Diverse Learners Top Hat Organizer

Article One: Neurodiversity: The Future of Special
Education?
● Discusses how Special Education needs to change
and how it has been weighed down as something
negative.
● Should be seen as a more progressive approach.
● Neurodiversity is another way to look at special
education students because they’re
neurologically different.
● Neurodiversity differs from special education in
multiple ways.
● Neurodiversity focuses more on social and
ecological dimensions.
● Goal of the teacher is to create more
opportunities for those with neurodiversity to
thrive.
● The teacher instructing those with neurodiversity
need to focus more on the strengths versus the
deficits.
Article Two: Navigating cultures and identities to learn
literacies for life: Rethinking adolescent literacy teaching
in a post-core world
 Development of one’s literacy continues after
school.
 In order to participate in global society, literacy
must continue.
 Post-core is in relation to learning skills that will
be used during their lifetime.
 Not everything should be core based.
 The CCSS were meant to be a set of goals that
enhanced student learning.
 The focus of learning literacy is more than just to
pass exams. It’s also meant to help students
manage their lives.
 Different cultures engage differently when it
comes to learning. All of them will not interact
the same way as the other.

Similarities:
● Both of the articles highlight that learning also occurs after graduating from school and never truly ends.
● Prioritize looking past the exams and what students will be doing with the information afterwards.
● Each article defines a struggle that the individuals are trying to overcome or can’t due to limitations that are in
their way.
● The articles discuss groups that could be discriminated against such as those with disabilities or cultural
barriers.

My Thoughts:
I resonated with the first article because my creative project is lightly talking about how a specific group of people can
hear what animals are saying while others can’t. Their neurology is different than that of the other person but those
who can’t hear the animals don’t understand and believe that they’re crazy. Those with special needs are looked at
sometimes with this thought that they’re weird and are going to struggle providing for themselves after high school.
With this though, those with neurological differences have numerous opportunities after school that are available for
them as long as they have been taught how to thrive outside of the classroom walls.
The second article, while lengthier than the first, had information that was beneficial to the topic of helping individuals
with cultural identities learn literacies that will help them in life. As well as understanding that while it’s important to
learn these literacies, how they can be implemented within their lives to better suite them. This put into perspective
that cultural groups are all unique and they all don’t abide by the same rules. As a future educator, it is important to
keep in mind that with cultures being different, so are our students.
Overall though, I thought both articles are useful in reminding us as humans to not just do things because they’re
required. But more focus on how this is going to apply to the students after they graduate and how, with the time you
have with them, can apply it to real world scenarios.