About a year and a half after Tina Arora came to the Long Beach Unified School District as a special education teacher, she was asked to begin a program for students with autism. Tina had experienced great success in her first assignment with students who had moderate to severe physical and mental disabilities. Working with other teachers, she had succeeded in placing all of them in mainstream third to fifth grade classes. Her new assignment, however, presented some significant challenges.

Children with autism typically have "large gaps in their socialization and communication skills," she says. One expression of autism is no expression at all; children simply don’t talk. During her time in Long Beach, Tina worked with "several children who had never spoken a word in their lives, and then as you work with them, you hear two words, three words—it’s very rewarding," she says. One strategy Tina used was to take the tiniest suggestion of communication and build on it. "Even a look, a glance is a type of communication," she says, "so you draw on that, lengthen it."

Despite her success—or perhaps because of it—Tina decided to put aside teaching for a time and go back to school herself. She signed up for the joint doctoral program offered by California State University, Los Angeles, and UCLA, aiming for a doctoral degree in special education with a focus on autism and moderate to severe physical disabilities. "The need for qualified trained people to teach youngsters with disabilities is huge, and not only in California," she says.

Having completed coursework at CSULA and UCLA and passed her qualifying exams in her second year, Tina is focused now on her dissertation, research that focuses on a typical behavior related to autism, perseveration. Youngsters with autism may become fixated on an action, object, or a word, unwilling to move on when their peers do. For example, in terms of language, a child with autism might "go on and on and on and on about frogs, long after the classroom has finished with the topic and moved on," Tina says. Or a child might repeat an action or become attached to an object and resist turning to another activity. Such behavior can be "a hindrance to social interaction," Tina says. "You see the frustration sometimes on parents' faces," and the perseverative behaviors "are also very hard to deal with in the classroom."

For her dissertation research, Tina is examining videotapes of children with autism and their mothers, which were made during a research project examining the impact of joint attention—when an adult and the child coordinate their gaze—and symbolic play intervention on children with autism. Tina is looking specifically for repetitive behavior involving actions, objects, or language, variables no one has previously examined in relation to joint attention. Part of the reason for the lack of research is that it can be difficult to establish objective criteria that distinguish normative repetition from perseveration.

Tina traces her interest in autism back to her years at J.B.A.S. College at the University of Madras, where she got a master’s degree. Although her thesis discussed the influence of play therapy on children with cerebral palsy, she was also intrigued by a set of symptoms that was called infantile schizophrenia in an outdated book at the time but is now referred to as autism. Driven by her desire to get an education "that would help me work with children with disabilities," Tina traveled half way around the world to Kent State University, where she obtained a master’s degree in the education of students with moderate to severe disabilities.

Clearly, Tina’s research responds to an important social need, but other elements of her UCLA career have also been need-focused. As co-president of the Graduate Student Association in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSEIS), Tina worked to build a sense of community among the various departments and programs in the professional school—for example, through an orientation for all of the school’s first-year graduate students and numerous other activities.

When a faculty member pointed out that the school had once published a journal, Tina got together with students from various GSEIS programs and established InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education & Information Studies, a peer-reviewed online academic journal for work by what she calls "up-and-coming scholars," graduate students and new faculty members. In its first issue, the journal recorded 5,000 downloads.

Joining the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Disability, Tina has helped in the creation of a minor in disabilities studies—spanning English, psychology, history, and medicine—which may debut as early as this Fall. A certificate program has already begun at UCLA Extension, and Tina serves on its Advisory Committee. For all of her efforts, Tina has received UCLA’s Women for Change Student Leadership award.

Even lacking her dissertation and degree, Tina has received some tentative job offers, but she’s uncertain about her next direction. "I always thought that I wanted to go into a full-time faculty position at a university," she says, one that would include "doing interventions with school districts for children with disabilities." On the other hand, she says, "I definitely enjoy working one on one with a child—and I would definitely want to train other teachers." Tina isn’t ready to decide. "I go back and forth in my head," she says, "when I have a few minutes to think about it."

One plan is definite: a return to India, where she grew up, at least to present workshops. Although autism is an identified disability in India, there are no school programs across the country to respond. "It’s not because they don’t want to," Tina says, but rather because they lack "up-to-date strategies." When she was a student in India, she says, it often took a lot of hunting to track down a specific book, and finding even one copy "was like you hit gold." She would like to take to India some of the latest techniques for helping children with autism.

Tina doesn’t think her commitment to helping others is unusual, but she adds that "the less you have, the more you appreciate what’s out there and the difference you can make."

Published in Fall 2006, Graduate Quarterly