VIDBE-Q Volume 68 Issue 2
18
looked for reasons why my students I graduated from high school, will likely not
finish college —if they made it in— or upon leaving high school, they simply
graduate to their parents' couches. I kept thinking that self-determination has to be
the key to their post-school successes or lack thereof.
As a TVI who completed a traditional teacher preparation program, and as a
current teacher educator, I have been privy to a variety of viewpoints on how the
expanded core curriculum (ECC; Hatlen, 1996) is taught to future educators. In
2007, The Council for Exceptional Children, Division on Visual Impairments and
Deafblindness (CEC-DVIDB) elevated the ECC as a competency area for vision
professionals beginning with their teacher preparation, professional development,
and instruction in the ECC as it became a requirement for accredited teacher
preparation programs (Spungin, 2017).
After multiple comprehensive search efforts, I could not find much in terms
of actual self-determination research with students with visual impairments nor
completed with vision professionals. Rather, my research kept returning to the
broader special education field, to studies completed by Drs. Michael Wehmeyer,
Karrie A. Shogren, Martin Agran, Susan B. Palmer, among many others. Dr. Agran
and colleagues (1999) completed a study with special education teachers in Utah
on their perceptions of self-determination. They found that teachers expressed a
strong support for instruction in self-determination and that they saw many benefits
