Personal Perspectives from Professionals: Mentoring and Role Modeling in the Ocean of Potentiality Program and Its Impact towards a New Paradigm

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Assistive Technology Supports for Self Determination and Community Inclusion

A description of media techniques that “give voice” to people with disabilities to engage in assistive technology problem solving, including video collages, interviews, walk-abouts and “how to” demonstrations. Ethical considerations related to publication and dissemination are addressed

Creating Futures: Potential of Video Empowerment in Postsecondary Education

Social progress benefits from positive future expectations which are often diminished in the disability community and higher education. Considerable potential exists in the use of video and related technologies to create images of positive futures where previously there was none. These potentials stem from proven practices of self modeling and feedforward, methods to teach new skills with carefully planned and edited videos that show future capability of the individual on video. These practices have been applied to a diversity of ages, situations, and human conditions. We extend these practices to video-based futures planning, in which teenagers find meaning in their current educational setting to prepare them for adulthood and to putting individuals with disabilities in control of the video production to assemble television shows illustrating personal advocacy or community environments with positive outcomes for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. The examples show the considerable potential for support in the postsecondary educational environment

Introduction to the Special Issue: “Self-Determination” as a Social Construct: Cross-cultural Considerations

This special issue of the Review of Disability Studies is meant to stimulate thinking and dialogue about how self-determination is conceived and promoted by and for people with disabilities, and how the concept and its application might be enhanced to better empower and improve the quality of life of people with disabilities around the world. We decided to devote time and effort to this topic because of our observations that self-determination as typically presented is not a good fit for cultural milieu in Hawaii and across the Pacific region. A likely reason for this lack of fit emerged as we read a large proportion of the many publications on self-determination and people with disabilities: the self-determination concept as typically defined is rooted in the individualistic values common to Western cultures, whereas most residents of Hawaii and other Pacific Islands come from collectivistic cultural backgrounds

Technologies for Voice: Video and Multimedia Communication Supports for Self-Determination

Video and multimedia technologies that support the self-determination of persons with disabilities are explored in a series of three stories. Young adults with disabilities clarify their values, visualize their futures, and speak for themselves, utilizing readily accessible consumer technologies. Professionals and critical friends are challenged to re-tool their technology skills to keep up with people with disabilities who are making decisions that impact their own lives

Family Focused Learning: A Model for Learning from Children with Disabilities and Their Families via Technologies for Voice

In this paper, we describe a collaborative multidisciplinary model for faculty and students learning about culture and children with disabilities and their families in Pacific Island contexts. The model, Family Focused Learning, incorporates aspects of case-based and problem-based learning within the context of “consumer” and “professional” partnerships (Ratliffe, Stodden, & Robinson, 2000; Robinson, 1999). Children with disabilities and their families share the daily challenges and successes of their lives with graduate students and faculty at the University of Hawai‘i, via video letters, video mapping, cultural brokering and satellite videoconferencing. To illustrate this process, we present the story of “Tomasi,” a child with cerebral palsy in American Samoa, a US territory. Tomasi and his family are “given voice” and act as teachers for an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students from public health, social work, physical therapy, speech pathology, nursing, special education, nutrition, medicine, political science and law

Mystic Inspiration of Effective Habits?

Although numerous and diverse publications address professors’ writing and research productivity, exceedingly few empirical studies report findings for interventions designed and implemented to increase professors’ research productivity. This study used an innovative mixed methods design with a concurrent triangulation strategy and methods from two research traditions that investigators rarely integrate – quantitative single-case interventions and qualitative inquiry. Processes and findings from this study illustrate how researchers can combine these methods to illuminate the how and why of changes in performance in participant-interventionist studies. In this study, university professors used goal setting and behavioral self-management techniques to increase their daily research productivity and the number of manuscripts they submitted to professional journals. Based on findings and existing literature, we identify practical habits that increase research productivity. This study extends the literature base that includes numerous descriptive articles and opinion pieces on many topics about scholarly productivity, but few intervention studies that report quantitative findings