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Date: 12/8/2021
NORTHAMPTON – A Massachusetts Humanities Grant of $20,000 has been awarded to the Collaborative for Educational Services (CES) in Northampton, which will be used to fund a portion of a larger national project, a K-12 disability history curriculum.
According to Richard Cairn, the civics and social studies curriculum and instruction specialist for CES, the grant will assist with an overall goal of bringing Disability History into the mainstream K-12 curriculum locally, across the state, and across the U.S.
“We began to get involved in a significant way with teaching Disability History in late-2007, working with the Disability History Museum,” said Cairn, who is also the project director for this. “Specifically thinking about curriculum, we began teaching a course where teachers are learning to teach Social Studies better with students with disabilities.”
As part of that course, teachers were asked to write lesson plans about disability history, and CES began editing the plans, which eventually were published sometime in 2012. Around 500 teachers in total took that course, and CES published 16 out of hundreds of lesson plans from that period. This process has been key in professional development and creating social studies classes that are as accessible as possible for students.
“Doing the curriculum [now] really came out of that experience,” said Cairn. “Nobody’s written a comprehensive K-12 disability history curriculum. Disability history is American history. What we’re doing is turning a different lens on history.”
According to Cairn, the grant will specifically allow CES to share and research stories of disabled Massachusetts veterans of the Civil War in a high school unit on the “Impacts of the Civil War on Soldiers and Society.” As students explore these stories – which will be found through letters, photos, news stories, and military and pension records from a diverse group of soldiers – they will examine enormous changes that took place in the country because of the thousands of veterans from that period in history.
For example, Cairn mentions the story of legendary Dorothea Dix, a Massachusetts native who carried a passionate support for the integration of asylums before the Civil War for people with mental illnesses during a time when there were not many resources. According to Cairn, this story and others in that vein might be mentioned in passing during classes nowadays, but very rarely are they looked at through a disability history lens. Additionally, there were a lot of federal changes that began to take shape during and after the Civil War, especially when it came to Union pensions, and how those were facilitated before and after the war. Other underrepresented stories will be told, as well, dating all the way back to the 1820s.
“This unit that we’re getting funded to do, there’s an important set of bookends for these stories. Looking at all of those stories is a way to make the story much more interesting,” said Cairn.
In exploring different stories during this period of the Civil War, Cain hopes that an awareness of the actions that people with disabilities themselves have taken over the past 200 years to expand their rights and services will be more widely recognized in Massachusetts and the country at large.
“We’re going to make the resources available for teachers so they can tell this story going back all the way back to before the Civil War,” said Cairn. “It’s great for people to be aware, but I’d rather – beyond that – people say, ‘oh, people can make a difference.’”
CES is working with several different Western Massachusetts partners on this project including, their Humanities Advisor Graham Warder, the Veterans Education Project, the Disability History Museum based out of Conway, as well as a bunch of teachers in the area. CES is also working closely with the Massachusetts Historical Society, and they additionally have the support and participation of activists from the #TeamDisabilityHistory campaign from Easter Seals Massachusetts; a non-profit in Worcester.
According to Cairn, the curriculum that is created will be free and posted on the CES website by the end of this school year. To learn more about the curriculum, people can visit http://www.emergingamerica.org/blog/new-mini-units-will-integrate-disability-history-across-k-12-curriculum.