It was when he was a kid at a summer camp in Michigan that Jordan Shurr first started to understand what was possible for people with disabilities.
Dr. Shurr, an associate professor in the Queen’s Department of Education, watched children with disabilities participate with all the wild abandon of any kid at camp.
“These were kids who normally had a lot of restrictions on them and, for the first time, they got to stay up late. They could get their wheelchairs dirty. They could be silly and eat junk food. It was a life-changing experience for them.”
And for Dr. Shurr, it was the beginning of a journey in education. At Queen’s, his research continues to search for ways to help educators reach into the world of exceptionalities and for new ways to measure success.
Technology has helped. Advances in artificial intelligence and programs such as ChatGPT, for example, allow teachers to quickly take a complex text and simplify its language while maintaining essential terms and jargon vital to the subject matter. Even something as simple as adding images can make abstract concepts more concrete.
“If somebody has a chemistry textbook and reads it to me eight times, it’s probably not going to help me,” Dr. Shurr says. “I don’t have the context or the background to understand it. So, pictures plus discussion is a way of bringing that out. It gives that student a chance to talk. You can see what the student knows, then find ways to build on that.”
Dr. Shurr has seen how effective simple changes can be.
… Pictures plus discussion is a way of bringing [understanding] out. It gives that student a chance to talk. You can see what the student knows, then find ways to build on that.
“The most telling thing for me is when I asked them what they remembered about the story – and these are kids with pretty significant communication issues,” he says. “Before I did the intervention, they would just stare at me or stare at the floor. The message was, ‘I don’t want to engage. I’m shutting down.’ But when we did this forum with pictures, I couldn’t stop them from talking. They felt they were invited into the learning process.”
Assistive technology is nothing new in education for students with exceptionalities. Tablets and iPads were quickly adopted in the classroom. But Dr. Shurr’s research looks at how to measure the effectiveness of those tools. In education, there’s no such thing as one size fits all.
“Technology democratized access, but it also opened the door for a lot of things that aren’t well put together. That’s always been a problem with assistive technology. It has to be a match with the people who are using it, the context they’re using it in, and their strengths and needs,” he says.
“Putting an iPad in front of someone sometimes does more harm than good. If they’re given an iPad with an app that’s supposed to help them without first ensuring that it’s a good match for the student’s needs, then they might not ever want to use it again.”
Dr. Shurr is also helping to harness and mentor the skills of his own students at Queen’s by establishing a research group where ideas can be shared. ADD*Ed – the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Research Group – is focused on promoting research, innovation, and engagement in education for students with autism and other developmental disabilities.
“I saw that students who were interested in special and inclusive education were having a hard time finding their place,” Dr. Shurr says. “I thought, ‘We’ll make a research group and get those students together every couple of weeks and talk about what they’re working on, what conferences there are, we’ll talk about journals.’ It’s just a nice place for them to find a home.”
One offshoot has been to establish an online magazine, also called ADD*Ed, that highlights the latest research in the field from Queen’s and around the world. Dr. Shurr hopes the magazine and the research it presents will be useful for educators, who may not be aware of research and ideas happening beyond their own school board, province, or country.
“We have more time than teachers to do something like this,” Dr. Shurr says. “We have expertise. We have connections and networks. We have time to step back and think deeply about these things. That’s part of our jobs.”
