OCALICONLINE- Only One Place I Can Go
Last Monday, November 14th, after school I walked around the building, saying goodbye to my coworkers and telling them I would not see them till next Monday (two days after the posting of this installment). One of my co-workers Savannah, who you, the audience, all know as the bride in “A Wedding In Wooster,” was helping out in the after-school program, and she asked, “Wait, why aren't you going to be here for the rest of the week?”
OCALICONLINE was happening from Tuesday to Friday. As a brief refresher, OCALICON is an annual conference with speakers to promote awareness about students with autism and low-incidence disabilities, and this year it's online. My public speaking mentor, and family friend Dr. Brooks, along with Noah's soccer coach Katie and I, were doing a presentation called “Using Contact-Based Interventions to Create Inclusive Learning Spaces.” I didn't blame Savannah for forgetting because the presentation for OCALICONLINE had to be pre-recorded. So at the end of September, I had to take a half-day to record it, and on top of that in October I took another half day to do a separate public speaking event in Dr. Brooks’ class.
While I was excited, since I've been working to get to OCALICON since the summer of 2019, I was slightly disappointed that it was an online event. “Like yeah,” I said to Savannah, “this is going to look great on my resume, and I'm still going to be able to network, but if it was in person I would have gotten to stay in this Swanky Hotel downtown and…you know me, I'm way too social for virtual!”
Savannah laughed and said, “Mitch, you're already off, don't just stay at home…go to a coffee shop and attend. Treat yourself!”
“Savannah, You're a genius!” I exclaimed.
On Tuesday at 11:45 a.m. I went to Crimson Cup Coffee, got a frozen hot chocolate, and waited 15 minutes until the conference kicked off. The conference started with the three keynote speakers, Haben Girma (the first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law), Judy Heumann (who has been a disability advocate her entire life after contracting polio and becoming wheelchair-bound at age two), and Temple Grandin (an American scientist who has Autism and is most famous for her work on animal behavior and for the humane treatment of animals going to slaughter). As I watched I thought to myself, someday I'm going to be a keynote speaker!
I spent Tuesday through Thursday, going to presentations, getting people's emails for later networking, and learning a lot about advocacy and what other people are doing. Then on Friday morning, at 8:45 our session started. It began with Dr. Brooks explaining the class she teaches at OSU to incoming gen ed teachers on what inclusion is. She gave some stats about how many special needs kids are in the gen ed system, and how she knows me. I then took over and gave a condensed version, of the presentation I give in her class, which is basically a bunch of stories about my experiences in school. And finally, Katie took over and talked about her and Dr. Brooks’ findings about the impact of my presentation.
Basically, each time before I would speak in Dr. Brooks’ class, the students would fill out a survey, and they would fill out the same one afterward. I'm not even going to try to touch on the statistics, mostly because I’m the least academic out of the three of us, and I couldn't do it justice in that format, but in extremely dumbed-down terms, having someone on the spectrum explain their story, put a face to Autism and positively impacted these incoming teacher’s understanding of why inclusion is critical to their role as teachers. The recording ended with Dr. Brooks saying, “Hope everyone has a great day…or a Greattastic day as Mitch would say!”
“You beat me to the punch.” Recording me chimed in. As the session ended, I smiled because I knew that there's only one place I can go from here- Up.
Have a Greattastic day and be safe!
J. Mitchie Ulibarri
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