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Lorem Ipsum Dolor Spring 2016
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life.
I'll be the first to admit that the prospect of this paradigm shift
is nerve wracking.
For those of you who are scared stiff at the
notion of what this might entail, let me offer a practical example.
Last year, my 12th grade English class of students
with visual
impairments engaged in a unit of study which focused on
loneliness, isolation, and transience during the Great Depression
(with a focus on John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men). As a guiding
instructional framework, I relied upon what Dorothy Heathcote has
coined "Mantle of the Expert" (Heathcote and Bolton, 1995). This
approach involves teachers and students working together within an
imagined context, acting as if they are a team of experts in a
profession, hired by some imaginary client to fulfill an objective. For
our purposes, the students and I took on the role of expert museum
curators, hired by the Smithsonian to develop a new exhibit on hobo
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