ABSTRACT
A special education teacher who was a staunch and regular learning community member gives her perspective on learning and teaching collaboratively, and creating project spaces that pair up and integrate children considered different, and systemically, sadly, deficient. The layout of Joyce Public School included a flow-through, multipurpose library-amphitheatre space purpose built for collaboration and interchange. Learning in and for the digital age fundamentally entails collaboration. Collaborative project-based learning introduces the possibility of children collaborating across age, grade, subject and classroom boundaries. Integrating special education children into the multiliteracies projects helped the regular classroom teachers value the skills that special education students brought to their learning. The Beauty project demonstrated many different faces of collaborative learning: teachers working with each other; teachers and students; students, even those with special needs, with other students. Remixing the curriculum and the collective expertise of teacher revitalized learning not only for the children but also for the teachers.
