The Cultural Common Threads of Support

Maggie Morales, Teacher of Orthopedically Impaired & CITTI Project Core Team Leader, offers her insights regarding family support models.

Bridgett and I are already getting settled into the Sierra Nevada Hotel in Quito, and while the CITTI Project 2007 gets underway, I’d like to take a few moments to reflect on my experiences at the International Special Education Forum (ISEF) in Lima Peru.

This was my first international special education conference. Once again, I found myself being a student of another culture. However, this time I was a student of “many” cultures as there were doctors, researchers, teachers, and families from all regions of our planet. I was eager to fill the empty pages of my notebook with new information about different educational/training models; research findings from other countries about how they reach rural areas; and forming possible universal collaborative contacts.

During the conference, there were several common threads that were woven throughout the many keynote speeches and concurrent sessions. The concept of “training trainers” was a reoccurring topic discussed by many presenters from several different countries. Each country and/or agency had a slightly different model which best served the needs of the people they were supporting. One common thread for each of these information sharing sessions was that focusing resources on training trainers has an effective multiplying effect that will hopefully serve more people in the long run – especially those in rural areas.

Another common thread between the presentations was the agreement that an important component of any model for training trainers is to involve & provide training for the families of the students with disabilities. At the Centro Ann Sullivan de Peru (CASP), they have even established “Individual Family Education Plans” (IFEP). These plans include a methodology which allows the families (parents, students, and siblings) to evaluate the support & training that they receive from the Centro, so that there can be on-going assessment and feedback about the process.

I am left feeling the fabric of the CITTI Project contains many of the conceptual threads that were woven together throughout the forum. During my years of involvement in the CITTI Project, there has been consistent involvement with the families of children with disabilities. Four years ago, we provided training at the Dana School in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. This school was started by Olivia because she has a son with multiple disabilities, who was not physically or cognitively able to access the public education system. Because of this one woman’s vision, many children are benefiting. At the Dana school, our focus was to train not only the teachers at the school, but teachers and therapists from surrounding agencies as well. After working in Mexico, we came to Ecuador. At every agency we visited, we not only have met the administrators, teachers and therapists from those agencies, but we met the children and their families as well. Throughout all the different phases of the CITTI Project in Ecuador, we have been connecting with and supporting the families of children with disabilities.

As I get ready for the CITTI Project 2007, I am anxiously awaiting to connect with familiar faces and to meet new ones. I can hardly wait to reconnect with the agencies, children and families that we have been working with. What I bring with me this year to add to the emergent weave of the CITTI Project is the knowledge that I have gained from attending the ISEF. That there is a universal thread of family support throughout many different cultures that is connecting different models of educational training and support. Teachers and trainers that we have worked with may come and go, but the families of the children are a constant. The CITTI Project has woven these families into our fluid model of educational & assistive technology support, and hopefully some thread of the CITTI Project is a supportive part of their family fabric as well.