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Welcome to week six.
I'm Professor Greg Long at Northern Illinois University.
Today and actually next week as well we're going
to be talking about education as a topic.
But before we do that,
let's do our disability etiquette question for the day.
And today's question is what strategies can you
use to help when you need to communicate with somebody
who is deaf or hard of hearing and assuming,
say, they know sign language and you don't?
What could you do to help with communication?
>>Greg Long V.O: For people who have no knowledge of deafness
or background with deaf culture,
they will usually look
at the interpreter and speak with the interpreter,
instead of looking at the person who is deaf,
the person with deafness, like they're supposed to.
Sometimes, sometimes they'll tell the interpreter
not to voice something or anything
if they're on the phone.
But if a hearing person was sitting there, you know,
they wouldn't answer the phone in the first place.
So you know what I'm talking about here.
You would be able to hear the discussion.
>>Professor Long: So the overview for today's lesson,
we'll first talk about when we think of education
bring a little bit of background
in terms of history and legislation.
We'll then talk about early
identification and intervention, moving into
some issues that happen, say, in the public schools,
kindergarten through 12th grade.
And dealing with that largely in issues of accommodations
and how does that whole process work.
One of the things that's, I think, most distressing
when we think about the issue of disability and education
is actually the relatively short time frame in which
students with disabilities have actually been given the right,
been promised the civil right to access education.
I graduated high school in 1974.
You can do the math to figure out how old I am.
But what we know is that
it wasn't until the mid-70s the laws were passed
that allowed students with disabilities
to have a right to go to school.
So historically prior to the 70s, it wasn't unusual
to have only say one in five students actually be educated.
You know, based on the:
Department of Education figures,
there is well over a million students from years past
who were excluded from school
simply because they had disabilities.
So if we think it's 2013 right now, we're really talking
just around slightly under a 40-year history
in our country in the United States of ensuring that
every child has a right to an education.
From our standpoint at this time as we think of education,
access is really seen as a civil right.
And we do have the laws in place that ensure that.
And from a, kind of a K-12 standpoint,
there's varying estimates of the number of children
who have disabilities.
But, approximately from the Department of Education
and some other sources,
we're looking at anywhere between say 12 to 15%
of students having some type of educationally
significant disability that impacts their ability to learn.
And the reason I'm not being specific is it depends
on source and it depends on how you look at things.
But the point would be that
there are a lot of students with disabilities.
And that the majority of them have disabilities
that aren't immediately noticeable.
So it's not that we're talking that we're seeing students
who use wheelchairs or who have amputations
or who are deaf or blind, but that the majority of children
that we see in the schools are there with cognitive processing
or emotional kinds or behavioral kinds of issues.
The types of invisible disabilities
that we've talked about.
And we summarize this particular segment
of education and disability by saying, first off,
remember the long history that students weren't allowed to --
were not guaranteed the right to go to school.
We have now laws that have been passed that do provide
the civil right, the civil right, that students have
the right to go to and access the school's curriculum.
What we'll do in our next segment is talk about
just exactly what are some of those specific rights
associated with gaining access to education.