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Education for children with disabilities
Education for children with disabilities
What negative attitudes exist towards people with a disability
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Recommended: Education for children with disabilities
The Importance of Disabilities Awareness
Disabilities Awareness has played an important role in my life. My present interest in it grew out of my early involvement as a child. In elementary school I was given the chance to serve as a student judge for disabilities awareness art contests sponsored by the NYS Commission on Quality of Care. Children from schools all across New York State were asked to send in drawings to express their personal message of equality and acceptance of people with disabilities. It was frightening to see how many drawings inadvertently depicted a negative message instead of the positive one called for by the contest guidelines. Later I experienced the same feeling when I judged a disabilities awareness writing contest and read many of the entries submitted by middle school students.
After seeing so many negative representations of people with disabilities, I decided I wanted to do something to help change the common misconceptions the general public had. I started to take notice of the challenges that people with disabilities faced every day. Some of them were concrete problems like the inaccessibility of buildings and the lack of accessible public transportation. I began to notice where people with disabilities couldn't go. I began to see that some of the worst challenges they faced, however, were attitude problems like the endless teasing or using the names of different disabilities as insults. I began to notice how people communicated (or failed to communicate) with disabled people. I observed that people thought someone with a disability was only a disability, therefore less human, and inferior to us. Expectations were low for them and they were more often sitting alone in a school cafeteria or not included in social events after school.
I hoped that my involvement in a New York State publication like the Disabilities Awareness Newsletter would help correct some of the misconceptions and lack of information I observed in my own world. I began to write articles that centered around positive accomplishments achieved by active members of our community who happen to have a disability.
Nancy Mairs, born in 1943, described herself as a radical feminist, pacifist, and cripple. She is crippled because she has multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a chronic disease involving damage to the nerve cells and spinal cord. In her essay Disability, Mairs’ focus is on how disabled people are portrayed, or rather un-portrayed in the media. There is more than one audience that Mairs could have been trying to reach out to with this piece. The less-obvious audience would be disabled people who can connect to her writing because they can relate to it. The more obvious audience would be physically-able people who have yet to notice the lack of disabled people being portrayed by the media. Her purpose is to persuade the audience that disabled people should be shown in the media more often, to help society better cope with and realize the presence of handicapped people. Mairs starts off by saying “For months now I’ve been consciously searching for representation of myself in the media, especially television. I know I’d recognize this self becaus...
‘“Now it’s my turn to make it better for generations that come after, which is why I’ve become, involved in disabilities issues”’ (Open University, 2016a).
The Moving Beyond Pity & Inspiration: Disability as a social Justice Issue by Eli Clare took place on April 16, 2014. Thinking about disability before this lecture I feel like I had a general idea of the things Eli spoke about. I attended a school were more than half of the students had a disability. The terms and stereotypes he mentioned I ha heard since sixth grade.
“Using Disability Studies Theory to Change Disability Services: A Case Study in Student Activism” outlines Syracuse University struggles with disability-related topics. Some of the university’s students formed a committee called Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee to be the voice for the disabled students. The article follows their journey in struggles with implementing handicap-accessible areas and study material for a student that was blind (Cory, White, & Stuckey, 2010). This article reminds me of a close friend from my old neighborhood. He got into a really bad car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. After the accident some friends and I helped his parent modify their home to accommodate for his wheelchair. When tragic accidents like that help it really makes you put thing into perspective.
Once the students begin to feel comfortable, I am flooded with questions. Students are able to expand their knowledge on a variety of disability-related issues. The real challenge is to help them change their perception of people with disabilities. Students have to be convinced that a disability is a limitation and every human has his or her own limitations. A disability is not a sickness someone can catch like a cold. When the students begin to see that we are all equal, then the Disabilities Awareness program has really done its job. The students are stubborn at first to new ideas but, after challenging them, they begin to see the truth behind these ideas and start accepting them.
Beck, A. (1978). Cognitive therapy of depression (The Guildford Clinical Psychology and psychopathology series). New York, N.Y : Guildford Press.
My step-brother was born with autism, but in some ways he is even more intelligent than myself. He has made me a better person and made me want to help others with disabilities in any way I can. In my lifetime I hope that we can eradicate the negative perception that is so commonly associated with mental disabilities. This change will not be brought by time; we can only bring an end to this delusion through education and exposure. It is my goal in life to one day start a charity to educate society on mental disabilities as well as ensure that people with disabilities can get the treatments and accommodations they need. We are all human beings. we all have flaws. No one has the right to feel superior to someone with a
Thorne, D., & Journal, S. W. (1997, Oct 09). Depressed? reach out for help; SIGNS OF DEPRESSION. Edmonton Journal. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/252468581?accountid=32521
Clinical depression is very common. Over nine million Americans are diagnosed with clinical depression at some point in their lives. Many more people suffer from clinical depression because they do not seek treatment. They may feel that depression is a personal weakness, or try to cope with their symptoms alone. On the other hand, some people are comfortable with admitting their symptoms and seeking help. Such a discrepancy may account for the differences in reported cases of depression between men and women, which indicate that more than twice the numbers of women than men are clinically depressed. According to the numbers of reported cases of depression, 25% of women and 10% of men will have one or more episodes of clinical depression during their lifetimes.
Depression is an illness within itself that affects the “whole body”. (Staywell,1998) The body, feelings, thoughts, and behavior are all immensely altered when someone is depressed. It is not a sign of personal weakness, or a condition that can be wished or willed away. For some people depression is just temporary, but for others it can last for weeks, months and even years.
Thanks to Ed Roberts, Mary Switzer and Gini Laurie the 3 major players in the Independent Living and Civil Rights movement, people with disabilities now have access to public schools with an Individualized program, access to buildings, facilities, buses for transportation and are protected by law from discrimination. “Approximately 50 million people today lead independent, self-affirming lives who define themselves according to their personhood their ideas, beliefs, hopes and dreams above and beyond their disability” (A Brief History,
Depression is a mood disorder involving disturbances in emotion (excessive sadness), behavior (loss of interest in one’s usual activities), cognition (thoughts of hopelessness), and body function (fatigue and loss of appetite) (Wade, Tavris 567). Most people don’t even know when depression is happening to them. It usually takes friends, family, or even doctors to notice the symptoms of depression within somebody they know. People that are depressed have the tendency to describe their mood as gloomy, miserable, dreary or uneasy. A lot of victims of depression have additional feelings of worthlessness, doubt, emptiness, pointlessness, unreasonable guilt, boredom, despair, and weakness.
In the essay “Disability,” Nancy Mairs discusses the lack of media attention for the disabled, writing: “To depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself, that it may enter anyone’s life.” An ordinary person has very little exposure to the disabled, and therefore can only draw conclusions from what is seen in the media. As soon as people can picture the disabled as regular people with a debilitating condition, they can begin to respect them and see to their needs without it seeming like an afterthought or a burden. As Mairs wrote: “The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time.” Looking at the issue from this angle, it is easy to see that many disabled people were ordinary people prior to some sort of accident. Mairs develops this po...
In middle school I was diagnosed with a disability with the way I expressed myself through writing. Ever since, I have gained multiple values and learned several lessons about self confidence. I was taught to push past my limits, in order to be successful in reaching my goals along with my dreams. Today I am a senior in high school who was once thought to struggle, but was able to succeed beyond expectations. To some, a disability may seem like a setback from achieving goals, but to me I used it as a challenge for myself. I accepted myself for who I was and looked at my disability as a unique trait of mine. I was able to provide a message to others that anything you set your mind to is possible with dedication and hard work. It might take
I have always grown up in a more ‘normal’ setting and seeing people with disabilities was something that was rare to me. When I was younger, my thoughts on people with disabilities were that they could only be physically seen, nothing else (mentally, intellectually, etc.). As I reached middle school, I realized how broad the world is and how many ways people were affected by disabilities. Some of them led a more normal life and some have a harder time adjusting. Just seeing and reading how so many are affected and how harder it is for them really opened up my mind and allowed me to have a wider perception of how broad things are in the world.