I was surprises by some of the social, cultural, and political activities that impacted the kindergartners' writing in just a short amount of time. In particular, Ashley (one of the pseudonyms) a five year old, experienced in my mind some common and helpful remediation and retention recommendation from the "Teacher Assistance Team," to Diane the kindergarten teacher. Ashley was able to receive one-on-one attention from parent volunteers and other teachers which seemed logical in terms of RTI. The goal of RTI as I understand is to pinpoint children who need some assistance at some level to get caught up, prevent labeling, or provide a challenge. I can see both sides of Diana's dilemma about removing Ashley or leaving her in the social environment. As a student who was pulled out of class for reading from k-4rd grade I like to think that my teachers had some plan to get me back on track. The writing trade-offs a teacher is faced with are difficult to decide, but do require immediate attention and action.
As a student who did experience first-hand some of the side-effects of removal or remediation, I am glad I was spotted to receive any one-on-one attention. The social environments in a classroom writing setting can be found in preschool settings or enrichment classes. In terms of Ashley, her social status and experiences with peers was lacking therefore removal would not have been a first choice of remediation. However, when considering the teacher's issues of not producing outcomes by the designated benchmarks can be the final straw in the decision making process. This highlights the social, political, and cultural dilemmas found in this classroom and many more.
Although, Ashley's removal was a detriment to her socially, she did begin to meet the required benchmarks. I am unclear as to when writing and learning to write are different components in kindergarten and 1st grade. When Diane raises the issues of Ashley not "inventing spelling or producing a text to suit her own purposes. Diane's educational coursework incorporated intentionality discourse that celebrates what children can do and value their intention to create social messages over their accurate mimicking of conventional forms (Wohlwend, 345)." In order to teach writing, letter recognition, and in particular their name mimicking the prescribed outcome is a good start. As some children obviously come to school not knowing their name or the alphabet, we as teachers jump right in and help those student tread water and race others who are already writing using the conventional forms. Should we praise the child who is using conventional forms or question their use of them? I think at 2, 3, or 4 you question and praise their use of inventing their own purposes. But, when it comes to young students learning to communication through pictures, words, or through their body language we should guide them to our conventional norms. Do we want children to communicate in an obscure way longer than normal because we are happy they are creating their own inventions? I can see with the children who are developmentally at a 3 or 4 years old to praise them with their inventions of writing, but they require intervention which I see as RTI. In terms of the constructivist psychological theories in particular Piaget, the schemas are the basic units like in math that construct one's understanding of their current and past knowledge combined. This process of combining occurs using either assimilation or accommodation to reach the coined term equilibration. Ashley is a student who I see needs more accommodation than assimilation. However one can argue she does not possess the basic units in order to build a schema so both assimilation and accommodation are useless. I am a person who looks at the world half full so Piaget's idea of building schemas is one learning theory to embrace, but I like to combine Ausubel's and Bandura's theory too.
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