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The Educational Center Is A Public School Outside Of Philadelphia Essay

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Overbrook Educational Center is a public school outside of Philadelphia. The student body is predominantly made up of students of a minority background and almost one-third of the students are visually impaired. Although the entire school is not special education, many of the classrooms are considered special-ed. My field placement is within a mixed second and third grade classroom comprised of students who all have varying degrees of visual impairments. There are ten students and two of them read using braille and write through a braille typewriter. The others read and write without braille, but use certain specialized equipment such as magnifying monitors to make it easier to see the letters and words. The students are all behind where the majority of other students their age are, lagging behind students in non special-ed classrooms particularly in the subjects of reading and writing. They all know the letters of the alphabet and how to write those, but are mostly unable to form the letters into words and sentences. My participation is primarily working on the students reading and writing skills and I’ve found that the purpose of education in the classroom is predominantly focused on “catching up” these special education students. McDermott and Varenne (1995) wrote about the concept of culture as disability and defined three different approaches to addressing this topic: the deprivation approach, the difference approach and the culture as disability approach. The

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