Tash

Vanderbilt Kennedy Center at the 2008 TASH Conference

Updated on 6/4/2010 10:49:49 AM.

Source: Vanderbilt Kennedy Center

Many Vanderbilt Kennedy Center faculty and staff participated in the 2008 TASH Conference held December 3-6 in Nashville, Tennessee. The theme for the conference was, “Social Justice in the 21st Century.”
The three-day conference featured over 200 peer-reviewed sessions, posters, Town Hall Meetings, Calls to Action, and “Think Tanks.” Workshops were coordinated and led by leaders in the field of disabilities. Preconference seminars and a special “Self-Advocate Conference” within the conference also took place. A special songwriters night featured the musical talents of Tammy Vice, Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Excellence Community Advisory Council member.
For more detailed information on VKC representation, see the list below. Vanderbilt Kennedy Center affiliated presenters are denoted by an asterisk (*).
TASH is an international membership association leading the way to inclusive communities through research, education, and advocacy. TASH members are people with disabilities, family members, fellow citizens, advocates, and professionals working together to create change and build capacity so that all people, no matter their perceived level of disability, are included in all aspects of society.
 For more information about TASH and its annual conferences, visit www.tash.org/index.html

Presentations

Goes to Preschool: Implementing the Teaching
Pyramid Model in Preschool Settings
Mary Louise Hemmeter,* Vanderbilt University; Patricia Snyder,
University of Florida, and Lise Fox, University of South Florida
The Teaching Pyramid is a model of practices for supporting social emotional development and addressing challenging behavior in young children. The model includes practices at the universal level (nurturing relationships, supportive environments), secondary level (targeted social emotional supports) and tertiary level (intensive, individualized interventions). In this session, presenters provided an overview of the model and how it would be implemented in inclusive preschool classrooms.

Lessons Learned from Instructional Practice Research in
Preschool Classrooms
Mark Wolery* and Matthew Busick, Vanderbilt University
This presentation described a series of studies focusing on instructional practices in classrooms serving young children who have disabilities. A variety of skills (goals) with several instructional practices were studied using single-subject experimental designs.

Why We Should Apologize for Too Much Early
Intervention Services
R.A. McWilliam*, Vanderbilt University Medical Center,
Nashville, TN
Early interventionists still are dumping a clinic-based model on the living room floor or, worse, therapists are holding hostage the early intervention community by refusing to serve children outside the clinic. This presentation addressed (a) the state of current Part C practice, (b) practices agreed upon by a panel of experts, and (c) a model for providing appropriate early intervention in natural environments.

Involvement of High-Poverty Youth in Their Educational
Planning and Self-Advocacy
Carolyn Hughes*, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;
Barbara Washington, Murray State University, Murray, KY
Opportunities for self-advocacy are notoriously limited for youth attending high-poverty high schools, particularly for students with severe disabilities. Presenters interviewed students, primarily African-Americans, attending a high-poverty urban high school, half of whom were identified with severe disabilities and half who were graduating general education seniors. Presenters compared findings across the two student groups with respect to their reported involvement in their educational planning and use of self-advocacy skills and discussed educational implications of findings.

Access Nashville, Restaurant Accessibility is Good
Business
Carole Moore-Slater,*Vanderbilt University and Floyd Stewart,
Nashville, TN
Access Nashville is a service learning project for students at Vanderbilt University that gathers “accessibility-friendly” information about restaurants for customers with disabilities.
Disability awareness and accessibility training is provided in a classroom setting, and students are given a specific restaurant to survey as an assignment. The accessibility of restaurants surveyed are rated “Wow,” “Good,” or “Limited,” and this accessibility information is posted on the Nashville Convention & Visitors Bureau website.

Successful Collaborations: Fostering Meaningful
Experiences in Service and Volunteerism
Elise McMillan,* Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities, Nashville, TN; Jason Wheeler, Institute for
Community Inclusion/University of Massachusetts–Boston; Del Ray
Zimmerman, Volunteer Tennessee, Nashville, TN
The Corporation for National and Community Service is committed to providing opportunities for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to engage in service that addresses the nation’s unmet human needs. This session highlighted successful statewide collaborative networks, intentionally designed to foster the increase of people with disabilities as active participants in service and volunteer opportunities. This session focused on strategies for collaboration through profiles and stories of individual experiences.

Poster Presentations

Defining Embedded Instruction for Research and Flexibility in Practice
Tara McLaughlin, Diane Ryndak and Patricia Snyder, University of
Florida; Mary Louise Hemmeter,* Vanderbilt University
This poster compares and contrasts different dimensions of embedded instruction as they appear in the research literature, describes the evolution of instructional practices that have led to the current uses of embedded instruction, and presents two examples of how embedded instruction has been defined differently in applied research. The poster provides examples of how teachers can use embedded instruction in both school-age and early childhood education settings to reach desired student outcomes.