Running head: REFLECTION

Reflection: My New Normal

Joycelynne (Liz) Lobert
KNES 240
Tara Chisholm
December 4, 2015

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Reflection: My New Normal

Before starting Adapted Physical Education, my experience working with people with
disabilities was limited. When I lived in Edmonton I spent ten months volunteering one
afternoon a week in the classroom of a friend. In that classroom I worked closely with a child
with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. I also
spent a short time as a substitute Education Assistant with the Medicine Hat Public School
District. During that time I spent one day in a Preschool Development Program classroom at
Riverside School helping with students both with and without disabilities and one day in a
Learning Assistance Program at Southview School working with students whose disabilities
included Autism, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I did get to know the
students I worked with as a volunteer, but not those I worked with as a substitute EA. I also
spent several months teaching a Sunday School class where one of my students was Autistic.
As a volunteer and an EA I worked under someone elses direction, doing only what I
was told to do. The Sunday School classes I taught were from a workbook. I found that my
Autistic Student, C.H., responded well to some parts of the lesson and not to others, so I began
adapting my lesson plans to his abilities. I even had the students do some research and each
student taught one of the classes. With a simple modification, C.H. was also able to teach a
class. He was very proud of himself and the other students were very supportive. This was my
first real introduction to the power of inclusion.

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Conclusion

One of the most important lessons I learned from Adapted Physical Education was that
creativity is necessary to create inclusive activities. As a teacher I will need to weigh the
demands of a task against the abilities of those who are supposed to accomplish the task and then
devise a plan to teach children of various abilities to accomplish the task. This is true both in the
classroom and in the gymnasium. Instead of building a lesson plan that will help most of my
students reach the projected goals, I will use the adaptation guidelines (Chisholm, 2015) to build
creative lesson plans that will enable all of my students to reach those goals. To facilitate
inclusion in the gym and even on the playground, I need to have the goals for my students clearly
defined and I need to be aware of the different abilities of my students before I begin to design a
plan that will be able to accomplish those goals.
Besides giving me the adaptation guidelines to help me create inclusive lesson plans,
Adapted Physical Education provided me with a set of tools in the form of visual instruction
strategies (Chisholm, 2015) to help me communicate activity expectations clearly to my students.
Instead of relying on verbal instructions to tell my students what I expect them to do, I will now
include demonstrations, verbal prompts, sequence supports, and, if necessary, visual schedules to
help students learn new activities. Lack of communication hurts relationships, and this includes
the teacher-student relationship. By building many paths for communication into my teaching
style I can create better communication with all of my students.
Having a disability does not mean being condemned to a lifetime of drudgery and
despair. Though this should be self-evident, for many people it is not. This may be why people
find people who participate in life in spite of having a disability inspiring. They see the

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positive view of life lived with a disability as triumph over adversity, and is triumph over
adversity not the storyline of every inspiring movie you have watched?
Through this class I have learned that people with disabilities do not see themselves as
particularly special; they are human. Just like every other human, people with disabilities want
to be acknowledged and treated as human. I learned that the biggest obstacle to inclusion for
people with disabilities is the fact that our industrialized world is built around a statistical norm
that doesnt include them as fully human. The industrial revolution introduced the concept of
efficiency, and efficiency introduced the idea of one size fits all (Shogun, 2003). When
addressing disability, the one size fits all solution does not work. Over and over again the
guest speakers in our class reminded us that no two individuals with the same disability
experience that disability in the same way. The educational world is slowly shedding the notion
of one size fits all classrooms, and modified programming is becoming more accepted.
Adapted Physical Education has helped me develop a new normal for myself both personally and
as a future teacher, an inclusive normal.

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References
Chisholm, T. (2015, Fall Semester). Class notes: KNES 240 Adapted physical
education. Medicine Hat College. Medicine Hat, AB
Mastro, J., Burton, A., Rosendahl, M., & Sherrill, C. (1996). Attitudes of elite athletes
with impairments toward one another: A hierarchy of preference. Adapted
Physical Activity Quarterly, 13, 197-210.
Shogun, D. (2003). The social construction of disability: The impact of statistics and
technology. In R. Steadward, G. Wheeler, & E. Watkinson (Eds.), Adapted
physical activity (pp. 65-73). Edmonton, Canada: University of Alberta
University Press.
Spencer-Cavaliere, N., & Watkinson, E. (2010). Inclusion understood from the
perspectives of children with disability. Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly,
27, 257-293.