Hello!

This is the beginning of our experience as GEDS (Global Education and Developmental Studies) fellows in UNC (University of North Carolina), Chapel Hill. GEDS is a mobility project for graduate students across the university partners of the Transatlantic Consortium on Early Childhood Intervention, in order to prepare leaders with a global perspective and skills related to educational policy, program development, evaluation, and research. Participants in GEDS will include 24 U.S. and 24 E.U. students, who will gain experiences at their home institution and during a one-semester, full-time experience at an institution abroad involving field placement, seminars, an independent study, and interactive experiences with a foreign language and culture.

We are Susana Castro and Mónica Maia, from Porto University. The first week's stay at UNC has been really exciting! We are based at the School of Education (Peabody Hall, which you can see in this picture). People working at he School of Education are extremely friendly and helpful!

There are lots of interesting things going on at UNC and we will be engaged in as much activities as we can, but today we will focus on FSN (Family Support Network), which stands for exceptional intervention programs completely focused on families of children with disabilities. Here, the focus of intervention is not the child, but whatever is considered by the parent as a need, will make them eligible for the services!

Within the Family Support Network at Orange County (FSN is spread all over the State of North Carolina) there are several programs, directed to the different needs of the family. All resources might be seen at www.fsnnc.org. This website also includes information on laws and policies regulating the special education and early childhood intervention services.

A very recent project developed in FSN relates to supporting military parents with children with disabilities, always considering that the needs are reported by the parents themselves! Marines are a very young population of parents in USA, so most of these children are under age 5, and have specific needs due to the fact that these are military families, where often the father has to go away of his home. In the scope of this project an assessment instrument is being developed concerning the perceptions of these children’s functionality and based on the International Classification of Functionality Disability and Health, Children and Youth version (ICF-CY; WHO, 2007).

In the next posts we will report specific tasks in the scope of the FSN team, as well as other centers we are about to meet and be a part of!