Design to Learn™

for people who live or work with individuals who have severe disabilities.

Design to Learn™ strategies and materials address the educational needs of children and adults who have severe disabilities, including multiple and "low incidence" disabilities such as deafblindness and autism.

Design to Learn™ materials are especially useful for individuals who do not have conventional means of communication – in other words, for nonverbal or nonspeaking individuals.

This project is designed to bring state-of-the-art, proven intervention strategies to professionals and families who are involved with nonverbal children ages 3-21 who have severe and multiple disabilities. Instruction for children of the target population is not simple and there are no “quick fixes”. Cook-book approaches will not work, and ten-minutes videos of best practices cannot possible provide enough information to sort through the needs and abilities of individual children. Over the past eighteen years, we have been privileged to receive a number or research and demonstration grants that have allowed us to develop methods for addressing the communication and cognitive skill needs for children with multiple disabilities including severe mental retardation, autism, deafblindness, and severe orthopedic impairment.

Making the Right to Communicate a Reality-Outreach III

This project is an extension of highly successful outreach activities funded by two grants that have targeted communication intervention in the early childhood population. Two previous projects took alternative forms of communication intervention in the early childhood audiences in the Western, Midwestern and Eastern states. This project extends that project in three ways. First, we are able to respond to requests from audiences who are involved with children of all ages: the target strategies are applicable across the life span and many individual who have not been exposed to appropriate communication intervention at an early age are able to learn to communicate effectively once an appropriate system is targeted. Second, we have expanded the geographic area to be served to include the entire country. Third, we are developing an online class based on this training, so that the training will become widely and permanently available without the support of grant funding.