This chapter informs readers of a collaborative five-year grant, project activity based communication (ABC), between the College of Education, Department of Special Education and the College of Communications, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. The purpose of this collaboration was to respond to the call for delivering high-quality preservice training to early childhood special educators and speech-language pathology candidates. A collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach was taken in the design of the instructional framework, the delivery of coursework, and the selection of professional development opportunities. The instructional framework is meant to prepare and educate pre-professionals on how to collaborate successfully while applying best practices of universal design for learning that support all preschoolers, with and without high-intensity needs in an inclusive preschool environment. This work is funded through a 325K personnel preparation development grant by the US Department of Education in the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
TopProject Abc
Project ABC is a 5-year project providing interdisciplinary training to cohorts of ECSE teacher candidates and SLP candidates. The aims of Project ABC are twofold: (a) to improve the effectiveness of early intervention, early childhood special education, and speech language pathology services and supports in bettering learning outcomes of young children with high-intensity communication needs, and (b) to increase the quality of early inclusive education for young children with high-intensity learning needs. The iterative nature of the project is designed to address the critical need to recruit and retain high-quality early educators and increase the knowledge and skills of Assistive Technology (AT)/Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) in ESCEs and SLPs, and accomplishes this by offering an interdisciplinary training program between the ECSE credential master’s program and the CSD master’s program (e.g., see Figure 1).
Project ABC seeks to accomplish these aims through collaborative training and instructional content. Training and seminars are designed to guide preservice professionals in the preparing, planning, and understanding of how to implement augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) across daily preschool routines to support the early language, literacy, and communication development of young children with intensive communication and learning needs.
TopThe Need For Project Abc
According to the 2017 report to Congress on the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA; U.S. Department of Education, 2017), almost half (43%) of preschoolers with disabilities had a speech or language impairment as their primary disability and 37.6% had a developmental delay (DD) as their primary disability. Given these numbers, early educators should expect to serve children who need access to aided AAC to promote their cognitive development. However, this is not always the case (Lieber et al., 2008).
Unfortunately, most preschool-aged children with DD who may require aided AAC are still educated in separate settings (Kleinert et al., 2015), where they face all the same challenges as their peers in inclusive settings yet have limited opportunity to learn language from or with same-age peers. In an inclusive classroom serving children with and without disabilities, all students are expected to learn from knowledgeable others, including classroom teachers, instructional aides, visiting family members, related service providers, and same-age peers. No matter the makeup of the preschool classroom, standard practices require all educators serving the classroom to know how to provide the necessary supports and services so all students develop school readiness skills for academic achievement (National Professional Development Center on Inclusion, 2012). Thus, there is an ongoing need for preservice education to offer integrated trainings (Tegler et al., 2019) to meet the needs of students with and without disabilities, all of whom are expected to learn together in their preschool settings.
Project ABC designed an interdisciplinary personnel preparation instructional framework to meet this need. In particular, the project director identified a need to build ECSE and SLP candidates’ AAC-related knowledge and skills to address the complex and diverse learning needs of all children. Additionally, project faculty wished to instruct early educators and preservice SLPs to reduce the reported social marginalization of preschoolers with complex communication needs. The reasons for this marginalization may be due to a limited number of communication partners or the lack of physical and adapted access to places where children without disabilities are playing (Østvik et al., 2017).
The work of Project ABC focuses on preservice training in early childhood education classrooms because evidence points to the need for preschool teachers to have education and experience in integrating aided AAC successfully (von Tetzchner et al., 2009). Project ABC wished to address this problem because classroom teachers are likely the first people to identify children in the classroom who may struggle to socially engage or fully participate in their early learning curricula (Light & McNaughton, 2014).