25 Hours in Family: How Family Internships Can Help School Leaders Transform from Within

This article describes the ways in which a 25-hour internship with families who have children with disabilities impacted four doctoral students in educational leadership. We discuss the lessons we learned as a result of our experiences and provide insight into the structural components of the internship experience that were critical to enhancing our professional development. Key lessons include: (1) the realization that disability is a socially-constructed term that does not describe the talents, feelings, and aspirations of individuals with disabilities; (2) increased knowledge and strategies about how school leaders can provide support to families by listening to their hopes, dreams, and challenges; and (3) the critical need to include families in decision-making processes to ensure that the family perspective is represented. Important structural components of the internship experience included spending time with families in their homes and communities for extended periods of time. Implications for the preparation of educational leaders are discussed.

Notes

The study described in this paper was supported by funds from the National Institute on Leadership, Disability and Students Placed at Risk at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.

All authors shared equally in the preparation of this manuscript and are thus listed alphabetically on the title page.

1. Instructional modules available free of charge at http://www.uvm.edu/~nildspar/

2. All family members were invited to participate in the writing of this manuscript. Although only one opted to join the author team, all families participated in meaningful ways such as reading for authenticity and contributing their own observations to help guide our exploration of the topics being discussed.

3. All family names, except Lisa Bushey who joins us an author, have been changed to protect their privacy.

4. This approach, which emphasizes the use of all modes of communication (signs, speech, gestures, lip reading, amplification, and/or finger spelling) is often used to help children experiencing difficulty with communication.