Language Arts - At Risk and the Language Arts, Sept 1991

Getting special education students to become risk takers helps them overcome the risks they face in a skills-in-isolation approach to learning and teaching.

Too often it is assumed that children who come from non-mainstream backgrounds are at risk just because they are from non-mainstream backgrounds. This article puts to rest the deficit myths about such children and proposes alternative ways of seeing the strengths they bring to the language arts classroom.

Being at risk implies something is wrong—either with children and their families or with the school. But Pellegrini sees it differently. He suggests that the reason children fail is because they are not familiar with the contexts in which they are expected to learn in school.

Children follow different trails into literacy. This case study shows one young child’s trail—her responses to Hansel and Gretei over a period of 4 years.