Reduce Disabilities Everywhere

On Friday, I learned a valuable lesson from Lisa Brewster of Miramar College, who is also the California Community Colleges' Success Network Coordinator for San Diego/Imperial Valley. While we teachers tend to begin with textbooks, lessons, and favorite activities, simply covering content leaves out the students that struggle the most, including those with disabilities. Instead of teaching to average students, we should design our teaching in such a way that it is for the lowest denominator of our class, so to speak, and help everyone else in the process, too, according to Lisa, who was giving a talk titled "Teaching Students As If They Were All Basic Skills Students."

The Universal Design (UD) principles require less in-depth coverage of everything and call for intentional flexibility in presentation, clarification, engagement, and assessment. Such practices reduce the disabling effect of our curricula.

But a more immediate challenge may still remain: deciding how to help that student who is demonstrating severe difficulty learning in class. Our college already has a Disability Resource Center (i.e. DRC) whose staff welcome faculty referrals, have an established procedure to screen a referred student, and offer a variety of assistive or adaptive technology, practical techniques, professional advice, as well as PD workshops and presentations.

Many of the area schools feed students to us. Also, many of our current adult students are parents whose children attend public schools in our community. So wouldn't our common interests be well served if we could be more proactive about sharing resources such as workshop information? Thanks to Katrina Tamura, we now know that North Coastal Consortium for Special Education (NCCSE) regularly offers workshops for parents and educators. For instance, there will be a two-day Specialized Brain Gym Course “open and free” to parents and educators who are able to attend on a weekday (11/1 and 11/2). Please click here to download a 13-page handout announcing free workshops (given in Spanish and English) for North County parents and educators. Click here to download a one-page Spanish flyer for parents to sign up to learn about an individualized education program (IEP) for their children. Click here to download a one-page English flyer promoting parents' awareness of the IEP. You might want to distribute a few copies of these flyers in your class. Making sure that every student learns despite obstacles is a major goal of NCCSE and UD. It should be ours, too.