Support for Teaching Disability History
Find up to date program details on teaching disability history on this page.
Keene State College (KSC) is pleased to announce a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) grant for a project to advance: Teaching Disability History in Rural Communities: Primary Source Investigations by ALL Learners. Awarded to KSC in September, the grant provides one year of funding, with the possibility of two additional one-year grants, contingent upon successful delivery of TPS educational projects based on the Library’s digitized materials.
Since 2006, Congress has appropriated funds to the TPS program to establish and fund a consortium of organizations working to incorporate “the digital collections of the Library of Congress into educational curricula.” Each year, members of the TPS Consortium support tens of thousands of learners to build knowledge, engagement and critical thinking skills with items from the Library’s collections.
KSC will host a one-day conference July 8, 2025 of school-age teachers, instructors of pre-service teachers, disability historians, disability studies educators, and disability rights advocates from across the U.S. to discuss ways to expand and strengthen the teaching of stories of disability history in K-12 schools. Participants will share the curricula and projects that they are working on now and strategize ways to enlist new teachers in this emerging movement. In future years, project partners will host this annual conference at the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and at the University of Texas at Arlington.
Graham Warder, Chair of the KSC History Department, will direct the project. Warder has long been active in the field of disability history, beginning in 2000 as Cataloger and Acquisitions Director of the all-digital Disability History Museum, www.disabilitymuseum.org. The disability history curriculum on that website was partially financed by a National Endowment for the Humanities We the People grant to KSC, “Becoming Helen Keller,” for which Warder served as Project Director. PBS broadcast an American Masters film of that title in 2021.
Warder served as lead historian in the development of the nation’s most comprehensive K-12 disability history curriculum: Reform to Equal Rights, published online at: https://emergingamerica.org/disability-history-curriculum by the Emerging America program of the Collaborative for Educational Services. Emerging America also published an online exhibit with Warder’s guidance featuring stories of disabled Civil War veterans and the people and institutions that supported them. Both projects were funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. The principal author of the curriculum, Rich Cairn from Emerging America, will also collaborate extensively with KSC on the new project.
KSC and its partners will work with local teachers to develop a series of guides to conducting research on disability history in middle and high school classrooms. Topics will feature the experiences of people with disabilities, including rural citizens, in New Hampshire, in Iowa, and in Texas. Additional topics will explore the stories of disabled veterans; alms houses / poor farms; county homes; centers for independent living; schools for deaf, blind and deaf-blind students; students with intellectual disabilities; asylums; and the disability rights movement. The guides will aid teachers to support student investigation of local stories of disability, including individuals and institutions in students’ own communities. The guides will direct students in how to search and to use primary sources from the collections of the Library of Congress and other national and local archives and libraries. Featured Library of Congress collections will include: Historical American Buildings Survey, Sanborn maps, American Folklife Center, StoryCorps, Veterans History Project, and historic newspaper articles from Chronicling America.
Project partners will extend the virtual conversations of a national group they founded, the Teaching Disability History Interest Group of almost 100 teachers, scholars, disability activists who meet quarterly to share their latest research and work on curriculum. The group also discusses efforts to help teachers meet state standards and/or mandates to teach disability history in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other states. Anyone interested in learning more or in joining the interest group or in participating in the July conference can contact Graham Warder <gwarder@keene.edu> or Rich Cairn <rcairn@collaborative.org>.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
