for Young Children with Severe and Multiple Disabilities
and
A Design for Learning: Teaching Communication and Cognitive Skills to Children with Severe Disabilities
Dates of Projects: 10-1-02 through 9-30-05 (Making the Right to Communicate a Reality) and 10-1-03 through 9-30-06 (A Design for Learning)
Funding Source: U.S. Department of Education
SUMMARY
Communication and cognitive skills are fundamental to lifelong learning: they are skills needed to negotiate the social and physical environments. Yet many nonverbal children with severe or multiple disabilities do not learn how to interact effectively with either environment. Without communication and cognitive skills, the child is not able to participate meaningfully in inclusive environments, nor to progress in other skill areas that are dependent upon a basic ability to communicate and an understanding of how the physical world works. Many of the educational materials and approaches that are currently available represent unrelated efforts that address only one area of skill development. Our instructional approach constitutes a clearly articulated model that promotes basic skill development in a systematic way that is nevertheless flexible enough to mobilize the preferences of the individual child toward the pursuit of lifelong learning. The model targets the fundamental skills necessary to understand and master the social environment (social interaction, presymbolic communication and symbolic communication) as well as the physical environment (manipulating objects, negotiating obstacles that arise at home, in class and in the community, and using objects for representational and social purposes). The model is the result of extensive research and demonstration efforts involving children with severe and multiple disabilities.
These projects are the latest in a series of outreach projects. Making the Right to Communicate a Reality targets the dissemination of strategies for teaching nonspeaking children to communicate. A Design for Learning disseminates the full instructional approach, addressing both communication and cognitive skill instruction. These projects target educators, speech-language pathologists and family members of nonspeaking children who experience severe or multiple disabilities.
