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Preparing special educators for poverty settings.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

The authors highlight a graduate level course offered in an innovative teacher education project designed to prepare special educators from diverse backgrounds to work effectively with diverse student populations. The knowledge and competencies needed to work with students from impoverished backgrounds are emphasized. Impact on participants and implications are discussed.

Introduction

Widespread national concern with the recruitment, preparation, and retention of qualified special education teachers is reaching crisis proportions. Two highly critical areas have emerged--the shortage of special educators from underrepresented groups, and the shortage of qualified special education teachers. Furthermore, schools in predominantly minority communities, and those in high poverty areas with significant numbers of students with disabilities, are most severely impacted by the nationwide shortage of special education personnel (Burstein & Sears, 2001). Beard, Cegelka, Graves & Valles (1999) add,

For the past two decades, we have been professionally challenged by the great ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity of the school populations, the complexities of urban educational delivery, and the extreme shortages of qualified special education teachers (p. 1).

The requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) to disaggregate assessment data by various categories (i.e., economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities) serves notice that teachers must be prepared to teach all the children in their classrooms. Given the NCLB reporting measures, teacher preparation programs must address the issue of preparing teachers to better serve students from impoverished communities.

The majority of those entering the teaching profession will work in schools with "increasingly diverse student populations from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, many of whom experience poverty, abuse, or other negative situations that can seriously affect their physical, cognitive, and emotional development" (Cabello & Burstein, 1995, p. 285). Meeting the needs of these students requires a thorough understanding of issues related to working with culturally and linguistically diverse students with a range of abilities and needs (Park, Turnbull & Turnbull III, 2002).

What specific knowledge and skills do special education teachers require to work with students with disabilities from high poverty backgrounds and their families? How do we best prepare the teachers? These questions were the focus of a federally funded project to train special educators to become effective facilitators of best practices in highly challenging and diverse settings where students experience poverty. In this article the authors describe an innovative course that was developed as part of the project. The goal of the course was to prepare special educators from diverse backgrounds to work with diverse student populations from impoverished backgrounds. The evaluation data are...

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