Here are some quotes from the recent The Art of Advocacy show.
If a little bit of therapy is good, then more is better. And so I believed in all that stuff until I got to know adults with disabilities who helped me realize, no, walking is not the most important thing in the world. I just might need a power wheelchair.
Kathie Snow
The medical model undergirds where people with disabilities are continued to be made helpless and dependent on the system and ultimately it is the business. The disability business and people with disabilities, kids and adults are the raw material of a business that keeps millions of people employed while adults with disabilities are not employed.
Kathie
Snow
We need to stop separating ourselves as parents and families and kids. When we maintain this special interest group kind of mentality, that works against us. We need to widen our circle of allies. We need to be concerned about other issues in our school district besides special education issues. This is education for everyone. How are we going to change for everyone?
Charmaine Thaner
One thing I learned from you Kathie, is the difference between the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and other kinds of movements is that they found other Americans, other people in our culture that rallied with them and that is different than what we see with disability rights movement.
Charmaine Thaner
I am a student of adults with disabilities who have taught me so much.
Kathie
Snow
Ed Roberts spoke about how you can be born with a disability, you can acquire disability through an accident or an illness or if you live long enough, you acquire a disability through the aging process. He made the point that people with disabilities make up the largest minority group of any group in the country or in the world for that matter. And it is the only minority group that is totally inclusive. I cannot go join
a minority group of people of color. But people with disabilities represent all gender, socioeconomic, genetic stuff, religion, ethnicity, everything.
Kathie Snow
I look at ways that we can impact the whole education system because we can't keep trying to retro fit and make our education system work for all. I look at all the other marginalized students in every classroom. This is a bigger issue. It's an education issue. It's not a special education issue.
Charmaine Thaner
We've sort of been brainwashed into thinking the most important thing about our kids is to get them to be normal again. We sort of set up this paradigm that you can only belong, you can only be included, you can only live in ordinary life, if you are normal.
Kathie Snow
We wonder why so many adults are not successful. It's because we have not prepared them to live in the real world. We haven't given them the education they need.
Kathie Snow
It is as normal to have a disability as it is to not have one.
Kathie Snow
I would like to see more training for Universal Design for Learning because I think as long as we keep having regular general education versus special education and we have different certifications and we have parallel tracks of training that we're going to still maintain that dual system. So to me, if colleges would teach our teachers the concepts of Universal Design for Learning, then we will have more kids included,
more teachers will have the skills and the background to include students.
Charmaine Thaner
It is frustrating that a lot of special ed teachers and administrators still have this faulty belief, this myth, that something magical and special happens in the special ed room and they don't realize what really happens is our kids are missing out on that rich environment in the general ed classroom.
Charmaine Thaner
You can write in training for staff. I'm not just talking about sending them to a conference. I'm talking about giving them the knowledge, and have other teachers be peer models, and peer coaches. Research has shown us that if we only send people to conferences, if we only give them an article to read, zero percent of that gets implemented in the classroom.
Charmaine Thaner
Just as we do with our kids that do not have disabilities, we need to allow our kids with disabilities to fail and to make mistakes. That's when learning occurs.
Charmaine Thaner
Presume inclusion.
Kathie Snow
