ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a course component designed to enhance pre-service teachers’ understanding of and empathy toward parents of children with disabilities and engender support for inclusion and collaboration. Pre-service teachers were given the opportunity to “walk a mile in a parent’s shoes” by becoming the parent of a virtual child with a disability. Activities across eight sessions, spanning birth through early adolescence, required them to reflect on a variety of situations from the point of view of a parent of a child with a disability. Journal entries reflected increased empathy for parents and transformed perspectives of inclusion and collaboration.
