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Transitional & |
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Schools alone
cannot prepare youth, particularly those with moderate cognitive
disabilities, for productive adulthood.
To be successful, it requires the collaborative effort of students,
faculty, administration, and the community working to provide students
with opportunities for community involvement and hands-on experiences. The
Access program has been designed to integrate academic learning with real
life experiences in order to prepare participating students to live
independently and to successfully transition to adulthood.
The program is a community based learning program that utilizes a
broad set of teaching/learning strategies that enable participating
students to learn from many segments of the community.
The learning
process serving as a foundation for the Access community-based learning
program is well grounded in cognitive research.
At the heart of cognitive research is the observation that
intelligence and expertise are built out of interaction with the
environment, not in isolation from it.
Cognitive research over the past ten years has shown that the
quality of cognitive performance often depends on the contest in which the
performance occurs. People
who perform tasks well in one setting may not perform them in other
settings. Learning which is
“situated” in practical, work-related contexts is both faster and more
effective than learning that is purely classroom based and unrelated to
the contexts in which it is to be applied. The Access Program
offers a range of environments in which students can develop various
skills and competencies that are important for employment and responsible
citizenship and provide participating students with meaningful roles in
their communities. It
utilizes a relevant curriculum designed to motivate students to want to
learn by focusing on community partnerships. The Access program
will take the subject matter students normally study, and will add many
new ingredients about people, jobs, self, and the way communities work,
enabling participating students to learn in the community through direct
interaction with adults in all walks of life.
As part of the program, students will earn academic credit, explore
the real dimensions of many careers, learn much about who they are and
what they want to become, and master many of the skills they will need to
succeed as adults in America. All activities of
the Access Program have as
their goal community integration. Planned
activities are made as “real” as possible to maximize generalization
of learned skills in the settings required of them in daily life.
As part of the Access program students
go to sites in the community each week.
As students progress through the programs, this component is
expanded. The goal of this
program is that upon graduation each student will have achieved maximum
mastery of community living skills and be linked with an appropriate adult
services provider.
68-70 Tuers Avenue
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