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Developing Rural Exceptional-educators
to Address Multicultural Students (DREAMS)
The DREAMS project is a field-based training collaboration in special
and elementary education between Northern Arizona University (NAU) and
local school districts in the Yuma and Tuba City areas. The purpose is
to train 58 rural pre-service special education/elementary education
teachers over a three-year period to deliver high quality service to
rural culturally and linguistically diverse exceptional students. DREAMS
provides tuition, books, and cultural expenses for participants.
In addition to the field-based students who live for one semester each
in Tuba City and Yuma, the program works with 40 rural paraprofessionals
(primarily Native American and Mexican-American) who due to time,
distance, and finances, are not able to attend the university to become
certified teachers. The Native American and Mexican-American
paraprofessionals in the project along with the field-based participants
receive all the NAU Special and Elementary Education courses necessary
for teacher certification in Elementary Education as well as K-12
certification in areas of Emotional Disabilities (ED), Mental
Retardation (MR), Learning Disabilities (LD), Orthopedic Impairment (OI),
and Other Health Impairments (OHI).
The field-based participants spend the Fall Semester training on the
reservation in Tuba City where they attend NAU classes with the Native
American participants who work in school on the reservation. In January
the field-based participants travel to Cuernavaca, Mexico along with the
Yuma paraprofessionals for Spanish Language Immersion and then continue
in Yuma during the Spring Semester. All students attend five courses in
the summer in Flagstaff, Yuma, and Tuba City via Interactive
Instructional Television (IITV). |
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