On Thursday, May 13th, I attended the 2010 LDANS Conference in Halifax. The keynote speaker was well known local author and enthusiastic-Mom-of-a-child-with-learning-disabilities, Sheree Fitch. Sheree’s message was very powerful and thought provoking. She spoke so passionately about LD and about our educational system’s successful and not-so-successful attempts to support our LD students.

Sheree says ‘there needs to be more joy brought back in to learning’: not just with the young students, but with our junior and senior high students too. She believes that part of our job as educators is to help our students achieve more joy in their learning and in their search to be literate.

Sheree enthusiastically advocated for the term “disabilities” to be thrown out, as these students should not, in fact, be seen as ‘un-able’ to do anything! Our LD students can learn and have loads of ability: however, they have learning differences. I am totally in agreement with this thought: one of the papers I wrote this past year for my ‘disability studies’ course, addressed this exact topic. I believe this shift in terminology really needs to change: it’s no wonder many of our students don’t want to be associated with this label, given its negative connotation!

Sheree voiced her enthusiasm that, with all of the marvelous and mind boggling technology that is available today (compared with 15 years ago when HER son went through school) these technologies MUST be used in our schools. She really stated her belief that our school curriculum and our school procedures cannot remain the same (as they’ve been in the past 20+ years) but must keep up with the changes in our world outside the classroom.

Another interesting thing that Sheree talked about was the very recent research information that has proven that the brains of boys really ARE quite different than the brains of girls. Dr. JoAnn Deak has studied this and has found that boys’ brains learn to read differently than girls brains: furthermore, schools are currently set up to teach to the needs of a girls brains’ learning styles! Here’s a link to Dr. Deak’s home page, with information about the brain research she has been doing: http://www.deakgroup.com/deak/index.html

So many of Sheree’s poems can be ‘interpreted’ through a social justice lens; in thinking about students with learning disabilities this is especially true. Consider the poem “If you could wear my sneakers” – watch this video of Sheree ‘reading’ this wonderful poem (along with two others). Enjoy!