Supporting Youth with Disabilities in School Transition Through Community Engagement: Results from an Online Toolkit Pilot in Singapore

• In Event: Community interventions for making inclusive education work – Key experiences and learnings

Proposal

Transition from school to adulthood is a critical time for any youth, but particularly for those with disabilities. However, many young adults with disabilities hear far less about their gifts and capacities than their deficits and the challenges they face (Cooney, 2002). Additionally, such youth often experience a significant disruption of services as they move from one system (schools) to another (adult social and employment services) (Shogren and Wittenberg 2020).
Students with disabilities currently have two educational options in Singapore’s national education system: mainstream education or the special education system. After school is completed and students age out, they are often very isolated and have limited social and community interactions (Lim, Thayer, and Stroglios 2019). To address this challenge, we believe that the education of such young adults needs to place a greater emphasis on supporting the development of self-determination capacities through community engagement.
As a US-Singapore collaboration of higher education institutions and educational service organizations, our project (2021–2023) developed an online multimedia and mapping toolkit to support youth with disabilities and their families in identifying strengths, skills, preferences, and discovering areas of community engagement for the future. We called this intervention the Community Engagement Toolkit, and it was developed through an iterative cross-cultural exchange.
The results of the pilot of our intervention toolkit demonstrates that youth with disabilities in Singapore can effectively communicate to others – including school staff, potential employers, their families, and the community at large – about their interests, preferences, and also allowed the youth to meaningfully engage in their communities and explore new places and opportunities. The youth used the Community Engagement Toolkit to take pictures and videos of places in their community that were both friendly and inclusive, as well as areas of Singapore where they felt excluded. Taking all of the participants’ data together, we, the project team, were able to create a community inclusion/exclusion map of Singapore that can serve both youth with disabilities as well as service providers such as schools and other social agencies.
References
Cooney, B.F. (2002). Exploring perspectives on transition of youth with disabilities: Voices of
young adults, parents, and professionals. Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 40(6), 425-435.
Shogren, K.A. & Wittenberg, D. (2020). Improving outcomes of transition-age youth
with disabilities: A life course perspective. Career Development and Transition for Exceptional Individuals, 43(1), 18-28.
Lim, L., Thaver, T. & Strogilos, V. (2019). Contextual influences on inclusivity: The
Singapore experience. In M.J. Schuelka, C.J. Johnstone, G. Thomas & A. Artiles (Eds.), The SAGE handbook on inclusion and diversity in education (pp. 496-508). London: SAGE.

Author

• Matthew Schuelka, Fora Education