More on Disability and Etymology

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            One of the advantages of conducting community-based instruction with students with disabilities is that you get to see how these students “perform” across different environments and in different contexts.  This is a part of conducting environmental inventories for your students; in each of the disparate environments in which the student is likely to be, you need to be able to know what assets are at-hand for students, and what situations can best emphasize their strengths and abilities.

            When we approach special education from this perspective, it helps us to rethink how to consider disability.  We talk a lot about the importance of “person first language,” but often do not interrogate why this is important, or why we must mean what we say.  Because a person is never “disabled” – this is not some kind of essential or fundamental part of an individual’s identity. (Or, perhaps more accurately, this shouldn’t be the case.)  Rather, being disabled, in the verb usage of the word, not the noun, entails being in a context where there is something lacking at-hand. (“Able” comes from the Latin habilis, which means “easily handled,” “easy to be held,” “apt,” and “fit for a purpose.”  Our English words “handled” and “habit” are related.) We are disabled when we literally lack the tool necessary for the purpose at-hand.  I have said this before, but a short person is disabled when he needs the brand of detergent on the top shelf; the tall person is disabled sitting in coach class on an airplane.  A student with a reading disability is disabled when she has to read Romeo and Juliet; she isn’t when she watches it on stage. 

            This is, of course, also true with students with “severe and profound” disabilities, and those following alternate, life skills curricula. My student Odin has autism and a cognitive disability.  But he knows how to use the internet, how to conduct a Google search and check his e-mail, and he’s memorized all the lyrics to the songs by Meek Mill.  My student Forseti is mostly non-verbal and has a hearing impairment.  But he can work the school snack cart almost entirely independently, and memorize routes for us to take as we go door-to-door selling chips and soda.  The question, then, is how we apply these students’ abilities to other environments, how we enable them to possess the tools they need to for the purposes they will encounter.  (This is part of my attempt to trace disability back to the concepts of ownership and property rights.)