Disability Awarness
Vanguard’s Approach to Learning Across Academic Domains: Disability Awareness
“Elizabeth Blaetz: Do you think differently about somebody who’s using a wheelchair, now?
Talha: Yes, now that I understand how it feels, I’m more sympathetic because I know how challenging it is to just move around in a wheelchair.”
Welcome to Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog. This is the fourth installment in our series STEM to STREAM: Vanguard’s Approach to Learning Across Academic Domains. I’m Elizabeth Blaetz, Founder and Head of School at Vanguard Gifted Academy. In this series, we are exploring the subjects and activities that incorporate Vanguard’s use of the elevated STEM approach that we call STREAM. This article will highlight disability awareness with Talha and Javeria, who are both graduates of VGA.
EB: Hi guys. How are you doing?
Vanguard Graduates: Good!
EB: So you guys have to strain your brains a little bit — stretch back — to when you were students at Vanguard. Tell me a little bit about how you began learning about disabilities?
Talha: First, we were learning about systems as the overall unit. We were learning how the systems work together. The two systems we were looking at were the body system and the American government system.
Javeria: And then we specifically looked at the nervous system, respiratory system and then the circulatory system — separately, and then together.
EB: Cool. Now, how did that lead you to disabilities?
Talha: Well we looked at, for example, parts of the brain and what they controlled and then if something wasn’t working properly, what would happen. For government, we looked at the Americans with Disabilities Act and how it affected people, and how people’s lives are affected because buildings have things like ramps and elevators, so they can have access to different parts of buildings.
EB: Great. So what were some things that you did so that you could understand more about disabilities?
Javeria: We simulated different disabilities. So when we simulated being paralyzed, or having no limbs on the lower half of our body, we used a wheelchair for half of a day. We also looked at having poor fine motor skills. So we wore gloves and tried to button up a shirt or tried to write with our non-dominant hand.
EB: Tell me a little bit about what it was like to be in the wheelchair for half a day?
Talha: The wheelchair was rather difficult because we’re not used to just using our arms to move around. We also couldn’t get up, so if you dropped something, you couldn’t pick it up. We had to ask someone to come and help us. A lot of small things that we usually could do easily, we couldn’t do and needed to ask someone to help us.
EB: How was community time in the wheelchair?
Javeria: I remember when I was in the wheelchair, we played tag, and I was almost always “It”, and I just couldn’t tag anyone because I couldn’t move quickly.
EB: So, what about that motor control? What did you notice when you were using your non-dominant hand for writing?
Talha: Small things were extremely hard and people couldn’t really understand you. For the buttoning, it was sort of frustrating because something that’s easy for most people to do, you couldn’t really do it all.
EB: So, what was your favorite part in that whole learning experience with the body systems and the government systems?
Talha: Probably the Showcase part, when each group made a model of the main organ for the three systems.
EB: What was your favorite part, Javeria?
Javeria: When we governed the trampoline and made the laws and voted on the laws that we were going to have for the trampoline.
EB: What do you think was important about learning about disabilities?
Talha: Well, it’s good to understand how people with disabilities, although they can’t do some things, are still people, and they can still do other things and still function.
Javeria: It also makes you more sympathetic and aware.
EB: Do you think differently about somebody who’s using a wheelchair, now?
Talha: Yes, now that I understand how it feels, I’m more sympathetic because I know how challenging it is to just move around in a wheelchair.
EB: When you were in the wheelchair, did you always want somebody to come up and push you?
Javeria and Talha: No.
Talha: Miss Holub told us don’t just go up and do everything for them. Only help them when they want to be helped.
EB: What’s our rule here about helping people? Help people only as much as they need — not too much, not too little.
We hope you enjoyed learning from these students how disability awareness is an important part of learning at Vanguard Gifted Academy. Our next blog will focus on pyramids.
Thank you so much for continuing in our STEM to STREAM series. We hope that Vanguard Gifted Academy’s educational blog will continue to be a good resource for you. If you missed our previous blogs, check out our second article in this series, where our students shared about their experiences learning about volcanoes.