Disability History is Our History
We can and should gain a better understanding of disability history and teach it in school.
Remembering Judith Ellen Heumann (December 18, 1947 – March 4, 2023), a disability rights activist who was the first person in a wheelchair to become a teacher in New York City. Heumann is often considered the “mother” of the disability rights movement, having lead numerous significant actions, including the 1972 Madison Ave Sit-In and 1977 504 Sit-In, before becoming an internationally-recognized figure in the movement.
Last year, one of my juniors turned to me mid-semester and asked, “Can we do a unit on disability in US history?”
The student, we’ll call him Jack, was on my caseload and one of two students at my school with a physical disability. He wanted to see himself reflected in the curriculum. Jack is a brilliant creative– an astonishing playwright, songwriter, and actor. He is a music fan with eclectic taste. Jack is thoughtful and observant; he is patient with his teachers, peers, and friends– even when we don't always deserve it. He plans to study psychology in college, and from what I have seen, will make a phenomenal therapist (if that’s what he still wants to do after graduation).
At first, the question provoked a sense of panic. Not because I didn’t immediately believe it was a great idea, and not because I didn’t know where to start with the content (in my special education masters program, I took several classes that examined the history of disability and felt confident I could build a curriculum around it), but because even though it has occurred to me a thousand times, it is always unsettling to be reminded that we never teach students about disability. On top of that, as a co-teacher in an inclusion setting, I do not make executive, authoritative decisions on curriculum and content in my classes. For those who don’t know, co-teaching is a collaborative approach to teaching in classrooms that include students with disabilities. There are several models of co-teaching, but the main ones we implement at my school are team teaching and one teach, one assist.
I responded confidently, “Yes! I love this idea!” My voice trembled as I attempted to form my next sentence: “Let me check with Mrs. McIntosh1 (my co-teacher) to see if it will fit into the schedule.” But in my mind, it was non-negotiable. If a student is brave enough to advocate for their ideas, ask teachers to educate both themselves and their peers (about a topic largely ignored in education and society at large, a topic that, according to the Center for Disease Control, impacts one in four people), then we must adapt. Just like the difficult centuries-long history of displacement, genocide, and slavery in America, and as a culture, we must address disability history. It is our history. We must acknowledge it.
Now, my co-teacher is the content specialist, and I defer to her expertise on the content of the curriculum for this class; of course, I voice my opinion when I want to, and I share and implement strategies for teaching the content to diverse learners for each unit, lesson, assessment, etc. There was no doubt in my mind that my co-teacher would be open to this idea. I feared that because the units were already carefully curated (almost to the minute), there might not be room to add another topic. Luckily, we are seasoned teachers who prudently left flex days at the end of the year. During the Civil Rights unit, I had fashioned a lesson on LGBTQ+ rights and was able to create two lessons on disability rights– on Day 1, we focused on disability history in the United States, and on Day 2, we focused on the history of disability rights in our country.
The results were moving. Students were very invested in the topic from the get-go. Several students have IEPs and 504s (especially in our co-taught section) or have friend or sibling who does. Many students know someone who uses assistive technology– at a bare minimum, they have encountered people with disabilities in the world and were able to grapple with the reality that anyone can become disabled at any time for any reason. Before we got to the heart of the lesson, we were able to have thoughtful conversations about accommodations and modifications, accessibility, and different types of disabilities (physical, intellectual and developmental, behavioral or emotional, and sensory impaired disorders). Students were given space to share their experiences out loud or in writing.
Then came the tough part– admitting to our history and reckoning with the terrible ways society has treated people with disabilities over centuries. We read a brief history of the disability rights movement and did an activity with a timeline of disability history. We went over different models of disability and discussed eugenics and disability discrimination. We watched part of Judith Heumann’s Ted Talk, the trailer for Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, and viewed images from the 1990 capital crawl that propelled the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law with bi-partisan support (religious extremists and proponents of large business being the only ghouls on the planet opposing it).
They learned about so-called “ugly laws” that lasted from 1867 until 1974 (1974!) in various American cities that targeted poor people and people with disabilities, making it illegal for them to BE IN PUBLIC, pushing them into institutions and to work in circuses and freak shows. We made connections to Black history, specifically the 1954 landmark supreme court Brown v. Board of Education decision that determined segregation on the basis of race violated equal educational opportunity, the gateway to a now-prevalent understanding that all people, regardless of race, gender, or disability, have a right to a public education.
The 1954 ruling broke ground for the 1975 federal law (now called IDEA, or Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) requiring access to a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE) for all children with disabilities. Until this law, many states had laws explicitly excluding children with disabilities from public education. More than three million children with disabilities attended school in segregated facilities, receiving abysmal instruction, while more than one million had no access to the public school system whatsoever and were housed at state institutions where they received shockingly poor to non-existent educational and rehabilitation services.
Many adults– many scholars even– are not well-versed in a history that we are inextricably linked to, whether we or someone we know is disabled, or whether we or they will be one day. Is it because people with disabilities were not seen as fit for public life or civic action for so long that their stories were not documented? Is it that it makes us comfortable to erase the parts of history we are most ashamed of?
US history is largely taught as the story of independent and rugged individualists who labor through blood, sweat, and tears, toward success and label themselves “self-made.” But the reality is we are all interconnected. As Kim E. Nielsen writes in the introduction of her book A Disability History of the United States:
“In real life… just as in real democracy, all of us are dependent on others. All of us contribute to and benefit from the care of others– as taxpayers, as recipients of public education, as the children of parents, as those who use public roads and transportation, as beneficiaries of publicly funded medical research, as those who do not participate in wage work in various life stages, and on and on… Dependency is not bad– indeed it is at the heart of both the human and American experience. It is what makes a community and a democracy.”
Maybe we weren’t explicitly taught the history of disability– it hasn’t been a popular narrative– but it is our history, and collectively, we can and should gain a better understanding of this past, and teach it to our children.
Names have been changed…