Literacy skills are a fundamental component of most daily living skills. Literacy skills are needed to break out of the poverty cycle, to access health services, and gain employment. Literacy skills for children with disabilities can also help support future independent living and improve the ability to be self-advocates and enable self-determination. However, most international education programs that focus on early grade reading do not or only minimally address the needs of students with different types of disabilities.

TANGATA GROUP, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the proposition that disability rights are human rights and founded by two School of Education graduates, has received a $200,000 grant through the United Kingdom’s Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning (DRILL) to further its work on deaf access to justice in Northern Ireland. The DRILL grant comes from the world’s first major research program led by people with disabilities and is financed with money from the United Kingdom’s National Lottery.

TANGATA GROUP, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the proposition that disability rights are human rights and founded by two School of Education graduates, has received a $200,000 grant through the United Kingdom’s Disability Research on Independent Living and Learning (DRILL) to further its work on deaf access to justice in Northern Ireland. The DRILL grant comes from the world’s first major research program led by people with disabilities and is financed with money from the United Kingdom’s National Lottery.

I am not much of a writer but writing this piece was surprisingly a breeze. With World Down Syndrome Day approaching, I get the privilege to share our little world with you and give you a first hand understanding of what it means to include someone with an intellectual disability in the real world.

This expansion of teacher training on inclusive education and critical disability studies promoted sustained school- and community-based discussions on inclusive education and sensitisation on issues related to disability. These practices also led to the development of inclusion committees, co-teaching practices, and stimulated the partial dissolution of the physical boundaries and categorical distinctions between ‘primary’ and ‘special’ schools. In conjunction, all of these factors ultimately led to an increase in the number of students with disabilities accessing any form of education for the first time. 

In 2017 I was arrested eight times fighting against the more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts that were proposed over and over again in the attempts to repeal Obamacare. Throughout all of my arrests I was not alone. I was always surrounded by 20 or more of my siblings in the grassroots Disability Rights group ADAPT.

And so it begins. With a barrage of controversial and polarizing Cabinet nominations, Trump further polarized the country and ignited national debates on everything from “pay to play” politics, to environmental pseudoscience, and the need for political experience in DC. During Senate confirmation hearings, educators and families of children with disabilities were shocked as they watch the confused, now confirmed, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos provide her testimony.