 | The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
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| The 131st Annual Meeting (November 15-19, 2003) of APHA |
Elizabeth DePoy, PhD, Center for Community Inclusion and School of Social Work, University of Maine, 5717 Corbett Hall, Orono, ME 04469 and Stephen French Gilson, PhD, School of Social Work, University of Maine, 5770 Annex C, Orono, ME 04469, 207-581-2409, stephen_gilson@umit.maine.edu.
Within the past two decades, there has been increasing recognition that people with disabilities are experts in their own lives and needs. However, while this principle has been supported in theory and rhetoric, pre-service professional education continues to rely on professionally dominated research, theory and teaching. In an effort to ground disability studies education for health, human service and education students in the lived experience of people with disabilities and thereby reduce inadequate service and education responses to disabled people, we instituted an innovative “disability mentor” component within a didactic two-course sequence. Different from “show and tell” class speaker approaches, each student is assigned to a disabled person or family member of a disabled child, for interview, exchange, and feedback on all course readings and assignments. In concert with the theme of participation, this presentation will examine the theoretical foundations of our approach, detail the participatory methods through which disability mentorship was developed, structured, and integrated into the course sequence, and present the results of fully participatory student and mentor evaluation of the disability mentorship learning processes and outcomes
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Disability Studies, Disability