Building Capacity with Assistive Technology in Teacher Education

Abstract

Assistive Technology (AT) is legally mandated via the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504, and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), but remains unevenly implemented in K-12 schools, in part due to teachers having limited preparation for selecting and using AT in inclusive classrooms. In this practice-oriented article, we describe how we designed two co-taught courses to systematically embed AT within a special education teacher preparation program. Guided by Disabilities Studies in Education (DSE) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), we organized instruction around the AT Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (AT-MTSS), positioning service teachers as being responsible for various assistive technologies. In this article, we outline course structures and assignments, including accessibility labs grounded in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG); structured labs for text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and AAC tools; field-based AT consideration and intervention using the SETT Framework; and an emerging focus on ethical consideration around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in special education.
We describe an emerging co-teaching practice, “One Teach–One Tech” through which we pair methods-based instruction with a real-time model of AT. We argue that the intentional embedding of assistive technology in pre-service programs is critical to expanding technology-assisted instruction and realizing the access promised to students under policies (i.e., IDEA, Section 504, and ESSA).