Developing Rural Exceptional-educators
to Address Multicultural Students

The DREAMS project is a field-based training collaboration in special and elementary education between Northern Arizona University (NAU) and local school districts in the Yuma and Tuba City areas. The purpose is to train 58 rural pre-service special education/elementary education teachers over a three-year period to deliver high quality service to rural culturally and linguistically diverse exceptional students. DREAMS provides tuition, books, and cultural expenses for participants.

In addition to the field-based students who live for one semester each in Tuba City and Yuma, the program works with 40 rural paraprofessionals (primarily Native American and Mexican-American) who due to time, distance, and finances, are not able to attend the university to become certified teachers. The Native American and Mexican-American paraprofessionals in the project along with the field-based participants receive all the NAU Special and Elementary Education courses necessary for teacher certification in Elementary Education as well as K-12 certification in areas of Emotional Disabilities (ED), Mental Retardation (MR), Learning Disabilities (LD), Orthopedic Impairment (OI), and Other Health Impairments (OHI).

The field-based participants spend the Fall Semester training on the reservation in Tuba City where they attend NAU classes with the Native American participants who work in school on the reservation. In January the field-based participants travel to Cuernavaca, Mexico along with the Yuma paraprofessionals for Spanish Language Immersion and then continue in Yuma during the Spring Semester. All students attend five courses in the summer in Flagstaff, Yuma, and Tuba City via Interactive Instructional Television (IITV).

If you would like more information about DREAMS please send E-mail to Dr. Peterson