Ability Privilege Lesson
This activity is designed for students to reflect on their own lives and their privilege status. Unfortunately in our society certain groups can navigate with ease, while others must fight for their basic rights. Students will reflect on how their ability (able-bodied or disabled) affects their lives and how they can use their privilege to help others.
Image Description: various heights of different colored bars lined up next to one another. The words “Ability Privilege” towards the top.
Disability History through Primary Sources
As our friends from Engaging America state, “Primary sources … can provide entry points and deepen exploration into historical events. Primary sources add immediacy, such as the faces in a photograph, the emotional tone of a drawing or song, or the complex look of a handwritten document. Documents from multiple points of view can illuminate conflicting ideas and events. Varied media, including maps, oral histories, published reports, and graphs offer many options for connection and investigation”.
We share these collections or primary sources as tools to continue introducing disability into the conversation from natural perspectives, using disabled people to tell their own stories whenever possible.
Image Description: Article from Dallas Times Herald, Wednesday, January 14, 1986 in section “Community Close-Up” titled “Police on sidewalk wheelchair ramps changed”
Full image description can be found at: https://adaptmuseum.net/gallery/picture.php?/451/category/16
We Want to Go to School
Using the book "We Want to Go to School," students will learn about the segregation of students with disabilities in the school setting. They will learn about the barriers that prevented students from attending school and the progression and processes to challenge and remove those barriers.
Image Description: Cover of We Want to Go to School! The Fight for Disability Rights by Maryann Cocoa-Leffler & Janine Leffler. The cover artwork shows five children behind a table that has papers and a gavel on it.