How do high school students confront and resolve conflicting messages about their intelligence and academic potential, particularly when labeled with social and learning disabilities? How does disability become “disablement” when negative attitudes and disparaging perceptions of ability position students as outsiders? Following the lives of adolescents at home and at school, the author makes visible the disabling language, contextual arrangements, and unconscious social practices that restrict learning regardless of special education services. She also showcases how young people resist disablement to transform their worlds and pursue pathways most important to them. Educators and scholars can use this important resource to recognize and change disabling practices that are often taken for granted as a natural part of schooling. Book Features: Offers concrete ways that students, schools, and teachers can unlearn disabling behaviors. Illuminates how social processes of disablement take place, rather than simply describing their influence. Looks at settings where students encounter more flexible ideas of ability and intelligence. “AnnMarie Baines shows us how LD can be rephrased, readdressed, and reworked. LD can be a good idea again, but the labels have to be tied to conditions of growth, identity enhancement, and institutional change.” —From the Foreword by Ray McDermott, professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education "Through compelling narrative vignettes and clear expository commentary, the author makes a persuasive case that adolescents' ‘abilities’ and ‘disabilities’ are situational, not fixed. The moral of her stories is this: change the social situations of learning to foreground and affirm ability rather than disability.” —Frederick Erickson, George F. Kneller Professor of Anthropology of Education, emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles “This book will touch everyone. The stories ring with familiar pain, strategies of persistence, and the randomness of what counts for success or failure. Valuable resources are lost to labels given too lightly for far too many; this volume tells us how to recoup and to protect these resources and to restore hope by doing so.” —Shirley Brice Heath, Margery Bailey Professor of English and Dramatic Literature and professor of linguistics, emerita, Stanford University AnnMarie Darrow Baines is an assistant professor in the department of secondary education at San Francisco State University.

How do high school students confront and resolve conflicting messages about their intelligence and academic potential, particularly when labeled with social and learning disabilities? How does disability become "disablement" when negative attitudes and disparaging perceptions of ability position students as outsiders? Following the lives of adolescents at home as well as in and out of school, the author makes visible the disabling language, contextual arrangements, and unconscious social practices that restrict learning regardless of special education services. She also showcases how young people resist disablement to transform their worlds and pursue pathways most important to them. Educators can use this important resource to recognize and change disabling practices that are often taken for granted as a natural part of schooling.

Since the defeat of the Nazi Third Reich and the end of its horrific eugenics policies, battles over the politics of life, sex, and death have continued and evolved. Dagmar Herzog documents how reproductive rights and disability rights, both latecomers to the postwar human rights canon, came to be seen as competing--with unexpected consequences. Bringing together the latest findings in Holocaust studies, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality in postwar--and now also postcommunist--Europe, Unlearning Eugenics shows how central the controversies over sexuality, reproduction, and disability have been to broader processes of secularization and religious renewal. Herzog also restores to the historical record a revelatory array of activists: from Catholic and Protestant theologians who defended abortion rights in the 1960s-70s to historians in the 1980s-90s who uncovered the long-suppressed connections between the mass murder of the disabled and the Holocaust of European Jewry; from feminists involved in the militant "cripple movement" of the 1980s to lawyers working for right-wing NGOs in the 2000s; and from a handful of pioneers in the 1940s-60s committed to living in intentional community with individuals with cognitive disability to present-day disability self-advocates.

A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else. As a Deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be. As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

Research has long substantiated the fact that living with a disability creates significant and complex challenges to identity negotiation, the practice of communication, and the development of interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, individuals without disabilities often lack the knowledge and tools to experience self-efficacy in communicating with their differently-abled peers. So how do these challenges translate to the incorporation of disability studies in a classroom context and the need to foster an inclusive environment for differently-abled students? Bringing together a range of perspectives from communication and disability studies scholars, this collection provides a theoretical foundation along with practical solutions for the inclusion of disability studies within the everyday curriculum. It examines a variety of aspects of communication studies including interpersonal, intercultural, health, political and business communication as well as ethics, gender and public speaking, offering case study examples and pedagogical strategies as to the best way to approach the subject of disability in education. It will be of interest to students, researchers and educators in communication and disability studies as well as scholars of sociology and social policy, gender studies, public health and pedagogy. It will also appeal to anyone who has wondered how to bring about a greater degree of inclusion and ethics within the classroom.