A special education teacher in North Carolina has a viewpoint on her career that we really love ... because it's so obvious, and yet we never thought of it like this before!
McAlister Greiner Huynh recently told GMA, "I teach a self-contained adapted curriculum elementary classroom, serving disabled students K-5. I am passionate about radical acceptance and disability pride."
McAlister's philosophy? "At the end of the day, I'm an educator; my students are getting an education; their needs are human needs; and "special" is only used as a term of othering. So I've decided that I'm just going to start calling myself an accessibility specialist, because I spend my days making abstract state standards accessible to my students (and really...don't all educators?).
My classroom is an accessible classroom, where accessibility to the environment and curriculum is prioritized. And my students' needs are accessibility needs, because talking about making things (environments, communities, curricula) accessible to students often leads to a much more productive conversation than simply saying they're 'special.'"
What do her students most need? A teacher who makes the challenging work "accessible to them so they can 'rise to the occasion.'"
