NAP- Neighborhood Alliance of Pawtucket

Learning

Urban school info

notices Free teleseminar

Difference does NOT equal disability: Creating Culturally Responsive Educational Systems By Elizabeth Kozleski and Shelley Zion from the National Center for Culturally Responsive Educational Systems (NCCRESt). Thursday, June 29 at 3:30pm EST, 2:30pm CST, 1:30pm MST, 12:30pm PST, 11:30am AK, 10:30am HI.



This free teleseminar will be 1 hour and 30 minutes long. Participants will receive Power Point slides to view during the seminar and will use a toll free call in number for the audio portion. Participants will have opportunities to ask questions of Ms. Zion and Dr. Kozleski during the presentation. To register for the teleseminar, please contact Vicki Hornus at vhornus@wested.org. This event is hosted by the LRE-Part B Community of Practice – http://www.tacommunities.org



Focus of the session will be on the phenomena of over representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education, from referral to assessment, identification, and placement choices. We will examine the policies, practices, and people that lead to the inappropriate identification of culturally and linguistically diverse students, and set forth an agenda for school reform that will change the ways we look at difference and disability. Highlights will include:



· examining the policies, practices, and people that lead to the inappropriate identification of culturally and linguistically diverse students;

· introducing a set of tools and activities for school personnel to uncover the cultural assumptions operating in their schools and classrooms; and

· setting forth an agenda for school reform that will change the ways we look at difference and disability.




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SPOTLIGHT new data in the data maps
Check out our new 2004-2005 school year data. We have recently uploaded brand new data to the interactive data maps on our website at http://niusi.eddata.net. We now have an impressive collection of 6 years of comparative data from all over the nation. In this website, interactive maps and tables present the distributions of students with disabilities across various disability categories by ethnic/racial category and teacher qualifications to help practitioners and policy makers at the local and state levels understand their own status in relationship to disproportionate representation in special education. As NIUSI and NCCRESt help to uncover the various elements that converge to create local and state level conditions in which students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds may be disproportionately represented, the data maps and tables will be become more complex.