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DS 1504 - K. Kulzer-Reyes: Topics & Background Info

A guide to Disability Services 1504: Cultural Competence toward Disability

Identify a Topic

Finding a research topic that is interesting, relevant, feasible, and worthy of your time may take a lot of time and effort. Remember that as you are searching for a research topic, you will need to be able to find enough information about your topic(s) in a book or scholarly journal. If you can only find information about your topic(s) in current event sources (newspapers, magazines, etc.) then the topic might be too new to have a large body of published scholarly information. Do some background work on a couple of topics before choosing one that may not have a lot of sources.

Sample Topics

  • Disability and Black culture
  • Disability and medical treatment for people from different racial and ethnic communities
  • How culture impacts communication
  • Intersectionality of disability, culture, race, ethnicity, and gender
  • Deaf culture and race or ethnicity
  • Communication, culture, and non-speaking communicators
  • Professional development in cultural humility
  • Exploring the differences between cultural competence and cultural humility
  • Regional center disparity data

Final Project

Part 1: Submit one to two paragraphs about the topic you are thinking about. Include ideas about culture, race, ethnicity, cultural humility and cultural competence. Provide a Reference page with five sources from the TC Library in APA style format.

All sources should be from the Taft College Library. All sources should be published within the last decade. Examples of sources are:

  • At least three chapters from an edited book or a chapter from multiple books. All books must be from the TC Library. You can use eBooks or print books. The books should not be memoirs or personal narratives. They must provide research on the topic.
  • At least two peer-reviewed journal articles from TC Library databases.
  • At least one current news article published by a journalist source. Do not use a web story/clickbait article. You can also use a current report published by an NGO or US government department.

Part 2: Submit the Bibliography with initial sources. Craft a draft of your Reference page that includes three chapters from books/eBooks, two journal articles, and one current news article.

 

 

Finding background information

Library reference sources, such as encyclopedias, are a great place to find objective background information on your topic. They can also help you narrow your topic and discover keywords for further searching.  A great source for background information is biographical works of the author.  These sources provide cultural, political, and religious perspectives that help you understand why the author wrote the story.

You can search by author's name and/or title of the book in Literature Resource Center: it provides biographies of contemporary authors.