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Winter Course on Using Inquiry and Primary Sources to Increase Access for ALL

Published on Fri, 01/15/2021

Amazing and student-empowering teacher-created lesson plans have been the result each time we offer this course! 

Our online graduate-level one-credit course, Accessing Inquiry for Students with Disabilities through Primary Sources, offered from January 16 to March 18, provides an opportunity to expand your comfort with finding and using primary sources to engage students of all abilities. Discuss strategies and tools with seasoned educators and creative colleagues around the country through the online discussions throughout the month. 

Putting Primary Sources in Order - Text Set and Flow Map

Organizing a rich text set of primary sources requires that students analyze and make sense of several sources on a topic. In this case, they seek to answer a focused guiding question. Students sort through about a dozen images, letters, forms, and political cartoon. In practice, a teacher could offer fewer sources, though it is a valuable sometimes to require students to choose among sources. The primary sources are also give context by a secondary source narrative from the Veterans Administration. 

Wendy Harris guest post: What exactly is a disability?

Published on Tue, 09/22/2020

In celebration of our new course on teaching disability history in the K-12 classroom, we invited Wendy Harris, a teacher at a school for the Deaf with expertise in teaching DeafBlind students, to share her thoughts about disability with us. The topic of Deafness as a disability gives the opportunity to begin with an exploration of the conception of DISABILITY itself, and the question of what abilities and attributes should be regarded as a disadvantage or an equally valid and valuable difference in experience of the world. This is where Wendy Harris's reflections begin. 

Disability History Primary Source Set

Disability History: From Almshouses to Civil Rights

UPDATED IN 2020. The following primary source set, created using materials from the Library of Congress, contains an array of sources focused on Disability History in the United States. Disability has been interwoven into America’s history since the country’s inception through letters, images, newspapers, diaries and other primary sources. The set provides a comprehensive look into a wide range of Library of Congress resources.

Polio Primary Source Set

Closed movie theaters, church services, and summer camps – special hospital wards with ventilators called ‘iron lungs’ for polio patients with the most severe cases – parallels between polio and coronavirus epidemics are numerous. What lessons can we learn from history?

Civil Rights & Disability: 1990 ADA, IDEA, & the Juvenile Justice System Today

Kelley McDermott, History teacher in a Massachusetts Department of Youth Services facility developed this lesson to attract her 8th grade students interest in research and public policy. Historically, students with disabilities are disproportionally caught up in the juvenile justice system. The lesson employs many strategies and tools for accessibility from Emerging America's Accessing Inquiry course. These include a focus vocabulary analysis and Universal Design for Learning plan.

Recommended Social Justice Books on Disability

From Social Justice Books: A Teaching for Change Project, this powerful site offers more than 60 curated lists of literature and history books on social justice and multicultural points of view for children, young adults, and educators. Book lists are organized by topic areas–including Changemakers, Disabilities, Immigration (and specific immigrant groups), Organizing, and Voting Rights! 

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