I am currently teaching a summer ELL program. This is my first time teaching ELL, and so far it's been very enjoyable. I have 14 lovely 15-17 year old Japanese students in my class. The interesting thing is that I have two students who obviously have some kind of learning issues. One, I suspect is overall very low. Academically, he is quite low, and he also has some interesting mannerisms that make me wonder. My other students is probably on the Autism Spectrum. When I asked their Japanese chaperones (the students' teachers) if any students in my class had any particular learning needs, they told me no. When I asked specifically about these two students, they denied that they had any particular learning needs. I found this quite baffling! After the second day of class, I asked our program director (who lived in Japan for many years as a teacher), what was the Japanese approach to students with disabilities. She told me that they completely ignore the fact that any student is different than the rest. In Japanese culture, you do not want to be different than the next, so any learning disability, or even physical disability is not talked about-ever!
This experience has provided a little light on to a few experiences I have had in the past with immigrant families, who have not wanted to send their children through the processes of taking an Ed Psych assessment, although their children clearly needed it. I am learning that the reality is that our view of special education, disabilities and learning challenges is cultural. As a teacher, I will need to learn to be culturally sensitive to my families, while at the same time, advocating fully for my students.
I had a student from Albania in my ESL class. As we worked with him, it became very clear that he was intellectually disabled. Because he was ESL, we were able to shelter him for a couple years, but eventually I asked the family if we could have him do some of the more functional coursework (he was in 11th grade at the time). Their response was to pull him out of school. As soon as they learned that he was cognitively impaired (and he truly was), they decided that school was of no value for him. They took him over to a local factory and he began working on the line. I always felt bad about that, but I don't know if it would have been right to not tell the parents either.
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