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Teaching Disability in United States History Classes Maya L The University of San Francisco USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center Master's Projects and Capstones Theses, Dissertations, Capstones and Projects Spring 5-18-2017 Reimagining Ability, Reimagining America: Teaching Disability in United States History Classes Maya L. Steinborn University of San Francisco, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.usfca.edu/capstone Part of the Accessibility Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Secondary Education and Teaching Commons, Special Education and Teaching Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Steinborn, Maya L., "Reimagining Ability, Reimagining America: Teaching Disability in United States History Classes" (2017). Master's Projects and Capstones. 504. https://repository.usfca.edu/capstone/504 This Project/Capstone is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, Capstones and Projects at USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Projects and Capstones by an authorized administrator of USF Scholarship: a digital repository @ Gleeson Library | Geschke Center. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of San Francisco Reimagining Ability, Reimagining America: Teaching Disability in United States History Classes A Field Project Presented to The Faculty of the School of Education International and Multicultural Education Department In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Human Rights Education by Maya L.G. Steinborn May 2017 ii Reimagining Ability, Reimagining America: Teaching Disability in United States History Classes In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS in HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION by Maya L. G. Steinborn May 2017 UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO Under the guidance and approval of the committee, and approval by all the members, this field project has been accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree. Approved: Monisha Bajaj 4/19/2017 Instructor/Chairperson Date ii iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………. iv Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………….. v Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………. vi Chapter I – Introduction ………………………………………………………………….. 1 Statement of the Problem ………………………………………………………… 1 Purpose of the Project ……………………………………………………………. 4 Theoretical Framework ………………………………………………………….. 7 Significance of the Project ……………………………………………………… 16 Definition of Terms ……………………………………………………………...19 Chapter II – Review of the Literature …………………………………………………... 23 Overview ………………………………………………………………………... 23 Review of the Literature ………………………………………………………... 24 Summary ………………………………………………………………………... 52 Chapter III – The Survey and The Interviews ………………………………………….. 54 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………... 54 Methodology ……………………………………………………………………. 54 The Survey ……………………………………………………………………… 56 The Interviews ……………………………………………………………...…... 69 Limitations of the Data ………………………………....……………………… 75 Significance of the Surveys and Interviews ……………..……………………... 77 Chapter IV – The Project and Its Development ………………………………………… 78 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………... 78 Description of the Project ………………………………………………………. 79 Development of the Project …………………………………………………...... 85 The Project ……………………………………………………………………... 90 Chapter V – Conclusions and Recommendations ………………………………………. 91 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………….. 91 Recommendations ……………………………………………………………….94 References ……………………………………………………………………………...103 Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………...111 iii iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Bar graph showing the distribution of participants’ responses to the question “When did you begin your teaching career?” ……………........................................... 58 2. Bar graph showing participants’ reasons for becoming history teachers. …………...…………………………….. 59 3. Bar graph showing the states in which participants have teaching experience. …………………………………...... 60 4. Bar graph showing what grade level(s) participants have taught. …………………………………………………… 60 5. Bar graph showing the percentage of students of four diversity categories represented in 16 participants’ classrooms. ………………............................................... 62 6. Line graph showing participants’ confidence levels about approaching disability history in their classrooms. One is equivalent to completely unprepared/unconfident and 10 is equivalent to extremely prepared/confident. ……….... 65 7. Bar graph showing how many participants desired different types of professional development or curricular tools. …………….............................................................. 68 iv v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Yafa and Tzipora, Ernestine and my two Lolitas, and those who came before them: thank you for imagining me into existence when imagination was all you had. Your survival, perseverance, and stubbornness made it possible for me to be here today. To my mother and father, who make me laugh and cry in the most Jewish of ways: thank you for making everything possible and reminding me to take everything less seriously. To my auntie, who has given me a home away from home for these past two years and always sends me the disability column from The New York Times: thank you for the best matzo brei in the world, early morning tea, and shtetl magic. To Carol Prince and Jackie Eugster, my comrades in arms: thank you for always being on the other end of the phone, and for keeping me writing (and alive). To Professor Emily Nusbaum: thank you for showing me the beautiful world of disability studies, recommending so many books that have changed my life, and reminding me why we keep fighting the good fight against all odds. I do not know where this project would be without your support. To Professors Monisha Bajaj, Susan Katz, and Shonali Shome: thank you for asking me the hard questions and showing me how to put scholarship into action. Your classes brought human rights to life and taught me to write with color and compassion, always centralizing the real-world stories that make this work so necessary. To Professors Nancy Bristow, Katherine Smith, John Lear, and Edward Wilkinson: thank you for showing me the magic and craft of history. Your classes gave me the lenses through which I now understand the world, and your red-ink edits have made me the scholar I am today. v vi ABSTRACT In service to the FAIR Education Act (2012) and the awareness-raising mission of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2008), this project reviews historical and educational literature about disability in the United States and provides a curriculum guide for teaching Human Rights Education (HRE) and disability studies (DS) at the high school level in California. This project traces the historical development of deficit attitudes toward disability back to the colonial era, uncovering the dichotomy between the vast resources in DS and the ableist omission of disability from K-12 curricula. Survey data and interviews further show how teachers lack the resources or knowledge to incorporate disability history into their syllabi despite their willingness to engage in the topic. In response to participants’ expressing the need for primary source materials and professional development resources related to disability, “Reimagining America: Reading U.S. History through Human Rights and Critical Disability Studies” was created, containing a glossary of key terms, an accessibility checklist, and a standards-aligned syllabus with seven lesson plans for bringing HRE and DS into an 11th- grade U.S. History course. Suggestions are provided for bringing DS into other core classes in K-12 settings. Keywords: disability studies, dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit), critical social studies education, U.S. history, curriculum development, Human Rights Education (HRE) vi 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Those with power can afford to tell their story or not. Those without power risk everything to tell their story and must. Someone, somewhere will hear your story and decide to fight, to live and refuse compromise. Someone else will tell her own story, risking everything. —Laura Hershey, Telling Statement of the Problem Since the beginning of American colonization, people’s worth has been assessed through the language of disability, through ideas of difference as it is written onto the body – including skin color, gender, size, social behavior, ambulation, speech, and vision – as if such difference is a problem that makes people unfit to participate in the body politic (DuBois, 1920; Groce & Sheer, 1990; Valencia, 1997; Annamma, Connor & Ferri, 2013). In the words of disabled scholar and disability justice activist Paul K. Longmore (2003), “This approach not only medicalizes disability, it thereby individualizes and 2 privatizes what is in fundamental ways a social and political problem” (p. 4). These stereotypes severely limit the societal acceptance and economic well being of disabled people, which is statistically significant in that poverty rates among disabled people range anywhere from 50 percent to 300 percent higher than in the population at large… The unemployment rate among those who report any form of disability is five times the national average… They tend to be socially isolated […and] are twice as likely to live alone. (Longmore, 2003, pp. 19-20)
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