Educators' Beliefs About Supporting Students With Disabilities as They Transition to Adulthood

• In Event: Reclaiming Possibility: Educators Building Learning Futures with Culture, Care, and Play

Abstract

Students with disabilities have unique, unmet needs in their transition from high school to adult life (Cheng & Shaewitz, 2021). While transition services are legally mandated (The Every Student Succeeds Act, 2015), the effective delivery of these services depends in large part on educators’ beliefs, roles, and collaboration. This study is part of a research-practice partnership between a Mountain West university and a local school district with the goal to build capacity for collaborative transition service delivery to prepare students with disabilities for adult life (Penuel, 2019). In this study, we explore how practitioners conceptualize their roles in preparing students with disabilities for adult life, including their beliefs about who should provide support.

Drawing from the early phase of our partnership, we examined a co-design workshop involving 18 school practitioners across five schools, including special educators, general educators, school counselors, and administrators. During the workshop, we used a fictional inquiry approach (Dindler & Iverson, 2008), inviting participants to reflect on their ideal vision for supporting students with disabilities using the metaphor of the Elder Wand, a magical tool that removes all constraints, allowing them to imagine possible futures and supports. We collected audio and video data during the workshop and conducted a qualitative thematic analysis. Transcripts were coded by two researchers (Cohen’s Kappa = 0.85; O’Connor & Joffe, 2020); codes were analyzed with affinity diagramming (Hannington & Martin, 2019). We share three themes representing practitioners' views about different levels of support including community, district, and individual actions.

Community-level action emphasized shared responsibility for transition, particularly involving families and students. For example, one educator shared that the Elder Wand could increase students’ external motivation, as one said, “Just lighting a little fire of motivation under their asses. Like, that would be huge!” District-level actions reflected potential changes to systemic constraints, such as high student ratios. One counselor explained, “Well, the Elder Wand would have to fix our ratios to at least [make it] better, which is 250 to one, but we're at like 400 to one.” Individual-level reflections were less common but included things they wanted to do to change to help students achieve their postschool outcomes. One co-designer shared that with the Elder Wand they wanted to connect students’ strengths to careers, for instance recognizing everyone’s strengths to connect them with resources and cater their instruction. Another educator shared a plan to do so, “Maybe I could make a list of skills and connect them to careers… pointing them out could make a difference.”

While educators care about transition services, their beliefs about supporting students with disabilities were often externalized to systems and families. When asked to reflect on what they could do in their role while ignoring existing constraints, there were some insights about how they could support students. Yet, the reality of their experiences shaped their belief in what their role could do and placed most responsibility for support on others.

Authors

• LuEttaMae Lawrence, Utah State University

• Stephen Kwiatek, Utah State University

• Malin Scharmann, Utah State University