"From Where I Sit" Video Series

Lana's Story — Faculty Response Video Transcript

Dr. John Berteaux:
The issue of "this, there, and that" which I see as invisible and go on behind your back that you have to be sensitive to, and I would never have thought of that, and I am not sure how good — even now that it's been brought to my attention — I wonder how good I would be in two weeks at not making the same mistakes over and over again, and "this, there and that" as, I'm sure one example, there are probably a host of other examples of things that are done that I do in the classroom that are just behind my back, you know, in the sense that I just don't see.

Dr. Carolina Serna:
I teach in the education department. So we're training future teachers, and this is something that we address. It's helping our students to develop those "habits of mind" that will then equip them to better address the needs of their special needs students and, so, I think that that's something that as a faculty we need to work on. I'm also thinking in terms of — for faculty development how much this can also help us to address other student populations that have special needs, and I'm thinking another major population that we're training our students to address the needs of English language learners in the State of California. So, again, that involves developing a whole set of "habits of the mind" that I think that's — I see that as very integral to this type of training of faculty development for us.

Dr. Don Gailey:
In the classroom we have literally two avenues of sensory input, it's sight and sound. What the student does with the sight and sound is all engaged in the nervous system in the brain, and we've seen deficits at every level here and these last two are the easiest, quite frankly, because there are these upstream deficits, just acquiring the data, the information from the lecture. So, when you can't hear or you can't see, then everything is slowed down and, when I've had a deaf student or a blind student in class, that's when I'm most sensitive too it's just the blockage and the ability in the uptake of the information, not the processing of it. So, I found these last two the easiest to identify. I think we all did because, again, it's just picking up the information, not progressing.

Dr. Jennifer Egan:
Use faculty as a resource. For example, if you know a student wants a textbook, you need to scan it, you need it in advance, and you can't get it from the publisher, call the faculty member because I know that there are at least four publishing houses that I can call and say, "Give it to me now", and they will do it, and they might do it for a faculty member and not for anyone else. And two, about faculty, if you're making a request on behalf of a student as opposed to a request that sounds like it's on the behalf of the administration, faculty will respond entirely differently or at least that's my experience.

Dr. Berteaux:
A number of different ways of resolving some of these problems, so for example, I now use a tablet in my, a computer, in my class that I actually write on, and I do all the electronic stuff. So I call it up on the — I have the books and the readings on the computer, and I show them on the screen, and I write my notes right on the screen and save all of that so students can see it later, but the issue is, and I've been told this, maybe it's not true, I'm the only one in my school that actually uses that tablet. So, that's really part of — there are many ways that we can resolve these problems that would take us away from notes and all of that, but it's getting people to do it.

Dr. Don Gailey:
I teach in the dance department here in the theater and dance department, and we're launching a program called Mixed Ability Dance to reach out to people of all abilities, and we had a blind student in our class this past winter, and it really turned my whole teaching style upside down in a way that I'm so grateful for. It really made me grow as a teacher because I realized almost everything in the way that I teach is visually, dancewise, and I had to learn how to describe what I'm doing verbally which was really, really difficult for a dancer and, so, I just — it struck me that sometimes I think faculty and myself included when a student comes in with a special need it feels like, "Oh, gosh, that's such a problem," but I was really grateful for the situation for how it made me stretch as a teacher, and I think that's really great for faculty to sort of push the skills, our skill level. So, it's not like we're not accommodating someone, we're growing as a teacher.