Teaching Disability Awareness in the Virtual Classroom
By Laura Mufson
Virtual school has forced many educators to rethink how to engage students with social activism from behind a computer screen. I discovered that reading books aloud to my 4th-grade students during the virtual class was one of the times where I had the highest engagement and excitement from my students. In February, we read the book Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper to commemorate an accomplished Black author during Black History Month. It quickly became a class favorite among all of my students. They were fascinated with the life story of Melody, a young girl who was born with cerebral palsy, who is not able to speak or walk on her own and is incredibly intelligent. Our class grew from discussions, to watching videos, and exploring more about cerebral palsy and other disabilities.
Seeing how much my students loved the book, I was encouraged to see if the author, Mrs. Draper, could visit our online classroom. The opportunity to have a speaker come to my class has never been this feasible before the virtual school year because the availability of guest speakers had been limited to the school's community. However, in this new world of online learning, the culture of online author visits, guest speakers, and virtual field trips have allowed many educators to use resources they otherwise did not have access to before. The nature of virtual teaching allowed a simple way to schedule a visit with Mrs. Draper. I was able to email the author directly, tell her a bit about our class, and she responded enthusiastically. I prepared the students for the visit by reading her biography and coming up with questions we wanted to ask her. Needless to say, my students were extremely excited.
Thank you card by a 4th grade student to Sharon Draper.
After the author’s visit, one of my student’s biggest takeaways was that Mrs. Draper wanted to tell the story of a girl with disabilities because she wanted to show how everyone has the potential to achieve their goals no matter who they are. My students’ participation and conversation showed me they were captivated by this visit and wanted to learn more.
Collaborating with colleagues, I was introduced to Sarah Kim, a journalist with cerebral palsy, who conducts talks for schools around New York City. Having had the experience of conducting a virtual visit, I was easily able to coordinate with Mrs. Kim. She joined our class to tell us about living with cerebral palsy and all of her accomplishments, including being voted valedictorian in her high school and getting a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University.
A slide from Mrs. Kim’s presentation to our class.
What impacted my students the most was seeing and hearing from someone with limited ability to speak and who uses a wheelchair, just like the main character Melody from Out of My Mind. They saw many comparisons between the main character and the speaker; the way society misjudged their intelligence because of their physical disability and the barriers they had to overcome to achieve their academic goals. Mrs. Kim mentioned how she was pulled into special education classes in school and was not offered access to advanced classes, so when she got to high school, she demanded that her principal allow her to take AP courses. Students saw this connection to Melody and how she was always put into special education classes and teachers did not believe she was smart because of her cerebral palsy, forcing her mother to advocate for her education.
They were in awe of Sarah’s positive attitude in spite of all the challenges she faced. She told them about how she learned to appreciate even the smallest things, like a sunny day. In the same way, Melody loved simple things, like listening to books. The value of this visit was it allowed my students to humanize the character from the book through someone else’s experience living with a disability. Once the presentation ended, the first thing that my students told me was, “Thank you. Thank you for allowing us to have this incredible experience.” And then immediately after, “Who are we going to have visit us next?!”
Laura E. Mufson is a fourth-grade bilingual teacher and instructional lead in Arlington Public Schools.
Laura also co-wrote “A Spanish Immersion Class Puts Columbus on Trial.”