Help Teach

Help Teach: Episode 19 - Best of Both Worlds

Mihai Covaser: [00:00:00] Welcome, learners and learned alike, to Help Teach!

Mihai Covaser: [00:00:09] Hello and welcome to our community audio project. I am your host, editor, producer, and project co-lead: Mihai Covaser. I am also a youth living with a physical disability. My most formative experiences living with a disability have come in the Canadian public education system. Many students like me, with physical, emotional, or mental challenges, go through their years of schooling lacking the supports and accommodations they need to partake of the same opportunities offered to their peers. The vision of this project is to provide educators in Canadian classrooms, students with disabilities, and members of the general public, with the tools and knowledge that they need to make our institutions more accessible and inclusive for all. Join me and a diverse cast of guests as we explore perspectives on disabilities and education in this podcast series. One last message for you teachers tuning in: Listen in each episode for our key takeaway that you can implement in your classroom today to help us further this vision.

Mihai Covaser: [00:01:10] Welcome back everyone, loyal listeners, after an unexpected break, to Help Teach. Thank you so much for your patience, it’s been a tough couple of months here in the Okanagan. We’ve had some emergencies in the area and the start of school and all, so it’s been a little bit tough to keep on track but here we are back again. And back with a good friend of mine who I’m very excited to invite to the show. Today I’m gonna have the opportunity to speak a little bit about the intersection between public and alternative education, and what teachers can do to push their students to their best potential with a bit of a different model perhaps. So, before we get into all of that, I am very excited to welcome to the show, Aaron Wang. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Wang: [00:02:05] Hi Mihai, thanks so much for having me on. I’m really looking forward to this.

Mihai Covaser: [00:02:09] So, for a bit of context, I think Aaron will maybe talk a little bit about this in his introduction, but I know Aaron from another project we do called the Canadian Philosophy Show. A little bit of a plug there. I will put that, sort of, unorthodox link in our show notes here but we run that project together. Aaron is doing a great job with that, no stranger to the mic, and I’m really happy to have you on. So, as I begin with all my guests, why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself?

Aaron Wang: [00:02:37] Sure, so, I recently turned twenty-six years old. I graduated last year from Vancouver Island University with a double minor in Mathematics and Computer Science. My current profession is working as an educational assistant. So, in my job, mainly what I do is support a diverse range of students. Mainly with higher level math, maybe a little bit of physics as well. So, yea, and I’m based out of Nanaimo, BC.

Mihai Covaser: [00:03:09] Aaron, I know you and I were talking about this before our recording here, but you’ve had a bit of a unique experience yourself with education. Some roundabouts and different ways of getting where you are. So, why don’t you tell us a bit about that? What has, sort of, your personal education journey looked like to get you where you are?

Aaron Wang: [00:03:30] Yeah, so, I was actually homeschooled for eleven years. I was homeschooled from grade one to grade eleven. It wasn’t necessarily the plan that my parents were planning on doing. It was just kind of the reaction to-–I was attending a private school in the City of Calgary and that educational experience just wasn’t working very well. My parents noticed that I struggled a lot with transitioning between different activities. It didn’t seem that I had a good fit with my teachers that were a lot of phone calls and experiences like that. And, so, that basically led to me being homeschooled for eleven years, and then I spent one year taking grade twelve courses. Fortunately for me, I come from a pretty privileged background. My dad is an engineer, and so he was able to help me with a lot of math on the personal level. And my mom’s family has a history of teaching in her family, so she was able to help me with the structuring of my education. She worked very very hard, reading lots of books, and yeah I’m very proud of my parents and all of the work and investment in my education and personalizing my education.

Mihai Covaser: [00:04:48] No, absolutely, that’s a lot of effort and we’ll get into that a little bit later today in the discussion—what that means and, you know, we know that’s not always a feasible option for many parents for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is affordability, both in terms of the system and in terms of being able to take time away from working to be able to set something like that up. Um, but, anyway I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here. So, all that you, you went through that eleven years of homeschooling and then you did your grade twelve. What happened after that to sort of get you into special education? Because I know you were saying that’s not necessarily where you expected to end up.

Aaron Wang: [00:05:30] Yeah, it was more or less an accident. So, as most people who are very good in math and science, they all tell us to go into Engineering—to give that a try. Basically, it doesn’t work out for fifty percent of us but it was a good experience. I made it longer than, I guess the average so to speak. There’s a big cut off after first year, so I made it into second year Engineering but I was just not very happy with the program that I was taking. Engineering just didn’t seem to be precisely what I thought it was going to be and I wasn’t prepared for that. So, yea, and then while I was in Edmonton at that time, I had two jobs working as a Children’s Supervisor for summer camps for low-income families with an organization called Kids On Track. So, they were an absolutely amazing organization. It’s hard to explain how much I learned from them and I credit them with all of my success in working in education. Yeah, so just a really amazing organization to work with and to be inspired by. And then the next summer I worked for an organization based out of the University of Alberta, called DiscoverE, which helps encourage kids to go into STEM careers. So that is where I started, was kind of being a summer camp instructor, trying to inspire kids to have fun and then to have fun learning math and science.

Mihai Covaser: [00:07:08] For sure.

Aaron Wang: [00:07:08] That, kind of, experience naturally transitioned into me applying for educational assistant roles in special education.

Mihai Covaser: [00:07:15] I see. I wanna ask you here, in all of that experience for you, you mentioned to me a couple of take-aways of yours that you think really highlight effective education, or underpin effective education especially at a young age like that. And I thought they were really powerful aspects that you shared. So, why don’t you tell us a bit about that?

Aaron Wang: [00:07:38] Yeah, so, this mainly comes from my observations just dealing with like conflict management as a summer camp instructor, and as an educational assistant, and a lot of what I’ve noticed is just for kids to be successful, successfully learning, and also to be successfully communicating, which I think is a really important part of learning, they have to feel safe and they have to feel comfortable. They have to be willing to just know it’s okay to be themselves and then to explore things and ask questions and ask for help. And I know that sounds, like, really basic, but it’s actually really hard. If you think about your own experience, everyone can understand that asking for help, especially if it’s something that other people don’t normally have to ask for help for, can be really hard. And in special education, a lot of the time we just kind of have to step back and just say, like, it’s okay. It’s okay to ask for help, it’s okay to need something different than what you might think an ordinary person might need. Everyone is a unique person and having those adaptations so that different, diverse peoples can succeed in school and educational settings is, I would say, very important. And one of the reasons I’m so passionate about that is just because of my background and I know that I never probably would’ve succeeded and gone to university had it not been for the investment of my parents.

Mihai Covaser: [00:09:18] Right, right. And there’s another thing you said which I’ll just touch on lightly before we move into the second part of our discussion here but, you mentioned about teaching students. As you said there’s no shame not just in asking for help but also in being high achievers or sitting outside the norm academically, especially when it comes to high achievement—which I’m really interested in asking you about. Just before we get to that though, I want to remind our listeners that you’re listening to Help Teach. Don’t go anywhere, we’re gonna be right back.

Mihai Covaser: [00:09:59] Welcome back to Help Teach, where today I have the pleasure to be talking to Aaron Wang, a colleague of mine and educational assistant. And we just touched on this subject of your two takeaways from, for I should say, effective education. The first of helping students to feel safe and comfortable, and the second about encouraging them to aim high and to sit comfortably in their niche in education, even if that sits outside the norm. If you want to elaborate on that, please go ahead. I also want to tie that to short-comings that you may have discovered in your research or/and personal experience even, regarding public education. I think they’re sort of meshed together, so I wanted to let you touch on that.

Aaron Wang: [00:10:47] Yeah, so my specific educational context—and I want to be careful here about not over-generalization because I think that’s just a real issue in education. It’s easy for people to just be like “Oh, this person did this and they were successful, so we should also do this”. And really, what I do is very specific and I would not recommend you generalize everything I’m saying, especially because I have a background in math. Generalizing is something that we do as a matter of proof in math, so that’s not really something we can really do in education. It’s a lot of trial and error. So, with that disclaimer in mind, one of the main things that I see is a lack of one-on-one attention with students. Specifically, the students that I work for, they don’t seem to succeed well in a classroom setting which is usually why they choose an online school. But for students specifically, a lot of the students that I work with, especially the ones that are new to online school, they are used to essentially being the failure in class. The one who just never got math, or never understood science, or never understood physics, and so a lot of my initial problems is just to be saying “okay, you know, just because you didn’t previously succeed at a high level doesn’t mean that you will forever be limited in your educational journey.

Mihai Covaser: [00:12:26] Right.

Aaron Wang: [00:12:27] So, as long as we can correct those roadblocks and find a process that works, there’s no reason why your potential can’t be as high as anyone else. There’s no such thing as a permanent set back.

Mihai Covaser: [00:12:38] Yeah.

Aaron Wang: [00:12:39] On my best days, that’s what I get to share with the students.

Mihai Covaser: [00:12:42] Right, of course. And, you know, you made a strong point speaking of not generalizing and maybe not taking things out of context. You made a quite strong and clear point of telling me that, you know, public school is an essential institution which I think we’re all in agreement with. I mean, regardless of what we talk about here on this show—about restructuring, about remodels that may work differently, especially just personal teaching models—the institution itself and the benefits that students get in the classroom are invaluable, right? I mean, and for students like me, I know in my experience I could not have survived in a homeschool or in a private setting like that because I just need the social aspect of it. I need to be with peers, to learn from peers, from teachers, that’s just how I learn, right? So, I do want to take that opportunity to remind listeners that it’s easy to get into that mindset of “oh, here’s all the problems and they’re so glaring and the system is broken” and right, it does a lot for us, too.

Aaron Wang: [00:13:49] Yeah I think that’s very important to remember, Mihai. I have nothing but respect for the public education system. I know that there are a lot of people who only see their own experience of negative results, but I think there are so many people who go through school and have a positive result, especially in highschool and middle school. And they have those few teachers who make those critical life investments. And as a society, those are the types of things that I think are really invaluable.

Mihai Covaser: [00:14:22] Yeah.

Aaron Wang: [00:14:23] Like, you can’t put a price on teaching someone who really wants to do good for society—common good for society—basic skills of reading, writing, and math are really enabling them to just better serve everyone in their community.

Mihai Covaser: [00:14:38] Right. That all is true, I also of course recognise that it wasn;t without challenges that I went through that system. So, I want to ask you now, hearing what you had to say about your experience in a sort of alternative system, of course your experience with the public system as well—both through your professional development and your grade twelve year—I want to ask you about bridging this gap. So, if you have some sort of key elements of your educational experience and the alternative programming that you’ve participated in, what key elements could we bring into the classroom to improve adaptability and accessibility? Where do you see the strong points of the work that you do and how we can sort of patch some holes, as it were, in the public system for students?

Aaron Wang: [00:15:30] Yeah, so there’s a recent book that just came out by Ana Lorena Fabrega. She is a really excellent philosopher of education, or someone who is discussing the role of education in society. I’m really picking that apart. She starts out her book The Learning Game, asking “well why do students need to learn six to eight hours a day, five days a week, for twelve years of their life? Why does learning need to be set up specifically in that context? Is it because that is the most effective way to set them up for success in life?” And she challenges that. She says that, you know, there’s a lot of things that we do in education because that’s how they’ve always been done in our countries for a hundred years or so. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that will be the best for the changing world we live in. And so yeah, The Learning Game is a recent book that I think brings that point home. And another point she makes in it is essentially that for her, she succeeded in many schools because she understood the game of school. And the game of school was to listen to your teachers, do your homework, to sit in class quietly. And she also learned that when she did her real learning, it was often when she was exploring her interests outside of the classroom but that had real pay-offs in the classroom. This is something that I think that highschool and university students could really learn a lot from, is that students who are the highest achieving students are often those not who are doing anything different inside the classroom, in terms of paying attention, but they are the students that excel outside of the classroom. In terms of doing exemplary home work, exemplary research, exemplary writing, and critical thinking. And once you have those skills and continue investing in them, the classroom just becomes even more useful to you.

Mihai Covaser: [00:17:35] Well, that is a good point and we’ll touch back on this in a minute, as far as resources for teachers, but this will tie back into this discussion about what teachers can do to help push students in that regard. Just before we get to that, I think that comments about doing work outside the classroom and thinking outside the box, let’s say, the box being the classroom quite literally. There’s a quote, so, in a work that you contributed to titled “Growing an Accessible and Inclusive Systems Design Course with PlantUML”, you and your cowriter’s focus on a broader end goal for accessibility, as well as really listening carefully to identify concerns. And I think that the example that was brought up was—so this particular paper is about assisting students that are vision impaired with a certain digital learning platform—but as opposed to focusing on the problem of being blind, or being vision impaired, the student which was the focal point of this paper really, sort of, took an approach of how can we make this more accessible to everyone? And therefore, more accessible for me. So I’m wondering if you want to touch a little bit about that and that, sort of, outside the box thinking aspect that I think you’re quite fond of.

Aaron Wang: [00:18:59] So before I get a little bit deeper into that, I do want to put out a big thank you to my professor, Sarah Carruthers, who was the instructor for the course—the course was named systems analysis and we talk about how to analyze software systems and the design processes that accompany that. There are a lot of systems diagrams that we create in that course, and obviously diagrams are not the most accessible thing for the visually impaired students; you could argue there’s nothing more harder to deal with for visually impaired students than a very complex diagram course. So my professor talked with my visually impaired classmate and she was able to figure out that for her, in her context, she had already had a lot of success doing coding for text-based tools. So, this is someone who can’t see, who is using a screen reader to use text-based programming tools to design websites and create applications, which I think is absolutely fantastic. And is something that I never would’ve even thought it was possible had I not had the privilege of being her classmate. So, when we were doing that, she found this tool called PlantUML which lets you create a text description in a programming language—a high level programming language kind of like Python—that creates that text description of the diagram. So our team would work on a text description of the diagram, and then when we needed to show it to our classmates we would just use the program to convert that to the diagram we needed. And so, what was very unexpected was that the professor in this course didn’t force anyone to adopt this tool, but she did require everyone to create a text description of whatever diagram they were working on, so that their work be accessible for the visually impaired student so that she could engage with the class like everyone else. So, PlantUML, rather than writing a text description of the diagram, you could just give the code for it and use that and access that. So that was one reason for user adoption from our classmates, but another was it was actually far superior as a tool for iterative development of diagrams. Which was something none of us really expected to find out, that there was actually a more effective way of doing software diagrams than drag and drop interfaces, which were the common practice. And we would have never known that had we not explored more accessible outcomes and I think the real message of hope from our paper was that sometimes by exploring inclusive and accessible outcomes, what we find is actually something that works better for everyone involved. Which I think is amazing.

Mihai Covaser: [00:22:20] Yeah, it’s inspiring, truly, I mean that's what we hope, right? That’s the basis behind universal design, something we’ve talked a lot about on this show. Behind other concepts like that is, is not just for one person. And in a sense, again listening to identify concerns from specific people in order to make something—a process, a classroom-–more accessible to them is not the same as being stuck inside a certain parameter or being confined to one way of doing things; rather, we should as you say, look to apply that more broadly. And I think that’s really interesting, that your experience has taught you that that creative exploration outside of, sort of, the traditional systems can lead to such useful outcomes and progressive outcomes for everyone involved. So I think that’s a really good message to focus on. As we approach the end of our time here together, I just want to turn to something maybe a little more practical—not so conceptional—something that teachers can maybe think to read up on and see how they can encourage that kind of critical thinking and that achieving of potential and pushing one's boundaries in their students. Which is the work of Lev Vygotsky, a name that is quite familiar I think to a lot of teachers and a lot of people who go through psychology, for his theories around child development, especially this zone of proximal development, as it's called. So, in a minute or less, maybe give us the run-down and I'll put out some resources in the episode description for teachers as well.

Aaron Wang: [00:24:00] Yeah, so this is a theoretical learning idea that I encountered while I was in university, actually in my computer science and ethics course. And so how it works is the zone of proximal development sits between a students current capacity—so the way the diagram usually works is you have a circle that represents the students capacity—then you have a much larger circle which represents the teachers capacity, and then in between them you have another circle and that is the zone of growth—the zone of proximal development. And that rests in between the student and the teacher, and then the question because, well, how do you help facilitate the learner to grow their zone of competence essentially? And so that’s where Lev Vygotsky’s second concept of scaffolding comes in and so this is creating structures to improve the students' learning above what it would be naturally.

Mihai Covaser: [00:25:03] Right.

Aaron Wang: [00:25:04] And these are, these can be many things, it’s a pretty generalizable concept. So many different ways of making education innovating and I find that very helpful when thinking about the specific needs of students. How can I create scaffolding that helps structure their learning, knowing where they are and where they need to go?

Mihai Covaser: [00:25:22] Right. Yeah, thank you for that. That’s a really clear way to put it. And so that’s where we will end with this episode—with our key takeaway for teachers to look into this, like I said I’ll provide a few resources, some interesting readings in the episode description—and consider the potential even if you take nothing else from this episode I would say just having that in mind of this incredible potential for growth that we have as students and as classroom teams.To push ourselves to really the outer bounds of our potential just by looking at things from a different perspective or pushing each other to really excel and succeed. Which I think is essential, and I mean that’s how I operate and I think a lot of people will take some really great information from that. I want to thank you very much, Aaron, for coming on the show today. Thank you for coming to chat with me. I’m sure I’ll see you very soon on our other project and maybe on this one again too. But yeah, thank you again—I think people will really be interested to hear what you have to say.

Aaron Wang: [00:26:26] Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Just before I go, I just want to make a quick couple shout-outs. The first one is a really wonderful community which I really hope you get connected with soon, Mihai, called Hope Braintrust. A really amazing community of people who want to create the best quality of education for the sake of the students and, of course, our other project Canadian Philosophy Show. Our vision statement we’re basically crafting goes that we want to encourage philosophical dialogue for the improvement of Canadian society. So, if that’s a vision you can get on board with and you’d like to help us with, then feel free to listen to our show and send us any feedback you have.

Mihai Covaser: [00:27:08] Alright, thank you very much Aaron. I hope to talk to you again soon.

Aaron Wang: [00:27:13] Sounds good, talk to you later Mihai.

Mihai Covaser: [00:27:15] You’ve just heard another episode of the community audio project, Help Teach. I’d love to give a huge thank you to my other co-leads on this project: Payton Given, Maggie Manning, Élise Doucet, and Alexis Holmgren, all youth leaders at the Rick Hansen Foundation, who I’d also like to thank for their continued support in this initiative and others. My name is Mihai Covaser. I am your host, editor, and producer for this podcast series. Thank you to Every Canadian Counts and their #RisingYouthInitiative for finding this project and allowing us to put out our vision for change into the community. You can now find all our transcripts, episode notes, and links to other resources on our base site helpteach.transistor.fm, or listen to us wherever you find your podcasts. If you have any questions about the show, or would like to get involved, now get in touch at helpteachpodcast@gmail.com. That’s helpteachpodcast@gmail.com. Tune in next time for more great conversations and key takeaways that you educators can implement in the classroom today, to make it a more accessible and inclusive place for all. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you next time.