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To me, it’s not about the disability and all of the things we have to teach the person with the disability...


head of the Special Educa- tion department. She refl ects on her approach, and how her scholarly work validated what she learned from her professional experience: “T e issues that people


with disabilities have are more a refl ection of the bar- riers that society throws up than something that’s intrin- sic in the disability. To me, it’s not about the disability and all of the things we have to teach the person with the disability, it’s about chang- ing the at itudes that other people have. “In working with the


group homes and institu- tions, I never met anybody that I couldn’t fi gure out how to serve in a com- munity set ing rather than an institution, but other agencies would turn them down all the time. T ere was always a way to make it work, though, and it had nothing to do with chang- ing something about them or teaching them a skill, but changing our ideas or mak- ing something more physi- cally accessible or changing the ideas the neighbors had. T at’s kind of where it start- ed and then Phil gave me the academic background for the thoughts I had. “Children from non-


Eastern | FALL 2011 21


dominant cultural and ethnic backgrounds are almost all overrepresented in special ed. Special ed teachers tend to dismiss that as basically economic, but even if you control for socio-


economic status, there’s still overrepresentation. What we tend to do in special ed is make everything a focus on the person with the dis- ability, so we say self-deter- mination is a skill and we


need to teach you the pieces of this skill. Phil and I take it from a diff erent perspective, in that self-determination is a right, that it’s not a mat- ter of teaching persons with disabilities the skills to make


“The Brehms are amazing, down-


to-earth, caring, loving people.


grandparents.”


They’re like an extra pair of


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