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Teaching Disability History in the Contemporary United States
[Editor’s Note: Below several scholars discuss their experiences in teaching a variety of courses that introduce students to disability history. In the future, I am eager to present courses for other times and places. The DHA will also be launching a syllabus pool that will contain annotated copies of syllabi as well as any relevant discussions. Please feel free to contribute anything you feel might be useful.]
“A selective historical glimpse at how American society has tried to educate, rehabilitate, or otherwise intervene in the lives of disabled children and adults, and their families, and how some of them have always resisted.”
Phillip Ferguson, Professor, School of Education, Chapman University, pferguson@chapman.edu
Based as I am in a School of Education, very few of my students think of themselves as historians (an occasional doc student might be the exception). So, when I teach a ‘history of disability’ course, or spend a few classes on historical background within a class on current theory or practice (say in a course on “Family-School Relationships”), it is with students who, for the most part, believe history to be a supplementary component of their program of course requirements.
One unit of a course I teach looks at the rise of specialized institutions in the last half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th, with special attention to the growth of the so-called “idiot asylums.” I have them read a chapter by the historian Michael Katz on “The Morphology of Evil” (from his book Poverty and Policy in American History, 1983) that does a wonderful job of deconstructing the 1880 special census report on the “Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent” population. I find the chapter works well to model for my students how to approach primary sources with an analytical approach that goes beyond a kind of superficial dismissal of the offensive language and moralisms couched as science. Katz' devastating critique of Frederick Wines and his report well-illustrates the process by which social categories become reified in ways that both reflect and influence the social and professional assumptions about the sources of human difference. It is a topic that my students usually know little about, and we use it to look at the social context for the rise of large congregate facilities and the abuses associated with those places.
For my students, the discussion often moves to the pervasive categorization and labeling that drives much of special education today. While cautious of looking too hard for the “lessons” of history, I am always struck by how well the unit leads the students to reflect critically on what had previously seemed objective. We move from Katz to looking at various examples of admission forms for the asylums that we are discussing. What previously could have seemed as little more than curious artifacts of bureaucratic record-keeping, is now more readily approached as catalogues of professional conceits and social obsessions. Why do some of the institutions ask more developmental questions (“Can the child tie his or her shoes?”) while others focus primarily on heritage and personal behavior (“Does the person exhibit any disgusting habits?”). By the end of the unit, I think the students have a heightened sense of the relevance of history for even a field so applied as special education.
On one or two occasions, a student has taken exception with the discussion. In one of my early semesters of teaching (OK, this was a few years ago), a student began shaking her head during our discussion and seemed to be getting upset. When she finally spoke up, she said that she felt that my entire approach was way too “anti-institutional.” After a few minutes of back and forth (not angry, but certainly engaged), she said that her interest in this was personal. It turned out that she had a sister who lived in an institution in another state. She felt that my approach was implicitly criticizing the choice her parents had made to institutionalize her sister. My response at the time was to pull out the “private troubles” vs “public issues” distinction, where I try and emphasize the difference between a “macro” level discussion of policy and practice, and the individual choices that families or others feel forced to make at any given time and place. The conversation continued for a few minutes and we moved on.
The incident stayed in my mind. Had I been too glib or dismissive? Or had I somehow backed away from my true beliefs and moved to quickly to “defuse” the situation? In reflecting on the incident, I decided that my response was at least incomplete and that I had missed an opportunity for a deeper discussion. When teaching this topic since then, I try and surface such tensions, if students don't raise them first, as important parts of the conversation and historical perspective (without forcing them to talk about their personal circumstances or experiences). My main strategy for this has been to try and find the voices of those who were actually involved in those choices from earlier eras.
Over the years, my research in institutional history has allowed me to review case files of residents going back to the 19th century. This, in turn, has allowed me to collect examples of actual correspondence from parents to institution superintendents about various issues of care (including support or resistance to the sterilization of their child), admission, or discharge. (I also use a documentary video called “My Uncle Joe,” [1991 - http://librarymedia.org/health/Titles/joe.html ] by Bill Rogers that uses old home movies and interviews with Joe Rogers and his siblings to reconstruct a family history where Joe's parents had placed him in an institution in Massachusetts.) Many of the letters reflect the emotions that my student expressed that day in class: anger at a perceived lack of choices; a sense of deference to professional opinion; and a clear plea just for someone to listen to their "side" of the story. The letters quickly establish an emotional connection with my students that cuts across the decades of policy reform and program development. Even if we can disagree with the choice, we can recognize the sense of marginalization and neglect.