living skills, recreation, and leisure. In a desire to extend my limited knowledge of special education and
return to the residential program in the upcoming summer break, I began to search for courses in special
education when I returned to the UA. As I scrolled through the list of courses, I quickly found each course
was full. Eventually, after much scrolling, I found and added the first available course, "SERP 424:
Methods of Teaching the Visually Impaired". As an undergraduate psychology major thus far, I was used
to large auditoriums filled with a myriad of students. This class was quite different. The class consisted
of about 12 students, and rather than beginning with a class dedicated to lecture, we began the semester
by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches under blindfold with a partner to learn how to conduct a
discrepancy analysis. Needless to say, in a few short weeks I decided to minor in special education and
continued to take courses with the professors in the visual impairment program until graduation.
In my junior year as an undergraduate student, I was selected to join the 2009 cohort of McNair
Scholars through the UA Ronald E. McNair Achievement Program, a program dedicated to preparing
underrepresented minority and first generation undergraduate students for doctoral studies through
research and scholarship. By the end of the summer, under the guidance of McNair advisors and faculty
mentors, I produced an unpublished qualitative research report entitled, The service and experiences of
Native Americans with visual impairments. Though extensive research had been conducted on the self
determination of sovereign American Indian nations and in the field of special education, there were no
studies which examined self-determination among American Indians with visual impairments and the
availability of services (i.e. orientation and mobility, self-advocacy, rehabilitation, daily living skills and
etc.). Given that self-determination and self-advocacy information with this unique population was
relatively unknown, I conduct qualitative interviews with 2 participants from rural communities and 2
participants from urban cities off the reservation, and asked them to describe the types of services they
received (if any) and their self-advocacy experiences. Using open ended questions, I hoped the vitality
of services would be expressed from each perspective. I was able to share my findings at the 2009 at
VIDBE-Q
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