Though approximately 25% of Americans live with some sort of disability, until recently, the topic of disability history has been largely overlooked in American classrooms.
In an April 2 interview with WGBH Public Radio, Boston, Fred Pelka, a writer and professor of disability advocacy at University of Massachusetts, Amherst noted: “You can’t find a period in history or a place in geography or time where there aren’t people with disabilities. And yet somehow, we’ve barely scratched the surface of that history.”
On a more optimistic note, Pelka admits that in recent years, there’s been a “way overdue” increase in attention to disability history that’s convinced some states to make changes. Nowadays, Massachusetts and several other states celebrate Disability History Month every year in October. Additionally, in 2018, Massachusetts updated its social studies and history curriculums to include lessons about the movement for disability rights. According to WGBH, “The Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education now provides a video resource, The Great Fight for Disability Rights, and associated curriculum to teachers for free if they request it.”
Richard Cairn, history, civics and social studies inclusion specialist at Northampton Massachusetts-based Emerging America, says his organization has also developed a new curriculum called Reform to Equal Rights. The curriculum uses primary source documents such as a 1913 silent film about American Sign Language to teach disability history. The program also connects the disability rights movement to other movements like civil and women’s rights. As Kate Benson, a special education teacher and administrator and president of Belchertown State School Friends Association told WGBH that the Emerging America curriculum teaches history in a more inclusive and intersectional manner than typical history curricula. For example, when teaching about the Civil War, “let’s also talk about institutions for the disabled and what it looked like for soldiers who had shellshock before we knew what shellshock was,” says Benson. “If we’re going to talk about women’s rights and abolitionism, let’s also talk about women’s rights in relation to involuntary commitment to institutions, things like that.”
Benson believes that learning about the history of these institutions and their eventual closures can help students “be advocates for themselves by watching how other people advocated for themselves during that time.”
