Special Education: Collaboration and Technology

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Table of Contents

Literature Review
Research Design and Methods
Coding and Theming Data
Ethical Issues
Credibility and Trustworthiness
Conclusion
Reflection
References

This qualitative study will explore how the use of technologies can enhance collaboration between special education teachers and parents of children requiring special education services in early childhood. The ability of the special education teacher to communicate and collaborate with parents of students receiving special education services is important for student academic success. One way to streamline such collaborations is through the use of innovative methods and technologies (Karst & Van Hecke, 2012).

So it is paramount to use effective, innovative methods and technologies for facilitating such collaboration. The review of the literature will be supplied below to provide the background for the study, as well as to identify better and define the research problem in question. The theoretical framework and my positionality for the proposed study will also be discussed, and research design and methods will be offered for the proposed study.

Literature Review

Background

The review of literature on the topic of special education on the whole, and special education for kids in their early childhood, indicates that parents of children with disabilities tend to experience serious stress, a considerable proportion of which originates in the fact of their child’s disability (Harry, 2008; Karst & Van Hecke, 2012). In particular, Karst and Van Hecke (2012) emphasize that parents of children with autism spectrum disorders suffer from multiple additional problems, including greater stress, lowered effectiveness of parenting practices, and increased physical and mental health problems. Children’s disability-related behaviors were also found to decrease maternal involvement in kids’ education (Benson, Karlof, & Siperstein, 2008). It might be possible to state that generally, most parents of kids with any type of disability suffer from additional stress because their child’s disability imposes additional demands on these parents.

Simultaneously, the collaboration between special educators and parents of children with disabilities is known to have multiple positive effects (Trivette, Dunst, & Hamby, 2010). It might be possible to state that it is within the capabilities of a special educator to help guide the parenting efforts aimed at children with special education needs (Karst & Van Hecke, 2012). In particular, the collaboration between special education teachers and families of children with disabilities can both teach parents how to increase better the effectiveness of special education interventions (Dempsey & Keen, 2008).

However, special education teachers may sometimes find it difficult to participate in effective collaboration with general education professionals (Friend, Cook, Hurley-Chamberlain, & Shamberger, 2010), let alone with parents of children with special needs (Starr & Foy, 2012), who often do not have educational backgrounds. Therefore, it is critical to explore ways that may assist special education providers in their collaboration with parents. One of the possible ways to facilitate such collaboration may be via innovative technologies (dos Santos, Schlünzen, & Schlünzen, 2016; Rock et al., 2009).

Nevertheless, it might be possible that special educators may need additional assistance in implementing innovative technologies – not only to enhance collaboration between these educators and families of children but also to implement educational interventions. In particular, it is known that special educators may not always have the skills necessary to effectively use innovative technologies (Arhipova & Sergeeva, 2015; dos Santos et al., 2016; Manning & Carpenter, 2008; Nam, Bahn, & Lee, 2013; Parette, Blum, & Boeckmann, 2009). In particular, Manning and Carpenter (2008) stress that the existing curricula for pre-service special educators are already tightly filled with important content, so introducing additional courses on the use of technology is problematic.

It is also worth considering the factors which stimulate special educators to use technologies in their practice. In particular, Nam et al. (2013) found out that the use of assistive technologies by special educators was strongly affected by how useful these educators considered these technologies to be. It was also affected by the perceived ease of use of these technologies, and the perceived ease of use also affected special educators’ self-efficacy when employing these technologies. It might be possible to extrapolate these findings and assume that the perceived high usefulness and ease of use of innovative technologies might stimulate special education teachers to use such technologies to increase better their collaboration with families of young children requiring special education.

Problem Statement

As the literature review indicates, it is known that the special educator/parent collaboration can enhance outcomes of children with disabilities, as well as relieve the stress of parents resulting from the fact that their child has a disability. It is also known that special educators may sometimes find it difficult to collaborate with families, that innovative technologies may help address this problem, and that teachers may be reluctant to use innovative technologies. However, it is unclear what particular difficulties special educators may experience when collaborating with parents, and what these teachers think about the possibility of using innovative technologies to improve collaboration. Thus, it will be helpful to explore their opinions and perceptions about these issues.

It should also be stressed that the offered problem has been poorly researched in the literature, but the previous studies related to the topic used a variety of approaches – both qualitative (Friend et al., 2010; Harry, 2008) and quantitative (e.g., Benson et al., 2008; Trivette et al., 2010) – depending upon the particular problems they were addressing.

Research Questions

Several research questions may be proposed:

How do special education teachers providing education for kids in their early childhood in (Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) communicate with families of their students with special needs?
How can innovative technologies be used to streamline communication between special education teachers and families?
What are teacher’s and family’s perceptions of innovative technologies used to communicate between teacher and family?

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework for the current study includes the general conception of special education, according to which children with disabilities need to receive educational interventions purposefully constructed for their type of disability to decrease the adverse effects of their disability on their development to eventually achieve better life outcomes.

A more specific framework that can be adopted within the given general theoretical framework is the one proposed by UNESCO (2011). It is a conceptual framework for utilizing ICT (information and communication technologies) to educate people with disabilities. It offers to take into consideration several factors that are context-independent and underpin the effectiveness of the utilization of ICT in special education (UNESCO, 2011, p. 85).

These factors include:

the need to train teachers to use ICT;
the need to make ICTs available to all special educators and special learners;
the potential of ICTs to realize the right of special learners to have adequate educational opportunities (UNESCO, 2011).

Also, the following principles are accepted within the framework:

ICT is not a goal, but merely a tool for improving education;
ICT should be used for promoting inclusive education;
ICTs should be available in any learning situations when they are required;
ICTs should be implemented systematically (UNESCO, 2011).

On the whole, this conceptual framework provides several guiding principles on the use of innovative technologies. It explains the critical factors required for the successful use of such technologies in the field of special education regardless of the context.

My Positionality

The research paradigm which will be adopted for this study is that of anti-positivism / interpretivism. On the whole, the terms “anti-positivism” and “interpretivism” are sometimes used interchangeably, to denote the position according to which one views their social reality and interprets it according to their point of view and knowledge, which, in turn, both emerge from one’s daily interactions and experiences (Kuada, 2012).

Thus, people have varying positions, which makes it impossible to grasp these in a precise, definite, mathematics-like manner, which is required for investigating them as the natural world is usually studied – e.g., using precise numerical descriptions. Furthermore, this means that the whole society and its elements might not be researched in the same way as the natural world. Consequently, they require different methods of inquiry than the empirical methods of the natural sciences (Kuada, 2012).

In practice, this means that the researcher needs to use qualitative research methods to be able to express the nuances of individuals’ opinions and perceptions on the issue in question; however, these opinions are in any case interpreted by the researcher, because the researcher also understands them in the light of his/her own opinions, experiences, etc.; hence the term “interpretivism.” All in all, adopting an anti-positivist/interpretive research paradigm means that qualitative methods of inquiry will be used in the proposed study (Kuada, 2012).

Concerning my positionality, it should be noted that I come from Saudi Arabia, am a Muslim, and am in the privileged position of being a Ph.D. student. Also, I changed my views on diversity from rather conservative to more open-minded ones.

In this case, “conservative views” means that, while being unconsciously aware of e.g., such issues as racial discrimination, and, unfortunately, having participated in it because it was a “natural” way to act in my environment in Saudi Arabia, I refused to acknowledge their existence; and that I had negative opinions about various “non-traditional” phenomena such as the LGBT, gender theories, etc., believing that people who are part of these groups or proponents of such theories simply defy their appropriate role in the society, causing harm to the latter. These views changed to more open-minded ones thanks to the course in epistemology, where various issues were considered; the discussions permitted me to see these phenomena in a new light, changing my position towards them. This is particularly important for an educator due to the need to work with various populations, and an educator has to treat each learner fairly and not harm them simply because of one’s views.

I came to the proposed topic thanks to knowing how important collaboration between parents and teachers is for students with special needs, especially in their early childhood. Parents play a crucial role in children at their early age (Benson et al., 2008), so collaboration with special educators is pivotal at least because the educators can help and advise the parents, who rarely have any training in special education.

This topic is important to me because I hail from Saudi Arabia, where collaboration between parents and special educators is difficult (Alquraini, 2011, p. 156), which is due to several reasons. Parents rarely know how important it is to extend the time of special education services even at home; they do not receive training from care providers, and it is usually difficult for teachers to access parents. Thus, parents and teachers communicate little about the child and what should be done when the child is at home. Therefore, I assumed that developing or using technology would increase collaboration and communication to help Saudi Arabian children with special needs in early age.

Research Design and Methods

Research Design

As has been previously noted, a qualitative research approach will be used for this study. This is because the research questions are qualitative in nature; they are aimed at exploring and documenting the opinions and beliefs of participants who cannot be measured on a quantitative scale. Additionally, there seems to be a gap in research literature when it comes to exploring the difficulties that special educators experience when collaborating with families of young children, and also when it comes to special education teachers’ awareness of technologies that can be used for facilitating such collaboration. Thus, it is needed to perform a qualitative, explorative study before conducting any quantitative research.

The research design will be phenomenological (Vagle, 2014). This research design is appropriate when it is needed to explore the views of a reasonably large sample of participants who experienced the phenomenon in question, for it permits for gathering the opinions and beliefs of these people, carefully processing them, and subjecting them to analysis (Vagle, 2014).

Methods

The research methods will be chosen following the selected research design. More specifically, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with several tens of respondents; it is possible to interview approximately 20 participants for the current study. The interviews are necessary because the proposed research questions entail the need to explore the beliefs and thoughts of special education teachers on the use of innovative technologies for communication with parents of children with special needs. It is needed to understand the meanings that these teachers have in their minds rather than simply collect their opinions about whether they agree/disagree with something (Vagle, 2014). In this case, it is needed to use interviews (Kilbourn, 2006), for these allow for grasping the beliefs/thoughts of the participants. Also, interviews are needed for phenomenological research (Vagle, 2014).

The questions for the interviews were purposefully designed for the current study while taking into account its research questions.

Participants

The target population of the current study will be comprised of special education teachers who work with kids with disabilities or other special education needs in their early childhood. The sample will be drawn from several local establishments of special education that serve young children with special needs in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This setting was chosen because, as has been previously noted, I hail from Saudi Arabia, and communication between parents and special education is limited there (Alquraini, 2011), so it is useful to explore the existing manifestations of this communication to potentially develop it further. The investigating special education in Saudi Arabia may also be useful in the U.S. to provide additional insights on the Arab/Muslim culture for the U.S. researchers (Abdul Khabeer, 2016).

The special education establishments will be contacted via the phone. Then I will either speak with potential participants via the phone or visit the establishments personally to invite these special education teachers to participate in the study as interviewees. The time and date of the interviews will be agreed upon. I will ask the participants to ask for official permission for my entry into the institutions if I visit them personally; in cases when interviews are collected via Web-technologies, no such permission will be needed.

As has been noted, 20 participants will be interviewed. Such several participants are needed because selecting too few participants will limit the generalizability of a study, whereas using a larger sample is problematic due to the qualitative nature of the research, so 20 respondents is a decent number (Denzin & Giardina, 2016). The sampling technique will be purposive sampling: the settings and participants will be selected according to the described above criteria to meet the purposes of the study (Maxwell, 2013, p. 97). This technique is appropriate because it permits for gathering the needed information about the issue in question, and non-probability sampling (which is not always convenience sampling) is more than adequate in qualitative research (Maxwell, 2013, p. 97).

Data collection and analysis

As has been previously stressed, the participants will be interviewed on a date and time that will previously be agreed upon. The interviews may be taken personally, via the phone, or with the assistance of online technologies for communication (e.g., ones that allow for video and audio communication, or simply audio communication). The responses of the interviewees will be audio recorded, so that nuances of the responses are not lost, and then these recordings will be transcribed for further analysis. After that, I will identify the most common responses and/or themes in the collected data and consider them further. It should be stressed that data analysis will proceed simultaneously with data collection (the constant comparison method). Conclusions will be made concerning the research questions identified for this study.

It should be noted that qualitative analysis is often based on the principles of data reduction and interpretation. Data reduction is needed to “filter out” unimportant details from the gathered data, and only leave materials essential for a given study, often identifying main themes and categories (Saldaña, 2013). Also, data gathered in qualitative studies is often too voluminous to be provided fully in a research paper, as can be seen from the example of Berry (2016). Furthermore, data interpretation is inevitable, for the researcher has to translate the opinions of individuals on a given topic, which can only be done if the researcher first understands/interprets them (Kilbourn, 2006; Kuada, 2012; Stake, 2010).

In this study, coding procedures (such as descriptive coding) will be used (Saldaña, 2013). The gathered data will be put in a table, and the main topics will be identified next to the text of the data using descriptive coding; these topics will be further generalized into themes (Saldaña, 2013). Common themes will be identified in the gathered data and further discussed. Manual coding will be employed; as advised by Saldaña (2013), I will need to better understand and practice the coding procedures before using professional coding software.

Coding and Theming Data

The following screenshots demonstrate the process of coding/theming the data that has been used for the interviews which were already conducted:

Appendix 2

As can be seen from the screenshots, the data that was gathered during the interview was transcribed from the audio recordings and then put into a table in Microsoft Word software. It was then manually analyzed using the descriptive coding technique so as to identify the first-step codes in the data which was gathered during the interview with a study participant (Saldaña, 2013). While reading the data, I identified the main topics which the respondent was discussing, such as her love and passion towards the children she works with, or the technological means that are used in their organization in the classroom, or the regular meetings with families and the attitudes of families towards these meetings, and towards the collaboration with special education professionals in general.

Using these codes, I was able to identify three main themes in the interview with the participant, namely, the “Description of the Current Situation” (related to the communication between teachers and families of children with special needs), the “Teacher and the Family” with respect to their attitudes towards collaboration using innovative technologies, and the “Idea Based on Experience” – the ideas of the respondent about the ways of using innovative technologies for enhancing communication between special educators and families of young children with special needs, and promote their further collaboration.

On the whole, it should be stressed that utilizing the coding techniques allowed me to successfully reduce the total amount of data which was gathered during the study to a number of short statements that transfer the crux of the opinions expressed by the interviewee.

Ethical Issues

It is also worth pointing out that the respondents will be asked to provide their informed consent before taking part in the study, most likely at the time when they will be asked to participate in the study, and when the date of the future interview will be agreed upon. It might be possible to state that the current study does not appear to have an extremely high hazard of violating ethical norms; however, the risks pertaining to the publication of personal details and/or health issues of the clients of the respondents will exist (Kuada, 2012). Consequently, the anonymity of participants will be preserved; their names will not be published anywhere; their details will not be given to anybody except me as a researcher and probably my possible co-researchers; and the professional secrets of respondents, as well as the details on their learners, will not be revealed anywhere.

Credibility and Trustworthiness

The results of the study are expected to be generalizable to the population of special education teachers working with young children in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This generalizability is expected to hold thanks to the use of a sample of 20 participants (Denzin & Giardina, 2016). However, it should be noted that the selection of centers from which the respondents will be recruited may adversely affect the generalizability of the study if some types of centers are not sampled. On the other hand, if the situation related to the research questions is very different in different centers, it also might be more difficult to generalize the results, because the latter will differ in the study itself.

For the current study, no triangulation is planned. This is because it is difficult to invent a methodology and data gathering tools which would be sufficiently different from the proposed instruments, but would allow for exploring the same research questions (Denzin & Giardina, 2016).

The credibility/trustworthiness of qualitative research reflects how well the opinions of its participants are reflected in the study (“Qualitative Validity,” n.d.). On the whole, the results of the proposed study are expected to be credible because I will attempt to keep as close as possible to the opinions of the participants; even though coding techniques will be used, the final paper may use direct quotations of respondents to exemplify their thoughts. Also, “member checks” will be made when communicating with respondents (Denzin & Giardina, 2016).

For instance, when respondents provide main assertions that are highly interpretable, it will be possible to double-check their answers by paraphrasing them to make sure the statement was understood correctly; also, participating informants may be used to double-check the interpretation of the respondents’ statements (Stake, 2010).

Conclusion

On the whole, the proposed study features several considerable strengths, but also has a number of weaknesses and limitations which should be pointed out so as to be aware of the possible problems and faults in the results of this research. In particular, there is an issue pertaining to the very research problem and research questions for this study, namely, that the study investigates the collaboration between special education teachers and the parents of children with special needs, but only interviews one side which would participate in such collaboration, namely, the teachers. In order to gain a more complete picture of the proposed problem, it can be advised to also interview parents of children so as to explore their views on the utilization of innovative technologies for parent-teacher collaboration, as well as on such collaboration in general.

Understanding the opinions not only of teachers but also of parents may be crucial for successful implementation of interventions aimed at introducing innovative technologies into the sphere of parent-teacher collaboration. Theoretically, it might even be possible to conduct clarifying interviews together with teachers and parents in order to clarify any possible misunderstandings and contradictions. However, integrating into the research requires conducting a study of a larger scope, which is not possible in my circumstances nowadays.

In addition, it should be stressed that more verifying techniques, such as triangulation, could be advised for the current study in order to further enhance its trustworthiness. Also, the utilization of various coding software might be more effectual than the use of coding techniques manually.

Reflection

This reflection is about a qualitative proposal. The aim of the qualitative study is to explore how the use of technologies can enhance collaboration between special education teachers and parents of children requiring special education services in an early childhood setting. The reflection is about the data collection that I plan to collect for my proposal. Also, it is about data analysis that is related to the pilot observation and interview that had been conducted. Moreover, the reflection is showing how interpretations and analysis of the data were influenced by my positionality.

The experience of the observation was very interesting to me, because it was the first time I wrote a qualitative research. I consider it as a very important skill that as a PhD student I should have for the observation assignment and data collection, and analysis that I did. I enjoyed doing that because it was a first time for me to observe participants’ behaviors. For the pilot observation, I decide to focus on only three behaviors of the participants. However, for the full real study after approving this proposal, I am aiming to develop spreadsheets of how to collect data and develop for field notes and how to report the data. I believe in this way, I will be more able to capture the context of the observation with more details and information.

The research method for this qualitative study is an interview. The purpose of these interviews is to collect the data about the investigation about the teachers’ attitudes toward using technologies as a part of a collaboration process with parents of children with special needs. For the pilot interview, it was challenging for me to develop interview questions that needed to be overarching and guiding research questions. Also, it was challenging to get agreements from the participants without completing official IRB process. However, the participants in pilot interview were very flexible to participate when they knew it was a just a demo of qualitative study. In the full study, I will create an official consent form that guarantees the privacy and security of the data.

For my positionality, both the interview and observation gave me several ideas to develop for the full study. In the pilot interview and observation, I focused in elements that I decided prior of interview and observation. My positionality changed to be more open and flexible to include more data, information, and details for the observation. For the interview, I need to design more open ended question to give more space for the participants to express their idea freely without any limitation.

References

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Alquraini, T. (2011). Special education in Saudi Arabia: Challenges, perspectives, future possibilities. International Journal of Special Education, 26(2), 149-159. Web.

Arhipova, S. V., & Sergeeva, O. S. (2015). Features of the information and communication technology application by the subjects of special education. International Education Studies, 8(6), 162-170.

Benson, P., Karlof, K. L., & Siperstein, G. N. (2008). Maternal involvement in the education of young children with autism spectrum disorders. Autism, 12(1), 47-63.

Berry, K. (2016). Bullied: Tales of torment, identity, and youth. New York, NY: Routledge.

Dempsey, I., & Keen, D. (2008). A review of processes and outcomes in family-centered services for children with a disability. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 28(1), 42-52.

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Maxwell, J. A. (2013). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Nam, C. S., Bahn, S., & Lee, R. (2013). Acceptance of assistive technology by special education teachers: A structural equation model approach. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 29(5), 365-377.

Parette, H. P., Blum, C., & Boeckmann, N. M. (2009). Evaluating assistive technology in early childhood education: The use of a concurrent time series probe approach. Early Childhood Education Journal, 37(5), 5-12.

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Rock, M. L., Gregg, M., Thead, B. K., Acker, S. E., Gable, R. A., & Zigmond, N. P. (2009). Can you hear me now? Evaluation of an online wireless technology to provide real-time feedback to special education teachers-in-training. Teacher Education and Special Education, 32(1), 64-82.

Saldaña, J. (2013). The coding manual for qualitative researchers (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

Stake, R. E. (2010). Qualitative research: Studying how things work. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Starr, E. M., & Foy, J. B. (2012). In parents’ voices: The education of children with autism spectrum disorders. Remedial and Special Education, 33(4), 207-216.

Trivette, C. M., Dunst, C. J., & Hamby, D. W. (2010). Influences of family-systems intervention practices on parent-child interactions and child development. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 30(1), 3-19.

UNESCO. (2011). ICTs in education for people with disabilities. Web.

Vagle, M. D. (2014). Crafting phenomenological research. New York, NY: Routledge.

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