Physical development
Language is powerful, they can start a war, destroy a trust, and can even impact how a person is viewed, which is why we need to think about people-first language. People-first language is choosing words to say about people with a disability that chooses to define the person first, then the disability. This is important because it allows for the person to be defined as who they are first, instead of defining them by what disability the person may have. When we define the disability first or the services a student receives, then we maximize the impact that the disability has on the student, whereas we minimize the potential of the student. Using people first language not only provides us with the ability to see the students first and the disability second, it also provides us with the opportunity to view all students through the lens of their abilities. This ability is referred to as the presumptive competence paradigm, where students are seen as being able to have competencies in all age-appropriate, general education curriculum content that are aligned to the specific grade level standards. This is important because it increases the expectations for both academic and social achievement of the student by including them in all the opportunities avail be to other students their age.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Canadian public schools were formally adapted for children with disabilities for the first time. In 1910, public school boards in both Toronto and Vancouver had established special classes, they were the first school boards to do so. A year later, in 1991, Ontario passed An Act Respecting Special Classes, and again in 1914 the Auxiliary Classes Act repealed the earlier legislation and replaced it with a much-expanded law, giving local school board officials even wide latitude to start special classes and programs. (Ellis,484) The Ontario Department of Education Circular no. 22, which consisted of the department’s regulations to accompany the Auxiliary Classes act, specified that both the province’s public and private school boards could establish fourteen different types of classes and programs for the exceptional pupils. Many of these are still around to this day. However, the same legislation that opened the doors for students to attend these special classes, also barred a few other disabled students from attending. In fact, this very act, closed the doors to public schools to these students altogether, and legal sent these students home and prevented them from attending school any further; stating that students “whose mental capacity is incapable of development beyond that of a child of normal mentality at eight years of age.” (Ellis 484). Later on, the school system in Ontario adopted an intelligence quotient of fifty as the line of exclusion, meaning that any score below 50 was equal to the diagnosis of idiocy or imbecility and allowed the schools to exclude that child. The experts in mental disabilities at the time were calling these students idiots and imbeciles.
Until the middle of the last century, did schools official justify exclusion on two main basis: children that are labelled idiotic and/or imbecilic could not benefit from public education and were a nuisance and even a danger to other schoolchildren. Gordon Porter, the Canadian inclusive education advocate summarized the causes for the continuing controversy over the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream classes, he said that it was “fueled in part by a strong feeling among both the public and educators that students with some types of disabilities will not benefit from what happens in a regular classroom…the inherent belief-indeed, the fear- that inclusion will water down or weaken overall educational outcomes..devaluing of people with disabilities (particularly cognitive disabilities).” (Ellis 504). Leaving it to seem that the actual views on intellectually disabled children at school have changed very little over time.
In the United States there are an overabundance of political headlines that use the derogatory terms for special needs (e.g. the retarded), not only are these headlines in the papers, they also appear in movies. Movies are made without concern of portraying people with disabilities correctly, using stereotypes and stigma supporting language throughout. This makes you think, what happened to the people-first language movement. Even though in some generations it seems evident that this movement has had positive effect it is made evident that our work is not yet finished.
Elizabeth Farrell established the field of special education in the United States and came up with the notion of special classes, not of special schools, her goal was to return the children to regular classes. Another prominent figure at the forefront of special education is Helen Keller, who was an American educator that was both blind and deaf, she was also one of the 20th century’s leading humanitarians, as well as the co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU. However seemingly positive these events were, we were suddenly on the backwards tack for special education. In the 1990s the United States became the leader in the eugenic movement, where state institutions separated people who were deemed undesirable from the general population and were commonly used as a method to clean the gene pool. This lead to the sterilization of persons with disabilities without their consent, which was both legal and a common practice (West, 19). By the end of the second World War, the number of classes in public education settings for children who were “educable mentally retarded” (West, 20) were beginning to increase greatly, and programs for children labeled as having minimal brains dysfunction and emotion problems started to appear at universities and in some medical sites.
The use of people first language was born out of the civil right movement and the laws that followed in regard to the education of individuals with disabilities (IDEA). For the first time, writers, researchers, and practitioners focused on the rehabilitation of individuals with disabilities began to advocate for a change in the way we act and in specific the way that we speak about and describe people with disabilities. When the 1960s rolled around and John Kennedy was president the disability field entered the civil rights movement, and as his sister Rosemary as an example, advocated for more open programs for children with intellectual disabilities. This movement help influence the support of disability advocates in their movement to expand public school programs and close institutions. This resulted in the passing of the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975. Later, in the 1990s federal laws such as the ADA and the IDEA incorporated people-first language, and later in 1992 the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education issued a statement that boosted and encouraged the use of people first language. In recent years, 2010 to be exact, the Rosa Law was set in stone and required that any references in federal law of mental retardation or mental retarded individuals be changed to a more appropriate people first language (West, 20).
People first language doesn’t just refer to the way in which we speak, but it also refers to the way in which we write and portray people with disabilities. People first language is a culmination of the three so that we eliminate disparagement of pity. We must, as both professional and educators believe that the goals of all written, graphic and verbal communications are to support the learning of our students (Clarke, 74).