Running on Empty: Exploring Parent Perceptions of Special Education Processes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though educational legislation in Ontario promotes parental involvement in special education, collaboration between educators and families from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds must be improved. Thus, this qualitative study explored the lived realities of five immigrant Indian and Pakistani families of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as they navigated Individual Education Plan (IEP) meetings. Via semi-structured interviews, the study details how these parents understood, perceived, and experienced their roles in a collaborative relationship between special education and school personnel and themselves, before, during, and after the IEP meeting. The analysis was informed by four theoretical frameworks: Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s Model for Parental Involvement (1995, 1997), Bourdieu’s theory of capitals, Foucault’s analytics of power, and Positioning theory. The findings suggest that Indian and Pakistani parents encounter a number of barriers that prevent meaningful participation in their child’s special education, including unfamiliarity with the schooling system and a lack of knowledge regarding special education services and legislation. The participants showcased varying levels of capital, though most found themselves oscillating between five distinct positions when interacting and negotiating with special education professionals: the disenfranchised dependent, the trusting caregiver, the child expert, the lonely advocate, and the hopeful partner. Being aware of and addressing these barriers and dynamics can improve special education processes within schools, education boards, and teacher education programs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".