Final Project Narative

 Susan Gaboriault

CURR 501

Summer 2024

 Final Project

         I work at Central Falls High School in a transition classroom. The transition program is for young adults ages 18-22, who have an I.E.P. and who want to work on employability, social and life skills. These young adults have mild to significant challenges and face many barriers to work and social engagement. Their families struggle with issues of immigration status, finance, food insecurities, homelessness, and language barriers. While we work to support our young people and their families, we focus on instilling self-advocacy, self-determination, and a sense of confidence. One way of directing them towards a more stable future is supporting them in securing gainful employment.

         Finding work can be challenging for most people. Our students also face additional barriers due to their disabilities. Our goal as a program is to make connections within our community to employers who could benefit from having our young adults as part of their team. Our young adults are given training in different types of skills such as preparing food for our class run cafe, they do prep work, cooking, shopping and meal planning. Skills range from knife skills, kitchen safety, budgeting, and cleaning. They also take orders and make deliveries, building social skills. Our program also does all the laundry for our sports teams, take request to do clerical work for teachers, make personalized merchandise, and take orders for jackets and shirts. A new business started last year is our class made, organic, dog and cat treats, as well as receiving a food truck as part of a CTE program. We make deliveries throughout our district.

         Outside of school, many of our students go out to work sites, often unpaid, to gain employment skills. We send staff to assess the needs of our youth and support them with the tools they might need to do their job. Some youth will always need a job coach to support them, while others gain independence quickly. All these experiences inside and outside of school build a skill set and confidence that make our youth better employees. The difficult part is getting employers to see that and to hire them. My final project was developed with this in mind.

         My project is to develop a class website to post resumes and to inform potential employers about our program and the support and training it provides. We can include a link/QR code in our introduction letters to new potential employers. I had previously worked on an elevator pitch in a Transition course I took last year, and we could fine tune it to fit individual employers. Adding our students' resumes to the website would allow these potential employers to "meet" our young adults and see what a variety of skills they have. They could then set up interviews to get further information. We might also use this site to gain access to tours of businesses with the potential to see if there are areas for employment for our workers. There are several things we could add to our site, such as interviews with current and past participants of our program. I look forward to collaborating with the staff and students to have a collective voice in developing this further.

         The reason I love to work in collaboration with others is because it is how I learn best, especially when it comes to technology. I agree with some of Prensky's opinions that those born before tech was popular and easily accessible, learn differently than those born into the tech age. I also have similarities to his description of the "digital immigrant" when he writes that when a digital immigrant learns “to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their "accent," that is, their foot in the past." (Prensky, 2001, p.2) That is me, one foot in the past. I like when students can teach me something new because it gives them an opportunity to hold power in space by being the "expert".

         I believe that every person has value, skills and purpose. Often students with disabilities are underestimated in their ability to teach us something new. I believe that we need to value individuality and diversity. Differently abled does not mean UN-abled. Young adults who face challenges need to build a level of perseverance. I was reminded of them when we watched to video of baby George in the TEDx Talks by Dr Michael Wesch. In the video his son kept trying to come down the steps and fell repeatedly, but continued because he believed he would eventually do it. It is that belief I want to instill in my students, that with enough practice and belief in themselves they can accomplish anything. Like Rita Pierson says, "Every child needs a champion!". We need to cheer them on and believe in them so that they learn to believe in themselves.

         We have discussed how the media has taught us how we see ourselves through this "hidden education" embedded in movies, news, social media, and in books. These socially constructed beliefs about who we are and our place in the world must be challenged and reimagined in a self-constructed belief system. Children are influenced from birth from the clothes they wear to the toys they play with. As they get older society and the media become their mirror and it is up to us to take a critical look at how to dismantle these influences that negatively impact our beliefs. Linda Christensen discusses this in chapter 7 of our text Rethinking Popular Culture and Media. Christensen discusses how she feels it is important to have students’ critique what they see in their favorite children's media to see the danger of embedded stereotypes. "First, I want students to critique portrayals of hierarchy and inequity in children's movies and cartoons. Then I want to enlist them to imagine a better world, characterized by relationships of respect and equality." (Christensen, 2014, p 176). A good article on this subject is Trapped in the Mouse House: How Disney has Portrayed Racism and Sexism in its Princess Films 

         Being critical of the media does not mean that we stop enjoying media, we need to find a way to hold both truths, a wise teacher recently told us. As I learn this for myself, I also need to find ways to teach this to my students and my children. We live in a world that revolves around technology and media and as a technocrat, according to Scott Noon, I am still working toward not only experimenting with tech tools but pushing to becoming a techno-traditionalist who is proficient at using tech in my classroom. By taking this class and trying new tech tools I am beginning to find tools that I can incorporate into some of our lessons, like Kahoot, Canva, and Google Sites. I used Google Sites to begin working on our classroom website and I am really excited to share this with my coworkers and students. I have confidence that this will benefit our program and project a positive image of our workforce. It is a great way to counter the negative bias toward my student population.

         My WHY for coming back to school to earn my degrees was to be able to support my children and the students I work with. My world was very closed off and only included the things that affect my everyday life. I was too busy looking to get through the day to look around at what was happening around me. I had a very narrow view of the world. My opinions were shaped by the few exposures I had with the media and the people I associated with. Coming to college opened a whole world to me. I was exposed to people who had vastly different lived experiences and a wealth of knowledge to share. I was exposed to readings that mainstream education does not provide. I learned about my identity, my privilege, my biases, and my lack of understanding. I learned that I could grow in ways I never imagined. I find college to be both a sanctuary and a torture chamber. It forces me to look at things that are hard to see and makes me ashamed while at the same time shows me a better way and gives me grace to turn my thoughts toward justice. Learning makes me challenge myself to be a better me, to imagine a better world. The best part is that it allows me to bring this self-discovery home to my family and into my classroom. It creates a pathway for me to support them in the ways that they need to navigate the world. I know I sound like it has all been a life changing event, well that is good, because it has!

         I thank my teachers for showing so much care and desire in their pursuit of creating a better world. I thank my coworkers for letting me try out new things in my classroom. I thank my students for allowing me to work beside them and teaching me about themselves. I thank my family for putting up with my absence so that I can come home and offer them a more understanding mom that can guide and support them as they grow into the wonderful human beings I know and love. I am most thankful for my mom that raised me to be independent and resourceful, who showed me that women are strong and capable. She makes me thankful to be me.