New Yang-Tan Course Will Connect Cornellians with Local Students
The Yang Tan Institute’s Kelly Clark and Thomas Golden were named Faculty Fellows in Engaged Learning – earning stipends to enhance the program’s mission of creating courses that take students outside the classroom to grapple with the real-world issues.
As a result, Clark and Golden developed a partnership with Tompkins Seneca Tioga BOCES to teach a new course entitled “It Takes Work: Innovations in Law and Practice to Advance Employment for Students with Disabilities.”
“Domestically, students and youth with disabilities are less likely to be employed, graduate and be economically self-sufficient than their non-disabled counterparts,” Golden said. “This is not an acceptable outcome in the 21st century.”
The course will be offered in fall 2020 in the Labor Relations, Law, and History Department at the ILR School and will review the foundations, laws, theories and practice that support the design, implementation and evaluation of inclusive work-based learning experiences.
“Currently, TST BOCES has a program at Cornell that prepares high school special education students for employment,” said Brandy Nielsen, a special education teacher at Smith School. “With the assistance of Cornell buddies, TST BOCES students attend Kennedy Hall three days a week to learn employment skills and to explore the Cornell campus and their communities to learn about basic entry level jobs.
“This new course will expand our assessment part of the curriculum to assist the BOCES students to define their interest and the skills needed for competitive employment.”
Students in this course will learn about approaches to creating inclusive work-based learning experiences, essential partnerships and collaborations with community stakeholders, as well as strategies, tools and approaches for developing quality and meaningful experiences for students. An essential component of the course will be learning through engagement, as Cornell students will be paired with “learning partners,” local secondary education students with disabilities who are preparing for transition to adulthood.
“Cornell students undertaking disability studies have keen interest in working more directly with students with disabilities and our students will have that opportunity to impact lives and our community as they engage in this learning opportunity,” Clark said. “Beyond the impact on our Cornell students, the learning partners, through their connection with Cornell students and the experiences they will have together, will gain skills, develop relationships and explore possible new futures.”
This course is designed in four components – Foundations, Law and Theories; Partnership and Collaboration; Strategies, Tools and Approaches; Engagement and Reflection – and each phase is designed to yield specific learning outcomes.
According to Anna Sims Bartel, associate director of Community-Engaged Curricula and Practice for the Office of Engagement Initiatives and facilitator of this year’s Engaged fellows cohort, “A central goal of the Engaged Faculty Fellows program is to support faculty in building out their teaching and scholarship in ways that better integrate their sense of what matters most. The best teaching, learning and research tends to come from people with a sense of agency and commitment around the public purpose of their work; Professors Golden and Clark are modeling that beautifully with their new course on disability and employment. One could learn a ton by studying the law, policy and practice of how youth with disabilities are empowered – or not – by the systems they occupy, but one could learn a ton more by doing that in an engaged way, as in Golden and Clark’s new course. Learning with and from such youth themselves provides a powerful new way in to the field at the same time as it provides useful service to those youth partners.”
For more information on the Engaged Faculty Fellowship Programs, click here.