Let me first explain what an “officer meeting” is, for those less familiar with our programs. A school-based Best Buddies chapter is a group of students and faculty committed to promoting an inclusive student body. “Inclusion” means the full inclusion, not segregation, of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Because students with IDD often take only special education classes, they have little opportunity to develop relationships with the general student body and suffer great social stigma. Thusly, in a Best Buddies club, students and faculty match a student with IDD in a one-to-one friendship with a neurotypical peer. The students who run the club call themselves the “officer corps.”
Audrey Moore and Kelsey Tigh are the highly motivated, highly organized Chapter Presidents of their respective corps. They asked me to meet with them, as Program Manager, in order to discuss their plans for the coming year. I asked what was on all the officers’ minds:
Joanna from Jesse Bethel High School said she wanted to “improve interactions” between buddies and peer buddies. She sometimes saw buddy pairs interacting with some discomfort: maybe a peer buddy talked over a non-verbal buddy, or sat perfunctorily for lunch, leaving quickly. Such discomforts would naturally arise in a social club like ours, but they’re no reason to not have friendship clubs. Instead, we should work through these problems.
Kelsey Tigh recalled a great dialogue exercise from Leadership Conference worth sharing. The exercise compared a typical dialogue between a Peer Buddy and Buddy, a parent and a child, and two friends on a soccer team. Each dialogue looks like this:
Parent: Hi, sweetie. How did you do in school today?
Child: Hi. It was fine. We worked on math for a while. What did you do?
Parent: You worked on math?! Awesome! Was it really hard? Do you need help with it?
Child: No, it was fine. I made you a card today in class.
Parent: Oh my gosh! You are so cute (hugs child)! Did you make this all by yourself?? This is the BEST drawing ever! I’m going to hang it on the fridge!
In the dialogue exercise, two presenters simply replace the titles “Parent and Child” with “Peer buddy and Buddy,” and “Soccer captain and Teammate,” respectively. After the presentation, a facilitator asks the audience perfectly self-evident questions: does the dialogue seem natural and appropriate between two friends? Between a parent and child? Do you ever see interactions like this in your club between a peer buddy and buddy?
The lessons of the presentation are self-evident. The dialogue may raise questions that program managers or chapter presidents are afraid to ask their club members. But these ideas are perfectly appropriate to point out – actually in my opinion as program manager, these questions are essential.
Furthermore, don’t be afraid that your peer buddies or volunteers won’t understand or might be “threatened” by these questions. Volunteers join clubs like Best Buddies with great intentions and want guidance! Often, as soon as you present the idea of this dialogue to peer buddies, you see their interactions with buddies become far more “normalized.”
As program manager, I greatly encourage the use of exercises like this in Best Buddies or in any “inclusion-based” club. Exercises like this are a best practice for anyone working with students with and without disabilities.
Learn more about inclusion:
Read more about neurotypical:
5 steps you can take to better train your volunteers:
- http://aspergersquare8.blogspot.com/2009/08/checklist-of-neurotypical-privilege-new.html
- www.iamnorm.org
3) Create an anonymous box at the front of your classroom so students and instructional assistants can ask questions or voice discomforts.
4) Share a little about disability history with your volunteers so that they can conceptualize their volunteer work as activism, not “help.” Relate it to racism and sexism!
5) Reach out to professional organizations to do trainings:
- May Tulin, Program Manager, BBCA Bay Area
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