Day 3 - Summer Institute

We started off the day with a presentation from Phil and Diane Ferguson. We are taking a course from them right now, so it was nice to be familiar with the speakers.  Their presentation started off by asking people to think of 3 adjectives that describe parents that have children with disabilities. The audience, that I think was made up of mostly graduate students, responded with words like: overwhelmed, stressed, tired, concerned, strong, involved, resistant, and one responded that they were no different that other parents. It was an interesting exercise because many of the people came up with words around the theme of being overwhelmed. I thought that was interesting. Consider the following video that was shared by a classmate:

The message of their presentation focused on the importance of the relationship between families, schools and community. As teachers, we need to acknowledge that when parents come into the school, they are entering with many different “ghosts” or stories, and to recognize that everyone has a different background.

Parent involvement in schools traditionally meant that they would come in for concerts, festivals, parent-teacher, etc, but that was not always successful because it met the needs of the students and the schools, but not necessarily the families and community. This is because the transfer of information usually only moved one way. We have to work hard as teachers to create a welcoming atmosphere and keep the lines of communication running both ways so we can keep families involved in the school community.

The second presentation tied into this idea. Karen Dyke told a story about having to move a whole school of children to a different location on the other side of town. There was huge parent involvement at the original school site, so the assumption was that when they moved, the community involvement would follow. The new school was only 2-3 km away from the original site, but that proved to be too far of a move for many community members, and the involvement greatly diminished. Administrators and teachers could not understand why the parents stopped coming in, but eventually realized that the move proved to be too far and inconvenient for many parents. (No car, no public transit, out of the way for other to drive them). It was a wake up call for me, and I realized it is critical to consider location, and it can limit access.

Karen also dicussed some other key points about major shifts in Nova Scotia over the past 15-20 years:
GCOs and SCOs for each grade level....outcomes and standards.
The basis for these outcomes are not local or central, but more universal.
The world is shrinking, and we can easily access so much more than we could 20 years ago. The world is at our fingertips!