Since I am a Turkish beginner-researcher and coming to a developed country from a developing one, I have a consistent urge to create bridges between my hometown country, Turkey, and the US through to develop intercultural educational research, specifically in special education. My picture demonstrates what is happening in Turkey regarding special education: Being NOT able to see the forest for the trees. Eres’s (2010) work leads me to connect the previous phrase to the low expectations that exist because of a child’s status in special education, poverty and other socioeconomic status elements (kin, marriage, etc.). Furthermore, I am reminded of the lack of effective special education providers (from managers to educational leaders), which diminishes the chance for building awareness of disability culture in Turkey.
Special education attracts attention in Turkey in legal and academic areas. However, it is hard to envision a life-changing improvement in education for people with disabilities and a related ‘education’ of society to accept and respect to disability culture. All of these reasons make it very hard for special education professionals to see learning as a vehicle to increase quality of life, instead of a way to instill basic academic-based skills for students with disabilities. This backdrop underlines my research interests: culturally responsive pedagogyand self-determination. I enlarge my research interests by linking up with transition planning, and technology utilization (e.g. Universal Design of Learning-UDL). I scaffold conceptual framework of research by these four fundamentals that I have been exposed to during both of my masters degrees.
My MA thesis from Turkey is about multicultural education and its presence in primary education curricula in Turkey, which gave my research a cultural focus, and spurred me to be fascinated not only by self-empowerment of diversified individuals and their perspective on others, but also be solicitous about society’s view of disability culture and the individuals who are seen as belonging to it. In a similar manner I studied culturally relevant transition curriculum for Turkish autism spectrum disorders (ASD) population in my other master’s degree, which guided me to the following question: What can I do to build a bridge for individuals with disabilities’ across different life-domains? Transition planning and technology utilization, coupled with culturally responsive teaching and self-determination as research themes, will interoperate to help me answer this further question: How can I use technology in Turkey to improve individuals with disabilities’ quality of life after school? Centralizing self-determination of people with disabilities and cooperating with three other foundations gives me a different viewpoint of life, and having the distinct honor of working with Dr. Michael Wehmeyer and Dr. Karrie Shogren makes me more confident about it.
I see cultural differences and barriers in special education regarding the cooperation of those four themes, specifically in Turkey and the US. The difference between the two countries is that there are efficient teaching methods and theories developed in the US but there is an urgent demand for effective interventions in Turkey, and the need to creates a bridge with the US special education system about mentoring to identify those practices to increase quality of life of individuals with disabilities as well as to amp up disability awareness in Turkish society. Currently, I am working on a functional model of self-determination to strengthen reciprocal relation of those four fundamentals in the intercultural context. I invigorate my studies on these stands in order to ‘see the forest’. I am confident about qualitative research methods to strengthen my studies by determining hidden connection patterns’ effects on education, and I am thrilled to get wiser about qualitative research methods in order to elicit underlying general privative elements of society’s lens for disability. Mixing appropriate research methods will stimulate my vision to ‘see the forest’ while considering particular ‘trees’ within the context of disability. Proper application of these methods will not only modify the macro identity of Turkish special education in intercultural context, but will also provide twofold benefit: gradual increment of quality of life for individuals with disabilities, and revision of social awareness of Turkish society towards clique with disabilities.
Last, while my researcher identity is in progress, I decided to scope the foundation first, which is to understand what 'educational research' is. My perception of educational research is parallel with Howe’s positivist dogmas, namely, empirical science-humanities dogma (Howe, 2009, p. 432), which means to me to lessen the gap between evidence-based research and its valuable practices in reality. I firmly believe in my mission on these co-functioning ideologies and relationships between themes of educational research to create a more humanitarian vision by revising the concept of ‘disability’ with ‘different abilities’, carried out through the application of dignity and passion in my research.
References
Eres, F. (2010). Special education in Turkey. US-China Education Review, 7(4), 94-100.
Howe, K. R. (2009). Positivist dogmas, rhetoric, and the education science question. Educational Researcher, 38(6), 428-440.