In the spring of 2001, Dr. Gladys Williams will teach a week-long class in behavior analysis at the Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa to senior psychology students. Many of these students currently participate in an educational project for twelve children with autism in the city of Mazatlán in the state of Sinaloa, México. This project began in the spring of 2000 when several parents, led by Dr. Arturo Santamaría—a sociology professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa, and himself the father of a child with autism—decided to organize themselves to provide the education for their children. The project, coordinated also by Dr. Luis Antonio Pérez-Gonzalez from the University of Oviedo, Spain, consists of implementing an educational program based on applied behavior analysis.
The objectives of the program are to train and teach the teachers and parents of the children so that they can help their children overcome their learning difficulties. This group of parents is formed by families with very low resources. For example, one of the families lives in a "chavola," a home made with their own hands of cardboard and metal. The parents maintain the program with money they raise through social events, to compliment their own resources. Recently, a family donated the use of an old house, free of rent. The parents got together to fix it and clean it, and at the end they had a very nice place that they could call "School". In this house six children receive individualized instruction in the morning and six children in the afternoon.
The project has had the good fortune to count on young, ambitious and intelligent university students (special education and psychology) from the Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa, who have been doing volunteer work under difficult circumstances. The money from the grant will be well utilized to assist this group of students and parents to pay for travel and accommodation while taking Dr. Williams’s class.
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