Organization description
Keene State College, as the public liberal arts college in New Hampshire, offers an accessible, high-quality education in an inclusive campus community dedicated to academic excellence. Through the integration of teaching, learning, scholarship, and service, we prepare students to think critically and creatively, engage in their communities, and pursue meaningful work in a global society.
Project description
New Hampshire’s Keene State College and its partners, the Senator Tom Harkin Institute at Drake University in Iowa and the University of Texas at Arlington, will enrich the learning of students with disabilities and their peers through support for rural teachers in special education, history, and other subjects to integrate primary source-rich stories of disability history into the curriculum. Keene will provide interactive professional development on teaching with primary sources for the schools of rural New Hampshire. The partners and the Disability History Association will advance discussion and resource-sharing nationwide among teachers, teacher educators, disability historians, and disability advocates through the Teaching Disability History Interest Group of the TPS Consortium. They will organize annual virtual conferences and in-person conferences in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Texas. Working with Keene’s graduate program in History and Archives, they will create, field test, and disseminate 8-10 research guides for students and teachers to investigate local stories of disability using Library of Congress and complementary collections. Compelling stories will include state schools and asylums, veterans homes, poor farms, service organizations, sports teams, deinstitutionalization efforts, and independent living centers. Keene and the Collaborative for Educational Services (CES) will infuse stories from rural America into the 2023 Reform to Equal Rights: K-12 Curriculum and online exhibit on disabled Civil War veterans. Project partners will disseminate the research guides, curriculum, and professional development materials nationally, and Keene and CES will publish them all free online in Open Educational Resource format.