Proposal for T560 Course Project

The topic area I would like to investigate for my course project is schizophrenia. I became particularly interested in this disease after teaching a 16 year-old schizophrenic student as a first-year teacher in 1999. Not surprisingly, I was ill-equipped to handle the behavioral problems that accompanied Gavin's schizophrenia. In addition to being unengaged and understimulated in my class, he was also manic-depressive and suicidal. I found that as the school year progressed, my goals for Gavin were less and less about making him learn the subject matter and more about simply making him laugh. Needless to say, the class became very Gavin-centric (it's very hard to ignore a schizophrenic student). After Gavin ran away from home and attempted suicide for the first time that year, I decided to switch gears by taking some of the pressure off of my students and making my Spanish class a more welcoming and enjoyable environment. Completely unaware of any universal design techniques that could have helped Gavin back in 1999, I attempted to make the classroom environment as comedic as possible so that he would want to come back to it day after day.

(While my topic is rather broad right now, I am hoping to narrow it down somewhat to focus more specifically on schizophrenia in adolescents and investigate their predisposition towards depression, outbursts and violence, as well as their tendency to be extremely intelligent and creative individuals. For an interesting article called "The Teenage Brain: Culture and Schizophrenia", see: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/episode3/cultures/index.html.)