2024 NEC Winter Seminar: Foundational Knowledge in Deafblindness

Seminar Overview 

In order to help students learn, teachers and related service personnel should support students to build their knowledge by integrating new skills and concepts into their experiences and understanding. The fields of neuroscience, psychology, and education have demonstrated that information becomes a long-term memory after ample opportunity to practice using the information in expected as well as new situations. In this two-day seminar, Foundational Knowledge in Deafblindness, participants will learn strategies that emphasize the importance of consistent and deliberate teaching for deafblind learners.    

• Participants will build core knowledge in practical and proven educational strategies they can implement immediately with their students. 
• By the end of the two-day seminar, participants will develop an implementation plan that incorporates one or more strategies.  
• To extend learning beyond the seminar, participants will receive followup consultation, and/or access to a web source of high-quality practices and innovative examples. Participants outside NEC states (CT, ME, MA, NH, VT) will be referred to their state deafblind project. 

Session 1 - February 2 

10:00 AM -12:00 PM EST 
Developing Individual Holistic Communication Profiles on Learners who are Deafblind 
1:00 -3:00 PM EST 
Self-Determination in Prelinguistic to Early Linguistic Communicators who are Deafblind

Session 2 – February 9

9:30 AM -12:00 PM EST 
Classic Literacy Lessons for the Classroom and Home

• Schedules/Calendar Systems
• Choice-Making
• Story Boxes
• Experience Books

1:00 -3:30 PM EST 
Case Study Conversations with Dr. Susan Bruce

There is a $20 registration fee for each day.

Presenter: Dr. Susan Bruce

Dr. Susan Bruce’s prolific career has focused on how students with multiple disabilities-particularly those who are congenitally deafblind develop communication and language. Her action, descriptive, and intervention research has spanned assessment, communication intervention, literacy, rare syndromes, action research, and teacher preparation. 

Learn more on the NEC Events and Trainings page.