Winter 2007

Teaching Disability Awareness
in the Classroom

How can educators teach students about various disabilities? How do we motivate them to be aware of differences and sensitivities related to persons with disabilities? Your editor went to various Internet sites to research this topic and found a number of excellent resources. Some sites may not be appropriate for every age group so focus on the ones that best meet your students’ needs:

Special Needs, Special Kids (Disability Awareness) — has been developed by “Jenn” who worked with children with special needs as a volunteer, educational assistant and counselor in Canadian schools and group homes. Heavy on the cute, this site includes resources for support workers and educating the special learner. Use this site for background information and some suggestions on teaching disability awareness.

Disability Awareness — is an online newsletter. This is a special project of a New York State agency, the Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities. It is “a unique statewide project that brings together students with and without disabilities to work cooperatively on a public education program geared especially to the needs and interests of teenagers.”

The newsletter features articles by New York educators and children in grades 8-12 about their experiences and those of family and friends related to disability issues. Also featured is fiction by these students, poetry and artwork also focusing on disability awareness. The most recent newsletter is from 2006, but copies of earlier newsletters are provided.

Boston Children’s Museum — is a terrific resource featuring Disability Awareness Teaching Kits. These are multimedia disability awareness series for elementary school students that include new activities, books and videos. They include a focus on accomplishments and abilities of people with disabilities.

Each unit contains a teacher’s guide with information, resources and activities. These kits are especially recommended for inclusion classrooms to foster understanding among classmates. Units include Introduction, Augmentative and Alternative Communication, Deafness and Hard of Hearing, Learning Disabilities, and other topics.

The rental fee for educators outside of Massachusetts is $25 per unit for two weeks. Updated kits for educators will be available later in the year.

Teaching Tolerance — The Disability Awareness section on this site offers an article about how high school students in Taos, N.M., staged a play confronting issues of prejudice and awareness concerning persons with disabilities. The strategy involves inclusion, bringing students with disabilities into general education classes. It also involves attitude change on the part of the students. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights advocacy group. This project provides free educational materials for educators that promote respect for differences and appreciation of diversity in the classroom and beyond.

CeDIR’s Disability Awareness Site for Youth — For children, from the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, this site is useful for developing sensitivity to people with disabilities. Its graphics are bright and pleasing and it is formatted for text only, or for readers of other languages. CeDIR includes children’s books arranged by disorder or syndrome. There are books about ADD (attention-deficit disorder), ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) and autism — and that’s just the A’s.

Another section is about sign language, Braille and the “language of disability.” You can e-mail children’s essays, poems and art work to the Web site.

Another section focuses on how people with disabilities are portrayed on television and in the movies. Lastly, there are famous people with disabilities, including biographies of celebrities such as Marlee Matlin and Magic Johnson.

National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped — This is one of the best sites with a most extensive bibliography. It provides free reference materials dating from 2003 or earlier. Many articles and books are listed in the NLS Web site on Disability Awareness. The NLS bibliography “explores myths and misconceptions that continue to exist and ways to interact with and write about people with disabilities to foster greater sensitivity and understanding.”

Various topics are listed, but look for topics appropriate to your classroom. Especially recommended are topics such as “In the Classroom” for teaching resources and “In Literature” for children’s literature, which includes adolescent novels that feature characters with disabilities.

In our next issue, we’ll examine Web sites for teaching about the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Teaching Disability Awareness in the Classroom

Teaching Disability Awareness
in the Classroom