Embracing Disabilities in the Classroom

Strategies to Maximize Students? Assets

Toby J. Karten

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781510700956
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica inclusiva

How we treat others often influences how individuals feel about themselves. This book illustrates how educators can effectively promote sensitive, inclusive classroom practices that maximize success for students with disabilities.
Embracing Disabilities in the Classroom provides content-rich interdisciplinary lessons accompanied by behavioral, academic, and social interventions that capitalize on student strengths. Inclusion expert Toby J. Karten demonstrates the impact of literature, self-advocacy, role playing, and strategic interventions on students' growth and achievement. The numerous lessons, tables, rubrics, instructional guidelines, and charts help readers:
• Determine effective strategies for differentiating instruction for specific disabilities
• Modify lessons and curriculum appropriately in the content areas
• Encourage students to become active participants in learning
• Increase disability awareness and foster inclusive mind-sets in students, colleagues, and families
This practical resource provides special education and general education teachers, principals, and teacher leaders with both effective instructional strategies for curriculum delivery and responsive approaches to promoting positive attitudes toward disabilities. Given appropriate support and an accepting environment, all students are able to achieve, thrive, and succeed in school and in life!

PART I

Introducing Disabilities

1

Historical Background of Disabilities

Chapter Highlights: This chapter highlights the historical background of disabilities along with past and current legislation about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and individualized education programs (IEPs). Disability statistics and vocabulary are outlined along with an introduction to response to intervention (RTI) and universal design.

Classroom Connections: Hypothetical scenarios and analogies in this chapter outline the many learning, behavioral, and social concerns that currently exist in inclusive classrooms, communities, homes, and other environments.

Ways to Differentiate Attitudes: Perspectives are given about both visible and unseen disabilities. This chapter addresses how barriers can be removed by focusing on strategies that match and maximize individual students’ strengths and needs.

THEN AND NOW

Sometimes we need to know where we have been to figure out where we are now, and what the future may hold. The following historical perspectives and quotes shed light on past, present, and future perspectives about disabilities.

The hard reality is this. Society in every nation is still infected by the ancient assumption that people with disabilities are less than fully human and therefore, are not fully eligible for the opportunities which are available to other people as a matter of right. (Justin Dart, disability rights activist, 1992, quoted in DEMOS, 2002)

Throughout history, people with disabilities have been treated differently from those who conform to or fit societal norms. The following bulleted list outlines some of those unfair treatments that were acceptable by different societies in given time periods.

• Killed or abandoned in the woods in ancient Greece

• Kept as jesters for nobility in the Roman Empire courts

• Experienced acts of infanticide during the Renaissance

• Drowned and burned during the Spanish Inquisition

• In 1601, Queen Elizabeth’s government divided the poor into three groups. The disabled poor were placed in the group labeled “helpless poor.”

• Kept in cellars in correctional institutions in early colonial America if family support was not available; people then paid admission to gawk at the oddities.

• Dehumanization in orphanages and asylums in nineteenth-century Europe

• Primary care given by the family at home in the early history of the United States instead of children being allowed out in public, e.g., homeschooled and excluded from community activities

• “Institution for Idiots” founded in Massachusetts in 1848

• Shackled to their beds in U.S. institutions because there was an insufficient number of staff members to care for residents

• Involuntary sterilization of people with developmental disabilities in the United States, beginning in 1907, to prevent the passing on of inferior traits

• Considered by eugenicists as defective and an interference with the process of “natural selection”

• Gassed, drugged, blood let, and euthanized in Nazi Germany

• Institutionalized regardless of needs, e.g., person with cerebral palsy was considered mentally retarded

• Housed in separate institutions throughout the world

• Not allowed to attend neighborhood schools

• Aversion techniques used

• Seclusion policies applied

• Restraint applied

• Abuse prevalent (physical, mental, sexual, financial)

• Victimized with inhumane treatments

• Lives devalued

• Stigmatized as criminals

• Viewed as sickly

• Inaccurately tested

• Inappropriate labels and services rendered

During World War II, when many jobs were left vacant in the United States, adults with disabilities joined the workforce, showing their competencies, until returning soldiers replaced them in the years following the war. Thankfully, during the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement began and created an even more favorable climate for people with disabilities to continue to enter and succeed in the workforce and beyond. When the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities in institutions in the United States was exposed, this laid down a supportive stage for improving conditions inside and outside of schools for people with disabilities. Eventually, more civil rights and educational laws were passed that consequently changed and expanded services for students and adults with disabilities. This led to the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities and altered the way society viewed disabilities in general. Group homes became the norm rather than the exception, and more community integration came to be afforded to people with disabilities, with settings that promote independent living. Appropriate education was advocated by U.S. presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. The table on the next page gives some of these directives, implications, and the beneficial results for people with disabilities in the United States.

Legislation today is continually replacing skewed views with ones that allow students of all ages and abilities to maximize their potential. Limitations may exist for those with disabilities, but many of the additional imposed anchors have been removed and replaced with not only life preservers to stay afloat, but also the opportunity for smooth and pleasurable sailing.

Public Law 94-142 (the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975) introduced a piece of legislation that drastically improved the way students with disabilities were treated in school settings. Consequently, through the decades that followed, peoples’ attitudes toward children and adults with disabilities have become more accepting. The earlier subhuman institutions were replaced with mindsets that advocated community integration. Each decade that followed P.L. 94-142 has added more provisions and continues to recognize future possibilities by not only leaving the educational door ajar, but also placing a welcome mat outside every classroom!

Services now include recognizing students and those of all ages as individuals who have the same basic needs and desires. Equal treatment in schools, private and government facilities, and community activities eventually translates to students with disabilities succeeding in life. With positive educational and social experiences, people with differing cognitive, physical, and social abilities and levels are primed to become happy and productive citizens and adults.

So why can’t we see students’ difficulties as human variation rather than pathology? (Reid & Valle, 2004)

Maybe one day we will!

OUT AND ABOUT

Increased visibility of persons with disabilities came about as the logical extension of the independent living, normalization, and self-advocacy movements of recent decades. (Ward, 1996)

Unfortunately, this visibility did not automatically translate into acceptance by school personnel, community, and other students. The way someone views another person is dependent upon factors such as his or her comfort level; prior background and experiences, be they positive or negative; cognitive levels; social skills; and feelings of self-esteem. This complicates issues about how a student with a difference is viewed.

Quite often, students try to “overcome” or hide their disability and don’t even ask for help because they are afraid of being seen as more disabled. In addition, relationships and viewpoints of others at times influence individual successes and failures of students with disabilities in school settings, communities, and in their adult lives.

Table 1.1 Legislative Accomplishments and Disability Directives

Legislative Accomplishments and Disability Directives	Implications and Results
In 1947, the President’s Committee on National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week was established by President Truman.	Today that week is now expanded to a month in October, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, to increase public awareness and job opportunities for individuals with disabilities.
In the 1950s, Vocational Rehabilitative Amendments along with U.S. Civil Service Commission directives were passed. In 1954, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education had a major impact upon integration and other civil rights movements ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Part I: Introducing Disabilities
• Part II: Classroom Implications
• Part III: Schools, Families, and the Future
• Appendix A: Differentiating and Assessing Attitudes With Ability Awareness Rubrics
• Appendix B: Enabling Versus Challenging Your Students
• Appendix C: Student Data Documentation
• Appendix D: Increasing Communication and Collaboration
• Bibliography
• Index