Costa Rica Service-Learning Project: What Education Students learned from Individuals with Severe Disabilities

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http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Title
Costa Rica Service-Learning Project: What Education Students learned from Individuals with Severe Disabilities
Type
Video recordings
Geographic Subject
Costa Rica
Created
2015-01-01T00:00:00Z
Abstract
In August 2014, Marymount students (n=9) in a graduate-level education course conducted a service-learning (S-L) project at Fundación Hogar Manos Abiertas in Costa Rica. A residential program, Manos Abiertas provides full-care for abandoned individuals who have severe disabilities including autism, intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, blindness, and deafness. Most residents are nonverbal, use wheelchairs, and have fine motor skill difficulties. In collaboration with teachers at Manos Abiertas, the Marymount team prepared relevant, multisensory, intercultural lesson activities, designed to promote self-advocacy and self -determination. In “structured” reflections we wrote about our interactions with residents during the activities we conducted at Manos. Back home we analyzed the contents of pre-& post reflection assignments to discover major themes as we sought to determine: (1) collective research foci drawn from our pre- trip questions about interacting and conducting activities with the residents; (2)the impact the experience had on us personally and professionally; especially the effects residents had on our initial assumptions, apprehensions, and questions about their disabilities and our capacity to provide appropriate instruction for them. Through this S-L research, the residents taught us a great deal about what it means to be human. Not only learned did we learn from them how to overcome substantial communication barriers, we also developed our capacities to assess, adapt, and scaffold for individual needs. Furthermore we acknowledged how this experience helped us gain confidence in our abilities to interact with, “get-to-know”, and teach individuals from diverse backgrounds and with a wide range of cognitive, physical, and communicative needs.
URI / Handle
http://hdl.handle.net/1961/muislandora:2990

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