My interest in autism began at an early age. I was 10 years old and in 6th grade at a new public school in south Minneapolis, where they didn’t yet have a gifted & talented program. So once a week I went into a level 3 self-contained Autism classroom to help out in the class. This was in the era when the Feingold Diet was popular. Dr. Benjamin Feingold recommended a diet free from artificial food coloring and flavors to name a few, as it was believed that they caused hyperactivity in children. One memory that stands out was watching a film with the students in this classroom, eating popcorn that had white butter on it (no food coloring).
Many years later, the single mother of a 5-month old boy, I returned to the University of Minnesota after a long hiatus. I found my perfect milieu at the Institute of Child Development, with a built in guinea pig~ my now 31-year-old son. I was drawn to the subject of how children acquire language. Three years later in 1993, I received a Bachelor of Individualized Studies, combining Child Development, Linguistics and Communication Disorders. My area of study was delayed and disordered language acquisition; how humans learn language, the developmental stages that a typically developing child goes through, and what can go wrong in the process.
After several years of working first with children and then wolves (at the International Wolf Center), I went back to Augsburg to get my Elementary Education degree. I taught reading and environmental science for years before I received my ESL license and now Masters degree in ESL~ returning to my passion surrounding children and how they learn language…
Dual Eligible Students 