The department of special education in the College of Education recently received a $793,000 federal grant to train teachers to work with middle and high school students with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Autism, a developmental disorder, affects an individual’s ability to communicate and interact with others. ASD is the term to describe the varying degrees of the condition.

The four-year grant will fund and create specialized courses and practica for teachers and graduate students committed to teaching students with autism. Participants of the program will earn a master’s degree and certification in special education or a specialist’s degree if a master’s degree in special education was already earned.

The program, called the Collaborative Adolescent Autism Teacher Training project, launches this fall and will work closely with Gwinnett, Clarke and Madison county’s special education programs for in-classroom training.

Kevin Ayres, assistant professor of special education and co-director of CAATT, said the program focuses on teaching adolescents with ASD how to live and work in their community as independently as possible.

“In special education, there are a lot of special considerations around ‘transition,’ or the process of moving from school to the ‘real world,’” he said. “Where a typical student might be taking a course on biology, the student with autism might be working at a [plant] nursery like Pike’s learning how to care for plants and attaining job skills.”

Ayres said courses will emphasize teaching teens with ASD how to better navigate their community, teaching about the legal issues that are of importance for teachers of adolescents with autism and how to face the unique challenge of teaching teens with ASD. He said the instruction portion of the program will involve more practice in the community rather than in schools.

Gwinnett, Clarke and Madison counties were chosen as collaborators because they have been great partners in the past and are supportive of the University’s special education efforts, Ayres said.

“We naturally turned to them first,” he said. “They also represent three distinct types of school systems, so our students can get a diverse experience during their practica.”

The grant will support five full-time graduate students through fellowships and tuition stipends as well as seven part-time graduate students who are teaching in the field and desire advanced training. Ayres said the program will be accepting students for each of the next four years and is open to current University undergraduates.

“Hopefully CAATT will give teachers of these teens and young adults the tools they need to advocate on behalf of their students and plan excellent instruction for them,” he said. “This occurs in a lot of places, but perhaps not as uniformly as we would all like to see. I see CAATT as helping teachers become better prepared for these challenges.”