This weekend I spent time up in Verona, NY with two of my peers and our advisor as we attended the New York State Council for Exceptional Children Convention. According to their website, the CEC "is the largest international professional organization dedicated to improving educational outcomes for individuals with exceptionalities, students with disabilities, and/or the gifted. CEC advocates for appropriate governmental policies, sets professional standards, provides continual professional development, advocates for newly and historically underserved individuals with exceptionalities, and helps professionals obtain conditions and resources necessary for effective professional practice."
I found out about this organization last year as some NYU students began a chapter here and I proceeded to get involved and become a member of the international organization. This year I am serving as the Treasurer on our Executive Board. Our Board has hosted some events so far this year such as having Laurie DuBos (former CEC President) and Vanessa DeBello (whose mother was actually a resident at Willowbrook) and going to Adaptive Design Association. This week we will be screening Autism: The Musical and having a discussion, as well as sharing our experiences from the Convention.
Anyway, this weekend was such an incredible professional development opportunity for all of us. We had the chance to attend a number of workshops about a large variety of topics which were extremely useful for us, preservice teachers, since we are currently working in classrooms and have begun to think about how we want to organize our own in just a few months! I learned so many valuable strategies and tools that I hope to be able to implement and I saw just how much is being done within the field of Special Education.
But, perhaps one of the greatest experiences I had this weekend was my ability to present, with my colleagues, at a poster session. We created a presentation about Low Tech Adaptive Technology which will allow for inclusion of all children. Much of our presentation focused on what we learned during our visit to the Adaptive Design Association. It was a very valuable experience for us to be presenting at a statewide conference while still undergraduate students and it gave us the chance to meet many people in the field, including Joel Klein, the New York City Schools Chancellor .