VCU news

By Kyra Newman

A workforce development effort led by Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education will prepare Virginia community college students to better identify and support children up to age 5 with disabilities.

Workforce Ready is a five-year initiative housed within the school’s Department of Counseling and Special Education and its Partnership for People with Disabilities. A nearly $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) is funding Workforce Ready, which is being directed by VCU assistant professor Christine Spence and PPD professional development specialist Cori Hill. A large team of Virginia Commonwealth University colleagues, as well as individuals from Old Dominion University and George Mason University, are participating.

The Workforce Ready team is partnering with four community colleges – Central Virginia, Eastern Shore, Patrick & Henry and Southwest Virginia – that have early childhood education departments. The four colleges were selected because they are less often invited to participate in this type of grant activity due to their limited funding and small staff. Additionally, they frequently serve under-resourced communities.

“Our immediate goal is to ‘grow your own workforce.’ If we provide more resources to  faculty to support their students, the hope is that these students would then work in their home communities. This would help fill a significant national shortage of people prepared to fill these jobs,” said Hill, the Virginia early intervention professional development specialist with the PPD. “Our ultimate goals are to increase the number of certified practitioners in the local workforces and increase their knowledge of disability in early childhood education.”

In Virginia, 3.3% of children receive early intervention services, but estimates are that up to 8% of infants and toddlers have disabilities, according to OSEP. By the time children enter K-12, the number receiving disability support jumps to 10% – which reveals a gap in early intervention.

Expanding disability topics across the curriculum

Many community college students work in center-based child care facilities or federally funded Head Start centers – inclusive programs that enroll children with and without disabilities. Workforce Ready also will support graduates’ career pathways, including potential early intervention certification through the Infant & Toddler Connection of Virginia program. Another option for students is to advance to a four-year university, including VCU, to earn a bachelor’s degree in early childhood special education or early childhood education.

The Workforce Ready team is providing technical assistance and professional development to the community college faculty, including adjunct instructors, to deepen their understanding of disability. This includes enhancing materials in eight content and two fieldwork courses to incorporate more disability information.

“I think the commitment from our team is that we feel strongly about growing the knowledge base about disabilities and growing future early interventionists and future early childhood special educators,” Hill said. In the process, the team is reigniting networking and idea exchanges across campuses, which had paused during the pandemic, to build a community of practice.

This year, the Workforce Ready team is gathering baseline information about those courses and identifying opportunities to broaden professional development for faculty. In parallel, team members are conducting site visits to the areas served by the community colleges to learn from faculty what they need and to better understand available resources for children with disabilities in each community. Ultimately, the team wants to understand how – and if –  families of children with disabilities are accessing early childhood programs and services.

“We’re making connections and learning about the community network,” said Spence, Ph.D., assistant professor of counseling and special education, whose research focuses on infants and toddlers with disabilities, professional development, and family-centered practices. “We aim to build bridges and identify relationships that are sustainable.”

Preparing educators for effective classrooms

The current community college curriculum for an associate degree in early childhood education includes one course on exceptional children, which is common across the country. That focused course remains essential, but as inclusion and integration practices continue, more preparation is needed for teachers to educate young children of all abilities together, including multilingual learners.

Traditional coursework includes child development lessons, but those likely showcase typical expectations. Updated courses will help future teachers be more aware that when something in a child’s growth appears different, they know how to engage with parents or guardians, access resources and offer accommodations.

The Workforce Ready team is supporting curriculum enhancement in multiple courses. For example, a course on creative activities that seeks to embed art and music into the early childhood curriculum can easily include strategies to support young children with disabilities.

“Case studies can be an effective teaching strategy for how to think about the accommodations that might be needed for those children to successfully participate in that same art activity with their peers,” Spence said.

Videos can be another powerful tool to help students see accommodations in action. In class, faculty can show videos that demonstrate strategies for communication, and then the students can practice how to utilize these strategies so that “the child who has fewer expressive communication words, or communicates through nonverbal ways, also is honored for their communication attempts just as much as the precocious 3-year-old who is speaking in long sentences and paragraphs,” she added.

Fieldwork courses also will be assessed to give the community college students greater experiences with young children who have disabilities.

“Right now, there isn’t an intentional focus on that experience,” Spence said. “So, while the students may go through their programs and have supervised fieldwork and practicum, if the classroom they’re assigned to doesn’t have a child with a disability or not yet identified with a disability, they might not get that experience. But when they are a lead teacher in their own classroom, they might have children with disabilities – and then they’ve had no support or education to understand what is needed.”

This Workforce Ready initiative builds on a workforce development program, supported by an earlier federal grant, through which VCU partnered with community colleges that serve more-populated areas of Virginia. Workforce Ready will provide the infrastructure for the four rural, under-resourced locations of its schools to increase the capacity for faculty to support a well-prepared future early childhood education workforce.