Positionality
When writing my initial intervention plan I gave a brief rundown of my relation to the subject of my intervention plan and the way in which the matter was not being addressed in early education had an impact on me. I have something called ‘Dyscalculia’, which is a learning disability similar in nature to Dyslexia; it means that the individual cannot quite make sense of numbers or mathematics. It can mean numbers ‘move around’ in the person’s head or that they become interchangeable or entirely too confusing to comprehend; the best way to understand it is to imagine it as ‘dyslexia for numbers’.
As I am a white, cis and feminine-presenting woman, when I was at school I was given more privilege within the education system then some of my POC friends and classmates; whilst the teachers took the time to sit with me and offer patience the many young black boys in the classroom were considered ‘boysterous’ or ‘disobident’ when they would ask repeated questions about math or reading tasks. I can remember the teachers taking me aside and saying, ‘I wasn’t supposed to be’ in the remedial math lessons I was advised to take and I couldn’t help but think they were gesturing to a social class they were putting me into. I wasn’t supposed to not understand- that wasn’t correct of my ‘class’.
I remained in these classes for the rest of my school education, always feeling inferior to my friends and like a ‘stupid girl’ who just didn’t understand maths. Or rather, too stupid to comprehend the constructs of it. I wasn’t diagnosed with Dyscalculia (I will henceforth refer to Dyslexia and Dyscalculia as D/D for brevity’s sake) until I was twenty-two years old.
Looking back at the experience, so many small gestures could have made a world of difference to me, such as making due dates written in a unique font or having it brightly coloured and physically printed up onto the classroom wall. Even just having the numbers spaced out in a larger font on exam papers could have accommodated others like me and had more positive outcomes.
Research data for D/D
Which brings me to how educators today are taking the time to research and accept D/D learners into their classrooms. My Intervention plan is for something I’ve called a D/D board, which is a large, movable, and physical board that always presents hand-in Due dates, important dates, and a week countdown to said due date. The research currently suggests that D/D have similar approaches to making information more accessible, for example, having a large and bold font with coloured text rather than formal thin black lettering can help retain the numerical information and stop the digits ‘moving around’. A week-by-week countdown to a due date can restructure the information from a numerical framework to a physical mass reduction one- as time goes on the weeks are removed and the physical load gets smaller and smaller. Easier to retain and understand.
The D/D board also has an added benefit to it, it can help convey information to non-English speakers in a less confusing and universal language. The students can approach the board whenever needed and take in the colour-coded non-linguistic information without an understanding of formal English. During this unit, I received some good feedback about what else could be added to the board – religious ceremonies and holidays! Such as Eid, Lent or Lunar New Year, this has the potential to help students from religious backgrounds help frame the timeline of the unit around their religious beliefs or even help their cohort understand an absence or a period of time for them to be sensitive toward, for example, a period of fasting.
Intersectionality
A good counterargument for the board is that ‘calendars already exist,’ which is fair enough, but I find it has a little more to it than that. For example, the board physically exists and is a translation into a D/D friendly script; it isn’t designed in the same reference of legibility as a traditional Western Gregorian calendar. Its purpose isn’t organization or reference to events, it’s a cross-cultural, bilingual way to help students retain dates, or even to simply have a safe space to reference hand in information without navigating a English website or breaking a religious ceremony (like using electricity on sabboth by looking up date on their phone).
The Gregorian calendar, whilst widely used around the world, has specific religious connotations and cultural Western baggage that might make it more intimidating to some students. For example, it uses the Christian date of 2025, where the Islamic calendar (The Hijri) states the year as 1446 AH, the Hebrew calendar states AM 5785 and the Coptic Calender (Used in Egypt, Sudan, Libya and South America) states 1741 AM. Just doing that small research got me confused about what date it is, Imagine if you’d emigrated from a culture/country that uses an entirely separate calendar, how confusing a hand in date could be. The idea of the board is to help students reference and retain information through a friendly translated framework.
The Implications
Every action has a reaction, what could come of the board that I don’t foresee? Already mentioned to me is human error, what if I or somebody else makes a change to a hand in date and the board isn’t corrected. What was once a friendly reminder and memory tool is now a trap laid out in plain sight! What’s worse is it’s designed to help students remember the dates ON THE BOARD, what if they only remember the incorrect/previous hand-in date? What if the board isn’t corrected and the students unionize against me and hold me accountable to the originally displayed date, I’d surely have to answer to somebody for that blunder.
Another issue I can imagine happening is the board slowly becoming co-opted by well meaning people, well-meaning classmates could put birthdays or fun events on the board and slowly reduce it to a regular calendar, unintentionally making it less legible to the D/D effected students looking for reassurance and a peaceful reminder to now have to navigate birthdays and other irrelevant material. I can also imagine a scenario where I or somebody else leaves out an important religious event but includes others, leading to an unintentional or even perceivable racial bias. What could a student feel or think if I neglect to mention a VooDoo or Yoruba holiday but mention the Abrahamic religions? If I overload the board, it’ll destroy its purpose of clear legibility; if I don’t mention everybody, I’m knowingly leaving others out.
Perhaps religion isn’t the right information for the board, but I feel remiss to not include it at all, as it provides key contexts to a lot of students. I don’t think I have a remedy to this problem, maybe we ask the student body if they want religious inclusion on the board, and leave it to them to vote?
Reflect on what I’ve learned about my practice and myself
Looking at the unit as a whole, I’ve noticed I have quite a few blind spots in my intersectionality, namely religion and race. I grew up an Atheist in a mixed-faith household. I am a baptized Catholic and my mother is Polish (a very catholic country) but like many other Catholics, she is non-practising. Religion wasn’t a big deal to me growing up and I struggle to understand the deep personal ties people have to religious holidays and ceremonies. I find it challenging to make lesson plans around faith-based events and I don’t know how to work around religious taboos. for example, I don’t understand how to make my lessons friendly to all faiths without leaving some out.
I also realized I don’t really consider race much in my teaching- I make sure we have a wide assortment of skin tone pigment dyes and all our ‘Skin Illustrator’ Palettes have a spectrum of colours, but outside of that in my day to day practice I don’t consider it much at all. I often find myself relating religion to race and wondering if my POC students are religious and how I need to account for that rather than their race.
My cousin is mixed race and we often discuss misogyny and how that has complex and wide-reaching impacts on black women. I do try to offer extra support to my chronically sick black students because I do fear they aren’t being given enough support outside of the institution.
Action plan, lay out the steps
As I wrote the above section, I thought about how I clearly don’t think enough about my black student body, specifically black boys, and the trauma they often carry from an education system that doesn’t listen to them early in life. My first step in my plan is a personal offshoot from my D/D board. I’m going to do more outreach and personal educating on how the school system treats young black men and how I can better myself as an educator to avoid continuing that harmful legacy.
The D/D board is my next step, I’m going to;
- Create a colour-based week-by-week calendar that I can re-print for every unit
- Spend more time reaching out to my unique student body to see how I can reflect their needs onto our shared calendar
- Dedicate a single board to our students that only ever gets used as a reference guide for hand-in information
- Spend more of my personal time learning about our education system and listening to the testimonies of POC students and their experiences
- Reinforce to myself that faith is deep and personal to many, and needs to be addressed to create a safe a happy educational space for all
Bibliography:
Newman, R. (2020) Dyscalculia Classroom Action Plan. Dyscalculia.org. Available at: https://www.dyscalculia.org/dyscalculia/dyscalculia-classroom-action-plan
Teachwire (2025) Dyscalculia teaching strategies – Signs, what to do… Available at: https://www.teachwire.net/news/6-games-for-pupils-with-dyscalculia/
Homeschool Academics (n.d.) Classroom Management for Students with Dyscalculia. Available at: https://homeschoolacademics.org/classroom-management-for-students-with-dyscalculia/
Penprase, B.E. (2016) Calendars and Timekeeping Around the World. In: Selin, H. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non‑Western Cultures. Springer. Available at: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-7747-7_9840
Stern, Sacha (2012) Calendars in Antiquity: Empires, States, and Societies (Conclusion). Oxford Academic. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/book/27844/chapter/198175126
EdChange (n.d.) Calendar and Cultures. Available at: https://www.edchange.org/multicultural/papers/richpaper.html
Barclay, S. (2024) An exploration of Black boys’ experiences of exclusion from school. University of Essex Repository. Available at: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/39161/1/An%20Exploration%20of%20Black%20Boys’%20Experiences%20of%20Exclusion%20From%20School%20-%20S%20Barclay.pdf
Burnett, A. & Wood‑Downie, H. (2024) An exploration of intersectionality and school belonging in the permanent exclusion of Black Caribbean boys in schools in England. University of Southampton Educational Psychology Blog. Available at: https://blog.soton.ac.uk/edpsych/2024/12/06/an-exploration-of-intersectionality-and-school-belonging-in-the-permanent-exclusion-of-black-caribbean-boys-in-schools-in-england-implications-for-educational-psychologists-2024/
Fekete, L. (2020) How Black working-class youth are criminalised and excluded in the English school system. Institute of Race Relations. Available at: https://irr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/How-Black-Working-Class-Youth-are-Criminalised-and-Excluded-in-the-English-School-System.pdf
Pearn Kandola (2023) Religion at Work Report. Available at: https://pearnkandola.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Religion-at-Work-Report-2023.pdf
Leave a Reply