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Social Emotional Learning and Toxic Stress

April 24, 2019

Question in mind: How can social emotional learning help students who have experienced toxic stress? Photo by schaaflicht on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA In trying to think about experiences I have had with students who had high levels of ‘toxic stress’ in their early childhoods, I was left with a big questions mark for, in reality, what tools do we have in our curriculum designs that allow for such data gathering? How are we to know which experiences our students have had which would truly fall in the category of toxic stress when a large part of the population does not know that there are different types of stress? So, instead of tackling this question at face value, I will start to examine the reasons that might bring about a lack of rapport in class that a professional dispositional to engage students, a definition of empathy employed by Warren (2014), should aim at ending with. The first point is time : getting to know students takes time from curriculum content and instr

Learning about Toxic Stress - a personal account

February 24, 2019

Photo by Suzer Jones on Foter.com / CC BY-NC During a period of almost a decade I had the opportunity to learn about toxic stress on a personal level. Not that it had me as a target, my stress levels have always remained at the tolerable threshold, and that has made me very appreciative for the wealth of opportunities I had been granted since inception. What I am about to describe took place while I worked voluntarily as a teacher of English to many groups of very low SES students from 10 to 18 years of age who were part of an NGO (non-governmental office) that catered to their various – and multiple – needs in tandem with their regular schooling (when that happened). The case in point is about a girl, let’s call her Luisa, about 11 years old but very much underdeveloped physically and cognitively for her age bracket. Luisa was one among five siblings who lived miserably in a slum located in the south zone of São Paulo, Brazil. She had no sanitation, nor regular electricit

On achieving a definition of Numeracy: hard word ahead

December 21, 2018

Photo by morebyless on Visualhunt.com / CC BY When I started delineating numeracy in my mind, a definition along the lines of numeracy is the attainment of a number sense wherein one can encode and decode information given through numbers came to mind. Upon learning that numeracy is but one component of a much larger concept, that of ML (mathematical literacy), I reformulated my working definition of numeracy, to state that numeracy would then be an element of ML, one more related to quantity than to number sense and the result of a structural design of teaching practice. On that occasion, I also made a mental note to highlight the idea of insight as necessary to the computational/algorithmic aspect for a full numerical command. But when I learned about the idea of math anxiety and how it shapes much of our collective numeracy development, I had to enlarge these two working definitions to encompass the affective domain involved in dealing with quantities for practical purpo

Have you ever thought about Numeracy? How does it differ from Literacy?

November 21, 2018

Photo on <a href="https://foter.com/re2/8ec163" >Foter.com The first time that I vividly remember reflecting on the importance of numeracy more recently was when I read an account of how some industry tycoons learned from a research conducted among the American Population whereby most considered ¼ as a bigger number than 1/3. Dismayed by the implications of this to the progress of the nation and the continued success of their business, they decided to invest heavily on ways to improve the numeracy of their future work force. And then I also remembered another piece of information about research carried out with disenfranchised boys that were considered illiterate in school and dropped out in large numbers as a result, but that could, nonetheless, perform serious math to carry out their work at the open market stalls where they worked. And then, upon viewing the “Branching Out” video, I could not stop wondering: what is it with numeracy that has to boi

A revised definition of literacy: always a work in progress?

October 22, 2018

By Eva Rozkosz under CC BY-SA 2.0 license In a previous post about literacy, I provided an analogy: becoming literate would be akin to generating life with all the different forms and variables that both entail. For a revised definition of literacy, I considered the importance of determining what type of literacy one is involved with so that desired results can be verified. This encompassed the idea that there are limits to what literacy can define and that experience with each of the cultural variants that literacy may be inherent to is largely determined by the deliberate practice that one engages in. B oth definitions still hold true to me when one considers the importance of defining the stages of development and consequently the kind of learning that one is apt to engage in. This is what I intend to expand on here. If one considers the term ‘active’ and derives from it the literal meaning that it conveys, that which is performed through physical exertion, then only

What do we mean by literacy?

September 24, 2018

Photo by Ewa Rozkosz on Foter.com / CC BY-SA Literacy is an umbrella term. But as broad as it may be, this very breadth seems to run counter to the needs for specificity and objectivity that being literate demands (Perry, 2012). An analogy may therefore serve us effectively in drawing depth from something that seems too broad (McDaniel & Donnelly, 1996). My stroke of insight came after I reread in Wolf (2007, p. 16) that “[the associative dimension] is part of the generative quality at the heart of reading.” What then could be more generative in terms of analogous concepts than the generation of life itself? If reading and writing are historically considered the core ideas for literacy (Elmborg, 2012) than pregnancy and delivery could equate to the apprenticeship stage and the final coming of age in whatever modality of literacy one might choose – or be forced - to invest. If bearing a baby is hard for some, as becoming literate may indeed be, for other

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