Across from the room where I have a study hall, there is a darkened classroom. I would sometimes see students enter or leave, and one day, I wanted to know more. I struck up a conversation with Joseph Di Zillo, the teacher in charge of that classroom, and discovered that he teaches English to students with IEPs. I had never before thought of English as a component of special education. As I quickly realized, I had a lot to learn about how teaching English might take on different dimensions in a classroom meant for people with needs different from mine.
English classes in the Special Education Department are about half the size of their general education counterparts—usually around 13 students, as opposed to 24 or even 30. Di Zillo explains that, in these smaller classes, it is easier to meet the needs of individual students; this is more difficult in a general education classroom.
Smaller classes also help special ed English teachers become closer to their students. “I feel like our classes are smaller, so we get to know kids, a lot of times, on a deeper level [than in general education],” said teacher Brandy Divito. “They’ll talk about their families, they’ll talk about their culture, what’s going on with their sports, so I feel like that’s really neat. Because, a lot of times, in a class full of 25-30 kids, you won’t get to know them on that level.”
Despite being smaller, special ed English classes are academically much like gen ed classes. Books like All-American Boys (Jason Reynolds), The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie), and Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) are taught in special ed English, just as in gen ed. Both types of English classes incorporate discussions of characters, motivations, and themes, as well as games like Kahoot.
However, though the two types of education may share content, special ed English is distinct in that it needs to adjust to challenges that general education does not often address. “Students in my classes often need help with reading comprehension,” Sara Derdiger of the Special Education Department said. “Sometimes, with writing skills, grammar, things like that. Other times, students just need a little bit more time to get work completed, and get work broken down in a different way than you might see in a gen ed setting.” Another concern is self-advocacy, a skill Derdiger tries to encourage in her students.
Because of these challenges, English teachers for the Special Education Department have to meet their students in a different place than general education teachers. DiVito described how some students in her classes have lower reading levels, or need help with vocabulary or comprehension. This means they need to take more time to get through a novel than a gen ed English class. “…it takes a lot of patience, and just kind of mak[ing] sure that you’re taking your time getting to know the needs of your students,” she said.
Derdiger concurs. “Different students have different needs, and so, when you have a new student that you’re working with, trying to figure out how best to help them can sometimes be a process. And I like trying to figure out how to help my students better in that way.”
Unfortunately, not everyone in the Niles North community is welcoming to students in the Special Ed department, and their English teachers notice it. “…sometimes kids have reported that they’ve faced some kind of, like, negative stereotypes or bullying because of their disabilities,” DiVito said. Derdiger also explained that the identities of students in the Special Education Department are confidential, in part to protect them from harm due to the stigma around their disabilities. (For this reason, I was not able to speak to any students from the Special Education Department about their experience with their English classes.)
Despite this, DiVito said, her students “also agree that the way people are perceived with disabilities has come a long way in [a] hundred years, right?…I think that now, people with disabilities are celebrated, and people are a lot more empathetic and can really realize that these people are full of potential, right? And even though they have a disability in one area, they’re full of abilities in many other areas.”
Special Education English classes can do a great deal to help their students thrive. DiVito and Di Zillo, for example, were both contacted by a former student who now works as a mechanic, and credited them with helping him to succeed. “…it meant so much to all of us” in the Special Education Department that he reached out, she said.
Di Zillo told me that, as an English teacher in Special Education, “I do like seeing the growth of the students. I like to see how they are starting freshman year to senior year, and knowing what their goals are, and where they’re gonna go from there.”
