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Enhancing collaboration: families as faculty project.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This article discusses the incorporation of a family-professional collaboration model into a master's level course, Introduction to Special Education. The model, Families as Faculty, provides in-service teachers an opportunity to visit with families who have children with special needs, at the family's home. During visits, in-service teachers have the opportunity to listen to family stories about the challenges and joys of raising a child with special needs, and also gain an understanding of the importance of meaningful collaboration with families.

Introduction

Parent-professional collaboration is essential to the educational success of students with special needs. High quality parent-professional collaboration has been linked with the creation of effective individualized education plans (Turnbull & Turnbull, 2001), inclusion of students with disabilities in their least restrictive environment (Bauer & Shea, 1999), and successful postsecondary outcomes (Wehman, 2001).

Collaboration is evident when parents and professionals share information and strategies to develop a common vision for the student. This requires creating clearly defined goals and subsequently agreed upon responsibilities by all stakeholders (Bruner, 1991). According to Turnbull and Turnbull (2001), when families and professional successfully communicate, share resources, and are equally involved in the development of the student's education plan, a collaborative relationship and a sense of collective empowerment is created.

Many parent-professional relationships are marked by dominant-subordinate power structures, rather than a spirit of collaboration and collective empowerment (Turnbull & Turnbull, 2001). This disequalibrium is often a result of pre-professional programs that train teachers to assume a dominant role when working with families. As a result, families are relegated to subordinate roles (Turnbull, Turbiville, & Turnbull, 2000) and are often considered informants or clients, rather than as partners in collaboration (Collins & Collins, 1990). Similarly, many teachers regard the ideal relationship with families as one in which parents carry out the requests of teachers and do not interfere with the teacher's decision-making process (Winzer & Mazurek, 1998).

All parties suffer when professionals are not provided instruction and opportunities to collaborate at the pre-service level. A review of the literature suggests that limited training and exposure to collaboration at this level correlates with professionals becoming resistant to collaboration with colleagues and families when they enter the workplace (Buttery & Anderson, 1999; Kamens, 1997; Lazar & Solstad, 1999). Therefore, it is imperative that pre-professional education programs create opportunities for pre-service and in-service teachers to meaningfully converse with families who have children with exceptionalities and to develop effective communication and decision-making skills consistent with the spirit of collaboration and collective empowerment. This paper explores a higher education initiative to tram in-service teachers to collaborate with families. We first review efforts to enhance teachers' ability and willingness to collaborate through the Families as Faculty model. Second, we include a participating student's reflection paper that highlights her experience and professional growth as it...

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