back then. I see that a lot of inequalities come through people with disabilities, because the doors always say no to them on a lot of things. So I see inequality when it comes to people disabilities or people have got going on, something in their lives currently. Because I’ve experienced it myself, coming to like inequality when, you know, within the system, so. 


MAGGIE: Yeah, where are some places where the education system is getting better and worse with discrimination and prejudice, and do you have any suggestions on how to improve? 

ZELDA:I absolutely love this question, Maggie. So personally, I feel like progressive states, like Washington, Oregon, education is constantly evolving and changing to help the people, better versus more traditional states like Alabama. This is this can go on a wide range of topics. 
For example, how education is formed, how education is always constantly renewed, some progressive states always believe that education should be changing and education should be new, education should be you know catered to students’ needs. Other states believe no, we want to keep it traditional because this is how everyone was raised and everyone has gone here. We’re not following what the world wants. 
We just want to do what has always been done. So I feel like Washington, California, have always been a little bit more progressive versus like southern states. Because I’ve experienced both sides. like, I lived in Texas and then I’ve lived in Washington and I’ve seen a difference, like physics like I’ve literally seen it in the education that they teach. Like, for example, in Texas education, for example, corporal punishment used to be used and got banned a lot moreish I recently than they did in Washington, for example. 
So they were like, no, we’re just gonna keep the tradition and Washington’s like, nope, we’re not keeping that at all. So that’s an example, so. 

MAGGIE: Do you have any, like suggestions on how to improve, like those certain states or like areas that want to stay more traditional? 


ZELDA: Absolutely. So, personally, I’d want teachers in all of the district to have mandatory culture trainings on how to be professional, how to be aware of bias, and how bias hurts others. personally, when I worked at a daycare, we did this every single year and I learned something new out of it every single time. 
And because of these trainings, it teaches people, oh, well, maybe that my thinking like can change and there’s other people that aren’t like me. So therefore, I can create an environment that fosters to everyone versus keeping to a rudimentary one way of thinking. It’s the closed mindset versus open mindset  thinking so. 

MAGGIE: Nice. Have you or a peer ever been discriminated against in the classroom? What did you do anything,wait,  what did you do about it if anything? 


ZELDA: Oh, so, yes, I have been discriminated in the classroom, uh, not by the teachers, but by the students. I got bullied a little bit, like in middle school and stuff like that, and my peers who are also in special ed to, because their autism was more noticeable than mine. And it was it was sad to see because I saw it more prevalently with the boys in my special needs class.
They’d always be excluded. They’d always get teased. And not  a lot of people knew I was autistic. So before, you know, like I get teased like, you know, here and there, like, oh, there’s all that. But like, the boys, oh my goodness, like, they’d be excluded, like, all around the school, taught it was not good. So, I’ve been discriminated in a way, like academically, so in a way,  I was failing so bad in middle school. 
I had to be put in like homeschool, education, because I wouldn’t like pass high school. It was really bad. But because of that, I got the education that I needed and then I went to community college, and now I’m here. So the teachers never set it up where I would like fail or anything like that. 
They always always tried their best to try to make me succeed, but it just didn’t work because of the needs I had, the scenarios going on and at the time, and I couldn’t I couldn’t. So, yeah. It’s different it’s different for each one. 

MAGGIE: Thanks for sharing. Yeah. As a future educator, how do you plan/insure/prevent discrimination in your classroom? 

ZELDA: Okay, so this one is a little long. So discrimination, for me, I feel like it started at a young age. You don’t just learn discrimination when you’re an adult, you learn it from lived experience. It’s passed down from generation to generation of how to treat people and sort of that stuff. 
So discrimination is a taught thing that is taught at a very young age, even birth even. Well, I would say very, very young. Discrimination is taught, like, oh, don’t go up to that or don’t go to this kind of person. 
So I personally would combat this in the classroom by, combating discrimination, by providing inclusive sports within the school district, and I’ll encourage students to go to this. This is also called I believe it’s a special kind of sport where it’s special needs students and just students within the district and it’s all like co-ed. Like everyone’s just together. It’s called unified sports. That’s what it’s called. Now inclusion to me, it’s a complex issue because it’s all internalized. 
And how do we take that internalization and we have to change it in a way. So we can practice on this. It’s kind of like a muscle in a way. 
So if we take this internalization out of people’s heads of thinking of one way and one way is the highway, we can turn that into an external response of how people talk with one another. So, as teachers, we can support this to the students. So some ideas that I had was integrated materials that improve inclusion and integrated curriculum that promote inclusion, and I believe by incorporating inclusion within the curriculum, like the hidden curriculum that’s woven in, it can create inclusion opportunities. Because to me, if you were to just force inclusion onto a group of people, it’s not natural. 
So you’re like, hey, you need to do this. Well, it’s like, well, why? And that’s where the the integrated learning comes into play. 
Like you need to naturally form it within people. So this can be done within materials, books, art like lectures, anything like that. But to me, I feel like inclusion should be naturally woven in versus just like forced in a way, because I’ve seen this so many times at schools, like where it’s like, oh, we have a no bullying policy at school. 
Don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this. Well, people are gonna still bully anyways, even if there’s a no bullying policy. So, how do it combat, like, for example, bullying, which is like a root of like exclusion, for example, you got to integrate why it’s not okay to bully, and how can you be a friend? 
Like practicing ways how to promote exclusion versus just saying, no, you can’t do this, this is part of our policy. So, that’s what I feel like, and then that way marginalized groups of people can coerce with each other. And then the marginalized groups won’t be shine in the dark, like people like there’s tons of marginalized groups that are like within the school district, especially as kids too, because it’s it’s everywhere in society. And I believe that starts early as preschool, I believe it starts as early as elementary. Yeah, complex. 
It’s a complex thing, that’s for sure. So my little two cents. 

MAGGIE: And last question.
How have you been approaching critical pedagogy and how do you recommend others to integrate critical pedagogy in their classroom/education? 

ZELDA: Ooo, okay, so this was the hardest question for me. So I wrote a little thing up here, about my personal pedagogy at the top. 
So my personal pedagogy for me is that I want people to be seen. And this can be done in the classroom. This can be done in activities, this could be done at the house. I actually read a really good quote this week and it shows and it said being seen is so close to love that it is indisguisable and is so close to love that an average person cannot decipher the two. Because when you really think about it when someone’s being seen and heard within school, within their emotions, within anything in their lives, they feel that love. And to an average person, those are two they’re so similar that they’re almost the same. 
So in a way, like for most people, they’re like, oh, I want to give love to students and I want that’s that’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love that. 
But I feel like for me being seen and heard comes from that root. And that’s where like advocacy comes in. That’s where student voices come in. It’s that’s where my personal pedagogy comes in. Now, in the classroom, I believe that personal pedagogy comes from research that works in the classroom. Now, to me, I feel like teachers always need to be active researchers once you get out of college because you’re a learner for the rest of your life. 
So to me, I feel like constant research about child development, classroom management, behavior expectations, teachers should always be researching about this, even when they get out of college because the world’s going to be changing 20 years when they got at college. And the world is going to be changing. And that’s where a little bit of bias comes in with teachers, because when I don’t know what it’s like to be in the field yet. 
But, you know, if you get out of college, you graduate and you’re like, I know everything. You go out to the world and then the whole group of kids is different than the era than you are in, then you’re not gonna know how to teach the kids. Like you went to school and everything, how to teach a classroom, but in a way, your own bias is like oh no, I know how to teach these kids. 
This is what I was taught in school. But you always need to be researching to the current generation of how to teach and how to like create the best environment for these kids. Now, I also believe that pedagogy comes from lived experience from the individual, from their education journey, how they learn as a learner themselves. And this can include, like their own personal journey within school, their own personal journey within college, their own personal journey within like clubs, homework. 
It’s a varied thing. And I also believe that pedagogy comes from the teacher’s understanding. What it’s like to be a different kind of learner, such as someone with special needs or an intellectual disability from their experiences, from people that do not think of the same way as themselves. So if I were to really hone in on this, I would say that pedagogy comes from lived experiences, pedagogy comes from constant research, how to like cater to kids that are not of your era and I also believe that pedagogy comes from understanding a different perspective in a way, so. 

MAGGIE: Yeah, I totally agree. 

ZELDA: Yeah, 

MAGGIE: Okay, awesome. Do you have any more questions or any questions for me? 


ZELDA: Um no, I wrote a little bit in the intro over here, but I think I’m good. 

MAGGIE: Awesome. Well, thank you for joining me today. 


ZELDA: You’re welcome.