Transcript for Experiences of People with Disabilities (1867-1977)

My name is Wendy Harris and I’m a high school social studies teacher at Metro Deaf School here in St. Paul, and I’ve been working as a teacher-in-residence here at the History Center to pull together primary source sets that we can use in our classrooms. 

One of my sets is about disability history. Many of our students have disabilities, have family members, friends who have disabilities, and so this touches close at home. And disability affects everyone, any identity, intersectional identity that we can imagine, all over time, there’s no place or time that disability has not been present. But it is not in our curriculum, it’s not in our standards, and most schools don’t touch disability history. So it’s very important to bring disability history into our curriculum so students can see themselves, can see their family members, can see their friends in the curriculum, while doing history, using historical skills that they can apply elsewhere. 

This set has three sort of subsets. There are some sets that talk about asylums. We have several different sources about asylums over time. 

We have some sources about policies and definitions of disability over time again, different eras.

And we also have some sources that talk about resilience, joy, resistance.

There are several ways that students can delve into these sources and look at them historically, or economically, or in government, a political way. One way is to look at where people have had agency over time, where people with disability have shown the options to take chances, to make choices, to have some say over their lives.

Another way is to look at evidence of intersectionality. How do all of those other identities impact someone’s experience with a disability? How does race, class, religion, gender, how do all of those impact someone’s experience with a disability?

A third way is to look at the definition of disability. The 1880 census record: what categories are listed there? News articles: what words do they use? How do they categorize people with disabilities? And what do we do today in our schools? We have many students with IEPs or 504 plans. What kinds of disabilities under that and who makes the decision of who has a disability?

All of these are ways that these sources can be pulled into the classroom curriculum and used to enrich our curriculum.