Editors Note: Although the following article by Henry Reiff focuses particularly on persons with learning disabilities, it is a helpful contribution to our understanding of all persons who have disabilities.)
Although much of my training 25 years ago as a special educator had a decidedly pathological orientation, we focused on all the problems kids with handicaps had. It was as though a handicap was some kind of disease and we would learn how to cure it, or, perhaps, help the patient cope better with symptoms. This all sounds like ancient history, and quite patronizing if not downright degrading.
Of course, times have changed. We no longer speak of “the handicapped.’ We reject the term handicapped as pejorative (it literally stems from a time when persons with disabilities had to beg in the street with “cap in hand”), preferring disability because it has a specific focus on functionality. We don’t say “disabled persons.” It’s the person first, who happens to have a disability, so we refer to persons with disabilities. The public school system has moved from main-streaming (where the handicapped had to earn their way into spending sometime with “normal” children) to embracing inclusion (where students with and without disabilities share the same classrooms, activities, and teachers).
In 1990 President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law. Taking his cue from events in Eastern Europe, he welcomed persons with disabilities into the mainstream of American society by proclaiming, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion come tumbling down.”
Clearly a great deal has changed in the last 25 years. Yet in spite of major legislative, educational, and social advances, I believe we still view persons with disabilities as broken entities in need of fixing. Take a look at virtually any introductory text in special education. Most of the content focuses on all the educational deficits associated with or caused by disabilities. Spend some time talking to teachers who work with students with disabilities. They tell you about all the things with which those students have problems, how far behind they are, how much extra time and effort it takes to work with them, and how it is often unfair to the “normal” kids to have them in the same classroom.
Although the ADA has improved employment opportunities and overall access for people with disabilities, many employers still doubt that an individual with a disability is as capable of making the same contribution as a person without a disability. Furthermore, it’s not unusual to hear someone grousing that a ramp or a designated parking place is some kind of special privilege.
Such disparaging attitudes are rarely the result of overt hostility or conscious prejudice. Patronization of persons with disabilities is largely unintentional, stemming primarily from a lack of awareness and realization of the capabilities of individuals with disabilities. Twenty years ago, when I was teaching children with learning disabilities, I recognized that they had significant difficulties with various aspects of traditional schoolwork, usually in some area of language (listening, speaking, reading, writing, and spelling) and/or math.
But I also saw that no two students were alike; I could not begin to make generalizations about these young people. Most importantly, I realized that in spite of their difficulties, all of these children possessed a vast array of skills and talents – in a sense, their hidden treasures. Some who struggled with language had excellent math skills. A child who could only read stories significantly below grade level could understand material above grade level if it were read aloud. Some children were musical, others artistic or dramatic. Some had unbelievably engaging personalities; they could charm their way into, through, or out of any situation. The list went on and on. I began to wonder what happened to these children as they grew up.
As a result, I teamed up with other researchers to find out what life was like in adulthood for persons with disabilities. We thought the best research method was the simplest: talk with these adults and try to see the world through their eyes. We began a series of interviews which resulted in a book, Speaking for Themselves: Ethnographic Interviews With Adults With Learning Disabilities.
We discovered that adulthood held a whole range of possibilities, the same way it would for anyone. Some of the individuals we interviewed were dearly struggling. Some were doing fine, looking forward to moving forward in their lives. And some had been extremely successful, particularly in their careers. They were respected professionals earning enviable levels of money and respect. These were the same people who had struggled so much in school, often being told they would never amount to anything.
Clearly, people with learning disabilities experienced a wide range of possible outcomes in adulthood. Yet society was still focusing on all the things that prevented people with learning disabilities (and disabilities in general) from succeeding. Perhaps we could turn our attention to what people with learning disabilities could do instead of what they could not do, on success instead of failure, on ability rather than disability. Furthermore, if successful individuals with learning disabilities shared traits and experiences related to how they had achieved, perhaps their stories could help others with learning disabilities find paths to success.
In order to explore these possibilities, we located 71 highly successful adults with learning disabilities from all over the country. In order to qualify for our study, the participants had to present solid evidence of having had a learning disability and received a high ranking in at least four of five of the following categories: income, education, type of career (i.e., professional), eminence in the field, and job satisfaction. From Connecticut to California, we traveled and met with these people, spending three to six hours interviewing and simply talking to each one. What we found gave us a whole new appreciation of not only learning disabilities, but of the power of the human spirit. The result of our work was another book, Exceeding Expectations: Successful Adults with Learning Disabilities.
Before I go into what we learned, allow me to introduce you to a few of these highly successful adults with learning disabilities, to present small snapshots of them and their stories: (a.) M.T. is one of the most respected executives of his Fortune 500 company. Known as “the hit man” because of his uncanny ability to solve problems quickly with wizard-like incisiveness, he supervises MBAs from Harvard and Stanford. Yet he often feels as if he is an impostor. Why? Because he is still acutely aware of his learning disabilities. School was always difficult. In traditional school, he was not a winner. But in the school of hard knocks, he found success. As a child, he practically had to run his father’s butcher shop.
As an adult, he rose through the ranks as a salesman. He was a super-performer because he worked unbelievably hard, never gave up, figured out what to do and how to do it on his own, and did not follow routines. As he entered the corporate world, aspects of his learning disabilities evolved into strengths. Because he had learned to simplify complexities in order to understand, in order to survive, he became able to come up with straightforward, workable solutions to seemingly inscrutable problems-hence, “the hit man.”
(b.) Another successful adult with learning disabilities, K.M., remembers the pain and embarrassment of always being the first child to sit down in a spelling bee. She struggled to read and always looked for the skinniest book for book reports. On the other hand, she was dearly gifted in art, a gift her parents nurtured and supported from third grade on. Nevertheless, others focused on her weaknesses, and by the time she had finally made it to community college a guidance counselor told her, “You have third year college visual perception. But you are retarded in all other areas.”
Refusing to let this devastating assessment knock her down, she moved on with her life, enrolled in and graduated from an art institute, established a strong reputation as a visual artist, and joined the faculty of the art department at a major university. She has received international recognition for her world. She is a confident, caring individual. Yet the pain of the failures and judgments from her childhood remain with her.
(c.) J. C. is an individual who embodies the American dream. He single-handedly built a contracting and building venture that has done as much as $ 50 million worth of business in one year. And for most of his life, J. C. harbored a harrowing secret: He could not read or write. He got through school by “faking it” — not coincidentally the name of a book detailing the life of an individual with learning disabilities. He did whatever it took to play the game and passed through the system because, as he says, “I’m an athlete, six foot four, blue eyed, and I had adapted socially.”
He found his calling as a builder and entrepreneur. His visual and conceptual way of thinking may have made it difficult to read and write, but it was ideally suited to his career, particularly a career where he developed his own systems instead of struggling with someone else’s. He explains his achievements simply: “The key to success is hard work. Tenacity is more valuable than knowledge and skills.”
As we interviewed the 71 adults in the study, we heard story after story similar to the preceding ones. We discovered that these adults with learning disabilities shared characteristics and behaviors that led to their success:
1. They all evidenced a strong desire to succeed. In most cases, they credited their parents or someone very meaningful who encouraged and supported them. At the same time, many were so angry at being told what they could not do that they set out to prove themselves, and they were not going to be denied.
2. They had developed a strong sense of goal orientation. They set ambitious but realistic goals, determined pathways to get there, and were willing to go one step at a time, no matter how many steps it would take.
3. They developed a positive appreciation of themselves and their learning disabilities, a process we called “refraining,” a kind of specialized self-actualization. They came to know themselves and their learning disabilities well. Recognizing their weaknesses, they also discovered and built upon their strengths. They saw themselves not primarily as disabled but unique. They knew when they would need help, but they also knew when they could go it alone. Equally important, they put this knowledge into action. They planned how they would deal with the world based on an accurate and positive understanding of themselves.
4. They were incredibly persistent and resilient. They worked harder and longer than others. They possessed the ability to persevere, often in the face of seemingly overwhelming obstacles, made defeat almost impossible.
5. They chose careers that maximized their strengths and downplayed their weaknesses. They also chose careers they genuinely loved. This process, which we termed “goodness-of- fit significantly increased the likelihood that perseverance would pay off.
6. They developed individualized strategies-compensations, accommodations, unique ways of doing things, an art we termed “learned creativity.” Almost all of these adults made use of various technologies. In addition, they came up with extremely sophisticated and personalized coping mechanisms. A professor who had difficulty reading names did not read the class roster aloud but rather passed it around so that students would initial it. A lawyer put pictures of his clients on their files to associate names with faces. J.C., who taught high school civics even though he could not read, always walked around with a newspaper under his arm and a paperback book in his back pocket.
7. They nurtured and utilized support systems or favorable social ecologies. They recognized the need for support and used it to overcome hurdles. Sometimes support was emotional, frequently the unflagging love and positive reinforcement of a parent or mentor; other times it was practical, such as having a business partner or spouse who would take on the lion’s share of reading or writing demands.
This model of success is unique to individuals with learning disabilities in that many of the processes are responses to the difficulties imposed by learning disabilities. On the other hand, the characteristics and behaviors that led to success for the adults in our study have applications for people in general. In fact, the qualities displayed by successful adults with learning disabilities share much in common with the construct of emotional intelligence. In his book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, Daniel Goleman defines emotional intelligence as the ability to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize; and to hope.
He contends that people with strong emotional intelligence excel in real life-in work, in leadership, in interpersonal relationships. I began this article by commenting that although much has improved for persons with disabilities in the last 25 years, we still have a ways to go before we can call ourselves a truly inclusive society. The success stories of adults with disabilities represent one step in that direction. First, an awareness of success challenges many preconceived or stereotyped notions about persons with disabilities. When we meet a non-disabled individual, we do not generally focus on what we think that person cannot do. Turning our attention from disability to ability simply means that we are viewing persons with disabilities in the same context we view anyone else.
Second, the success of adults with disabilities can teach all of us, not just those with disabilities, much about what it takes to make it. As mentioned before, the adults in our study adeptly tapped into emotional intelligence. Their path to success is a direction we all can follow.
Finally, what is the connection between my remarks on disabilities and Christianity? One point should be clear: The UCC promulgates a doctrine of inclusiveness founded on Christ’s teachings. Christ instinctively drew himself to the most marginalized of citizens, in many cases those individuals who seemed to be weak and in some cases specifically to persons with disabilities. He saw strengths where others saw weaknesses. Sure we are called on to do the same. Moreover, the experiences of persons with disabilities might teach us something about a core element of Christianity. One commonality of the successful adults with learning disabilities is that they have had to face struggles. They have suffered, but they have persevered. And almost all credited their struggles with making them better persons-resilient, more understanding, more compassionate, more loving.
This past Palm Sunday I realized that persons with disabilities perhaps walk a step closer to God than many of us when our congregation invoked, “Let these branches be for us signs of his victory; And grant that we who bear them may also acclaim Jesus Messiah by wailing the way of his suffering and cross; That dying and rising with him, we may enter into Your kingdom. Amen.”
Sidebar: If we begin to turn our attention from what people with disabilities cannot do to what people with disabilities can do, we will be changing our entire outlook.
Sidebar: When we open our minds to allow persons with disabilities to inspire, guide, and teach us, our hearts will invariably follow. We will become more tolerant and accepting. We will become more inclusive.
The author, Henry B. Reiff, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Special Education, Western Maryland College, Westminster, MD and an active member of St. Paul’s UCC, Westminster
From UCC DM Newsletter Archive
