blog #9

One interesting thing in this reading was the school not dancing around disability. I think it does a great job of not only destigmatizing it. As someone who is autistic whenever someone dances around it, it feels like they see the word autism as an insult. It also feels like they don’t recognize its negative impact on my life. To me it often doesn’t feel like a “superpower” it just feels like a disability. Which isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, to me it’s neutral. To me, it’s a fact of life. This also affects kids because then they don’t know how to deal with someone who has a disability. In my schools, we never had inclusion classrooms. Disabled kids often weren’t even in the same art or music classes. From what I remember this led to disabled students often being treated badly by my classmates. I think if we did have them it would’ve helped a lot with the treatment of disabled classmates. I also think it would’ve helped with my understanding of myself as an autistic person. Another thing about that I liked about Hehier was him allowing disabled people a voice. Again in my schools, disabled people never had a voice. I think this pattern shows a lot about people’s ableism in thinking disabled students can’t speak for themselves. Especially those with Down syndrome. Learning how to speak for yourself is a really important part of life, and when people speak over disabled people they’re denying that to them. It also ends with disabled students not knowing how to speak for themselves when they never got the chance to. These skills can transfer over into daily life, such as speaking up for yourself at work or in personal relationships. People are unintentionally setting disabled students back in their personal life when it’s believed they can’t do these things.