The following describes a journey of collaboration across disciplines to support Universal Design for Learning (UDL) curriculum and assessment enhancements in an Elementary Education teacher preparation program within a college of education (COE). As a collaborative partner with a public
university in Florida, a public state college in Florida completed a review and enhancement of the Elementary Education teacher preparation curriculum using The Roadmap for Educator Preparation Reform to create an overt and measured use of the Universal Design for Learning framework.
This project was supported through a grant from the Florida Department of Education FLDOE 171-5015A-8CC01.
The Innovations and Special Education Technology Professional Development Committee would like to extend its appreciation to the following leaders in the field of Special Education. Each of the following individuals volunteered to speak during the 2020–2021 ISET Expert Panel Discussion series and shared expertise on a variety of pressing topics during remote instruction due to the COVID pandemic. The information sharing is a testament to their unwavering support for the members of ISET and all of the stakeholders involved in supporting individuals with disabilities.
Preparation of pre-service professionals to work in the field of special education requires explicitly taught approaches to collaboration as a part of a multidisciplinary team. The authors' faculty learning community provides a model to emanate the skills, knowledge, and dispositions of a high-functioning collaborative team expected from pre-service professionals through a mock individualized education program (IEP) team video series. Issues (origin story), solutions (video modeling), and areas of future research (mock interdisciplinary student teams) will be discussed. A description of Cox's (n.d.) 16 recommendations to frame a faculty learning community, video production, and other relevant topics for potential implementation will also be included. The faculty learning community and its video modeling products are presented as an exemplar for interdisciplinary, cross-departmental/institutional expertise to model a positive student-centered mock IEP team.
The chapter will provide an alternative point of view from the traditional discussion of mother scholar to the lens of a childless or childfree academic to include topics such as perceptions of peers, equitable workplace evaluation, emotional impacts, social isolation/exclusion, and other areas of often overlooked concerns for women in higher education. The context of women in academics is framed by a brief overview of the history of women in education, and challenges with solutions as a resource for change or to create awareness for women in education without children or alternative family structures. Additionally, personal accounts of being a childfree or childless scholar will provide context to the history, issues, controversies, problems, and solutions presented in the chapter.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.