It's Time: Disability Justice in High School
An interview with Sara Barber-Just of Amherst Regional High School.
Last week, I was skimming a digest of Google alerts for “disability arts,” which is one of the ways I discover news items for Crip News. And I saw a local newspaper article about new course proposals at Amherst Regional High School in western Massachusetts. One of these courses is called Disability Justice Literature, proposed by Sara Barber-Just. I was delighted when Sara agreed to talk with me about how she developed this elective English course for seniors and a soon-to-be-required disability history and identity unit for all sophomores in her school.
I, like many artists and activists and academics, have dreamt about a world where disability history, culture, and politics are built in to every student’s education. Even at the college level, Disability Studies is not an easy field to find. I am delighted to be able to offer Sara’s interview as evidence of the possibilities for curricular transformation.
-Kevin
Kevin Gotkin
20 years ago you developed and piloted one of the first courses on queer literature at the high school level. A few years back you supported student journalists in exposing your school administration's use of labor by incarcerated people to reupholster auditorium seating. You were one of four finalists for the 2022 Massachussetts Teacher of the Year Award. And now you are about to teach a course on Disability Justice Literature. What else do we need to know about you as a teacher?
Sara Barber-Just
I’ve been at Amherst High School since I was 24 years old. And I'm turning 48 this year. So I've been at the same high school for half my life. And I have been with my wife since we were 20 years old, so during that time I've also been married to this amazing person who is incredibly supportive of my work and is a talented editor and writer. I also have 15 year old twins who now attend my high school. Being in the same building for so long has been really incredible because it's allowed me to help transform some aspects of my school and to see the benefits of that work over a really long period of time. I've also been the English department head for the last six years. And I’m the advisor of the school newspaper.
Though it was an honor to be a finalist for the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, I was even more grateful to see this course proposal go through. That is the bigger prize for me as a teacher, to be able to make a big curricular change that will meet the needs of students in a way that we haven't yet met them.
KG
Tell me about the course proposal.
SBJ
The course will be a 9-week English elective for seniors offered for the first time in the fall of 2022. It will introduce students to important disabled writers and activists, critical moments of disability history in the United States (including activism to pass 504 and ADA legislation and to end institutionalization), and the transformative work of the BIPOC and queer-led Disability Justice Collective. Students will explore social and cultural models of disability; visible and invisible disabilities; ableism and disability justice; and webs of care, especially among disabled people on the margins. Class readings include Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong; The Secret Life of a Black Aspie, by Anand Prahlad; Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, by Rebekah Taussig; Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling With Cure, by Eli Clare; as well as numerous films, TED Talks, interviews, and podcasts that explore the lives and experiences of disabled people.
KG
Could you take us through the history of the proposal for this course?
SBJ
The path to this course was not just curricular. As you mentioned, I introduced one of the first queer literature courses in a public school in the early 2000s, and I’ve been deeply invested in racial justice for decades. What I’ve come to realize is that Disability Justice has also been on my brain for a long time, before I even knew what it was. When you are working in a public school, you automatically notice all the institutional practices and policies that serve or liberate students and all of the ones that don't serve students and can even cause harm to those who are already marginalized. By the time I became a department head, and I was in the position to propose goals for my English department for the first time, my dreams were actually Disability Justice-related. As my first initiative, I sought out trauma-informed training for teachers at my school because we were noticing how many students had adverse childhood experiences and anxiety or depression and could not fully access the curriculum. This led us to change so many of the ways we interacted with students, to center love and care more explicitly, and to do practical things like create an online course for students who were unable to attend school for a period of time, from days to months. English was the first department that had a way that students could earn credit online well before virtual schooling. I also wrote a grant to bring in a year-long meditation course for teachers, realizing how stressful it is to be in care work at a big public school and how many teachers need support to do the work that we are doing.
Then we spent two to three years looking at our ninth and tenth grade required English courses and trying to create a universal design model, where everyone has access to all the things anyone with a 504 or IEP might have. We found audiobooks for every single book and made them available to all students. We created graphic organizers for every single assignment. We posted all kinds of model essays for students to look at when they are writing complex papers. We put in place writing conferences and teacher check-ins for all students. We started talking about where students sit and polling all of our students about their pronouns, their access needs, their experiences in the room. We built in so much more student choice to help different kinds of learners to show what they know. And once we had scaffolding for every single assignment in ninth and tenth grade, all of a sudden, we had the lowest failure rate of any academic department in the school. This was revolutionary for all of our students.
We also have heterogeneous grouping in the English department, which means we don't group any of our students by perceived ability, from grades 9 to 12. All of our students are in the same classroom; if they want to earn honors credit they do that through independent work. We also revamped our honors program to include more exciting and accessible text choices. Our goal was to have the demographics of those opting in to our honors program match the racial and disability demographics of our school. We achieved that goal in two years, and the participation of multiracial students exceeded that goal, quadrupling in that period. We are always “doing the work”—to dismantle white supremacy culture, to be more culturally responsive teachers, to enliven our curriculum. Disability Justice and dismantling ableism were at the center of all those moments.
I did a lot of queer outreach through our gender and sexuality alliance in a foundational way before I ever brought queer literature into the curriculum. We also have robust programs to support students of color, from a club called People of Color United to the Minority Student Achievement Network. But curriculum about queer and BIPOC history, literature, art, and justice is critical, too; when it’s in the curriculum, it signals that we value bringing these conversations to all of our students. The same should be true for disability.
I don’t think we could have jumped into any sort of Disability Justice curriculum without centering access. Once we created all of these ways to make our classrooms more accessible, I started including disabled voices in the general curriculum, starting in my sophomore poetry unit. I had a student, Walter Lloyd, who has cerebral palsy and is a wheelchair user who chose to study one of Lateef McCleod’s poems, “I Am Too Pretty For Some Ugly Laws,” from a list of poems I offered students. Walter eventually wrote a letter to McLeod, who also has CP, and the poet wrote back; they had a powerful exchange. Walter ended his letter with the words “discrimination is ugly, not its victims.” This is a kid who has been writing letters to the newspaper since he was 13 years old about accessibility for wheelchair users at our local university. But he told me he’d never seen disabled people represented in the school’s curriculum.
This was the impetus I needed to push forward with a Disability Literature course. I realized we were not teaching about disabled people as a group of people with a history, a culture, and an identity at all. I’d been putting materials of interest about disability into a folder for over five years and feeling like with all the other work I was immersed in at school, I might never have the time to really do anything cohesive with it. But I went back to Walter and said, I’ve been thinking about making disability history and Disability Justice a more explicit part of the curriculum for years. Would you be interested in testing out curriculum with me? And he said yes. Last summer, I took an even deeper dive into literature by disabled writers and activists, reading/listening to close to 30 books. I soaked up inspiration through a Teaching Critical Disability Studies group of college professors I joined on Facebook. I spent hours in related workshops. I engaged in conversations with former students now studying or teaching Disability Studies in college or disabled students I’ve taught who are engaged in activism as adults.
I’ve had the immense pleasure of testing out curriculum with Walter, now an eleventh grader, over the last 18 weeks. We've met for two hours each week. And I also brought one of the units we tested out to my entire sophomore class. When I submitted the proposal to the School Committee, they approved it as a formal class offering for next year, and encouraged me to keep a required introductory unit in tenth grade. One of the School Committee members said she was so moved by the proposal she felt like crying.
KG
I think you're describing a way that a lot of people come to Disability Justice, which is not to inaugurate some new thing, but to find language for a set of values that are aligned with practice in actually very ordinary and small things. And then later find the language to call that Disability Justice. It's also one of the ways that Disability Justice is a form of solidarity. All kinds of spaces that might not be identified as disability-related have actually centered Disability Justice.
I wanted to ask you about how you're conceptualizing literature in this course. Will the focus be on form and genre? On the texts that have offered us some of these still-emerging forms of legibility of Disability Justice?
SBJ
Most of our English curriculum is fiction texts. But what students will read in the senior course will be almost all nonfiction; they will be immersed in the voices of disabled writers, artists, and activists, largely people of color, immigrants, and queer people. The sophomore unit will lay the foundation for disability history and critical concepts for high school students, and the senior class will center a Disability Justice framework and the work of affiliated artists, writers, and thinkers.
In the sophomore class, I started by showing Crip Camp. The students took a lot of notes on how liberating Camp Jened was, how that varied from people's lives in their homes or in institutions, how it built them up to be activists who changed the world. They were amazed they had never learned about this important part of U.S. history. They shared their personal reactions. They followed this with a workshop with a guest teacher who exposed them to Crip Theory and where they learned how to distinguish between social and medical models of disability. Then we began reading Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, by Rebekah Taussig. She starts by talking about being disabled as a child and her young family life. Then she moves to talking about dating, love, and sexuality with a disability. She unpacks models of disability and applies them to her life. She looks at representation of disabled people in movies and in the media. She talks about ableism and concepts of work and productivity. She talks about being a disabled woman and gender with such power and vulnerability. She condemns charity. And she ends with how critical accessibility is and how responsible we all must be for dismantling ableism. Rebekah is a white, physically disabled person but she explicitly names that positioning in this memoir; she also invites students in and gets them to think critically about how these concepts relate to their own lives and to the lives of everyone on this planet. I chose this book for 15 year olds because she speaks to teenagers how they like to be spoken to—with clarity, seriousness, and intimacy. She starts her book with the words: “To everyone with a body that has been sent to the margins. Our stories matter.” Many of my sophomores first said, “I've never thought about this before.” Then, a week later, disabled students were like, “Oh, wait a second, I've been thinking about this my entire life, but I didn’t have the language to talk about it!”
I have a student in my class who at first had a hard time writing about a personal connection to disability or ableism. However, it suddenly dawned on her that she has terrible migraines and needs to miss at least one or two days of school every month. Thinking about her migraines and chronic pain as a disability, as an identity, is not part of her language, even though they absolutely affect her everyday life. After watching Crip Camp and reading Sitting Pretty, an autistic student in my class felt empowered to confront some other students in a social group they are a part of who did something exclusionary. The move from shame (“This is my fault or there’s something wrong with me”) to pride and even feeling indignant happened in just a few days for this student.
At the upper level, Disability Visibility, edited by Alice Wong, is such a complex and intersectional text. Walter took notes after reading each essay, and we discussed all the concepts and ideas at length. He related to so many of the ideas he found there. We started to follow all the activists and writers on Instagram so we could keep learning and hearing from them. One day, we were talking about eugenics, abortion, and “ugliness,” the next genderqueer clothing, DeafBlindness, the failures of public transportation, and incontinence. He also selected topics he wanted to expand his learning about, and we watched a bevy of films—Hannah Gadsby’s Douglas, Becoming Helen Keller, Audible, and CODA—and listened to podcasts with Liat Ben Moshe and Lydia XZ Brown. From these Walter learned so much: about his own history, the power of art for disabled people, Deaf culture, and the carceral state. He’s currently reading The Secret Life of a Black Aspie, a memoir that looks at the intersections of race, poverty, gender, and autism with such profound beauty. It’s one of the most moving books I’ve ever read.
KG
What I understand you're saying is that the texts are the entryway or the tools for exploring a whole set of practices that are actually not textualized. I know some folks who are referred to often as Disability Justice activists who think, I don't know if this thing exists the way that everyone references it, that actually it's in small very small moments of helping meet people's needs directly. So they have this concern about the legibility of the larger term and it seems like a lot of Disability Justice expertise lives not in the archive, not in text, but in relationships and forms of trust, in the intimacy of providing and receiving care.
SBJ
I think that’s true. I’m not sure if the title is right, but I also want students to know that the senior course will certainly center the voices of people who are at the heart of envisioning and creating Disability Justice. But I agree that Disability Justice lives in relationships. Mia Mingus introduced me to the term “access intimacy,” the idea that there are some people who just seem to know or anticipate your needs without you actually having to state them and “the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met.” For as long as I’ve been a teacher, my number one goal has been to meet all my students' needs like that. I will be in the middle of doing something and I can tell right away if anyone is upset or uncomfortable about anything in class or in their life at that moment.
One time, I came back from the bathroom and found a girl crying in my room. I didn't know her. I said, “I'm glad you're here. How can I help you?” And she was like, “I just heard this was a good place to cry.” By the end of the school year, before the restrictions of the pandemic, I’d have students coming to my room to eat lunch, talk about their problems, get help with assignments, rest. My room has a burbling fountain, there's often meditation music on, orchids, twinkling fairy lights, and beautiful art and books everywhere. People often walk in and say, “This place feels like a spa.” People don't usually think of the classroom as a spa! But I created this spa for myself, too. I work really hard in my own life to think about what I need to survive and thrive. I feel like that is really central to who I am as a teacher, trying to meet as many access needs as possible, but also remembering how my needs are a part of that, too, and modeling for students how to say no to things that are too much and how to be gentle with yourself. Introducing a curriculum like this feels like an extension of all that.
With this curriculum, I want every student in our school to be so immersed in these ideas that they internalize and live Disability Justice, that they go out into the world and consciously think about the needs that they and other people have and how to meet them. Sitting in front of every teacher are future activists, artists, scientists, teachers, doctors, neighbors, parents. I want all my students to be really thoughtful about how they interact as disabled people and with disabled people in the world.
KG
It is amazing to know the ways that you're thinking about Disability Justice not just as a content or a unit alone, but actually part of an ecology of access practices and the longer work for preparing the way for this course and to continue to shape the curricular surrounding.
How do you imagine your teaching practice will be transformed as you teach the full elective course and introduce the required sophomore unit?
SBJ
I don't know! But I know something big is likely. Before we started teaching online during the pandemic, I felt like I was a really strong classroom teacher. I met my students with care. They felt challenged but also supported, not just as learners but as people. But we were online for a full year, and I had never tried to build connection with students online before. I learned more in that year than I learned in 20 years of teaching.
For a lot of students and teachers, it was actually really liberating to be able to go off and learn things on their own and to be able to process at whatever speed they wanted to and not be surrounded by people and noise all the time. But distance learning was also really traumatic for a lot of other students and teachers and parents. In that year, I developed rituals of one-on-one connection with all of my students at least once a week. I did a lot of writing back and forth to students. Sometimes if students couldn’t get to class during the week we’d meet on a Sunday. The learning was immense.
I anticipate that my own learning in this course is going to be enormous. It's probably going to transform the way that I think of myself as a teacher in a classroom, and I think it's probably going to transform the way some students experience an academic space.
KG
Disability justice is a practice and a legacy that has been innovated and expanded and taught by the people who know most about the systems that maintain ableism. We're two white people talking about a legacy that queer trans disabled people of color have brought into the world because the dominant whiteness of a disability rights paradigm has been inadequate for actually addressing some of the ways that systems of dispossession operate together. Do you expect that your first class will be majority white and majority nondisabled?
SBJ
I hope not. Our student body is 55 percent white, 45 percent students of color, and about one-quarter to one-third of students in most classes have a diagnosed disability, but many more are disabled. Our school has a large ELL population and native speakers of 29 languages. Roughly 50 percent of kindergarteners are eligible for free or reduced lunch. A lot of queer students are out at my school, and there’s widespread acceptance of gender nonconformity. Because of the diversity of our population, teachers at my school have to be culturally responsive to build strong relationships. My expectation is that in a class like this, at least half or more than half of the students will ID as disabled and/or as students of color. Disabled students who have a 504 or IEP are used to quietly going up to a teacher and negotiating for accommodations, but I think it’s going to be really empowering for students to realize disability is not just about accommodations. It's an identity. It's a culture. It’s a movement. And anytime you are learning from or about any cultural group, you want to center the voices of the people who are the most marginalized. That is something that is at the forefront of how my English colleagues and I have structured our classes, our curriculum, and our never-ending professional development. As a white person, I have to be willing to interrogate my own biases constantly and think about what I’m not thinking about enough. I know I don’t want my voice to be the central voice, and when it’s not, I’m amazed at my students’ ability to be vulnerable and brave with each other. Ableism intersects with every other “ism” but the vast majority of American schoolchildren haven’t learned that in school. During the curricular testing period, I have seen my students talking openly about the intersections of their race, their trans identity, and being autistic, dyslexic, chronically ill, or physically disabled in ways that I have never seen in my classroom. It’s time.
KG
Is there anything that you want to call in as forms of support from the readers of Crip News? Or, how might broader disability communities support this course?
SBJ
The Teaching and Learning Critical Disability Studies Facebook group has been an incredible form of support. I would love to know about networks that I or my students could or should be a part of, opportunities for learning and growth. I’d also welcome copies of free books that I can put in my classroom’s Disability Justice library so that students have access to a lot more voices. There will be at least one choice book unit, and I am eager to have a robust set of options.
I would also love the support of people who have brought these concepts to 15- to 18-year-olds, or are willing to share resources or activities that you know would be empowering for young people. I am also interested in virtual events that students or I could attend.
KG
Sara, thank you, thank you, thank you. It has been an honor to talk with you about this course, about your teaching practice, about what this moment means. I am so grateful for your work.
SBJ
It has been my pleasure! The most incredible thing about this is being able to connect with people who've been doing this work for much longer than I have and to learn from them.
If you would like to send books, events, or other resources to Sara and her students, please email me at kevin.gotkin@gmail.com or reach out to Sara at barber-justs@arps.org.