This piece is part of our Research Into Practice series. In this series, members of our team reflect on connections between their academic training and research and their current work in digital learning and program support.
Leanna Duncan is a Director of Faculty Engagement at Everspring, supporting faculty at partner institutions in facilitating their online courses from training to troubleshooting to resource creation. Prior to her time at Everspring, she received her PhD in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focusing on disability activism and education in the early twentieth century U.S. During her time there, she designed and taught history courses as well as supported others' teaching as a graduate affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. She also holds a BA and MA from the University of Tulsa.
When discussing educational technology, digital learning, or contemporary higher education, disability is often considered through the lens of compliance: what schools and programs are legally required to do to make education accessible to students with disabilities under rights legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). There may also be attention to topics such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL), including designing learning experiences in such a way that they work for all people. These approaches ask how education can address or account for disability, with recommendations ranging from making PDF files accessible to designing with motor disabilities in mind.
This piece considers the inverse question: how has disability activism approached education, and what insights might those histories offer for education today? To do so, this piece highlights elements of consistency between early twentieth-century activists in the United States and modern-day digital learning development. These activists placed education at the center of their work, not only advocating for access but also developing their own instructional practices. Many of these leaders, such as Blanche Van Leuven Browne and Joe F. Sullivan, were themselves former children with disabilities who understood the transformative role education could play in securing independence, belonging, and citizenship.
Early twentieth-century thinkers often used hallmarks of good instruction, such as authentic activities, experiential learning, and community-building, well before these ideas were widely theorized. Their methods can still inform today’s digital practices at all learning levels. Today, accessibility involves elements like text color, heading structure, and alt text. Aligning these practices with historical approaches can help us design flexible courses that adapt to future change. These practices have endured across eras, serving learners with different needs and technologies—from the calculator to the internet to artificial intelligence—and will likely continue to serve as education continues to evolve.
Why Education?
Education was an intentional choice for disability activists’ focus. During the early twentieth century, children with disabilities often did not attend school, leading to both academic struggles and social exclusion (Duncan, 2020). Activists argued that education—not medical care—was the most urgent need for these children. They highlighted stories of children who undertook extraordinary journeys to reach school, from traveling in goat-drawn wagons (Byrom, 2006, p. 51) to crawling over mountains (Duncan, 2021, p. 123) as proof of education’s power and children’s desire to learn.
Education also promised a way for people with disabilities to build independent lives regardless of whether a “cure” was possible. Movement leaders credited their own survival to their schooling; Blanche Van Leuven Browne, for example, supported herself and the children in her care through writing that provided both income and advocacy. Yet this emphasis on education also carried exclusionary undertones. Activists sometimes used it to distinguish children with physical disabilities—framed as healthy and intellectual—from children with intellectual disabilities, who were regarded as potentially incapable of benefiting from the same supports (Duncan, 2020). Proving that physically disabled children could be educated was therefore not only a strategy for individual advancement but also a way of constructing a collective identity.
Lessons for Today
These histories offer more than just accounts of educational access or the groundwork laid for later policies such as the ADA. They also show how early activists, drawing on their own lived experience as children with disabilities, developed approaches to learning that emphasized experience, community, and choice—approaches that continue to resonate in digital education today.
Authentic Experiences
Education was rarely rote memorization for these activists. At summer camps associated with one school, children with disabilities took on roles of authority that required responsibility and leadership, serving as meaningful demonstrations of their capabilities. Children in hospital-schools also produced an incredible volume of written work, including writing and editing for everything from internal classroom newsletters to community-facing publications (Duncan, 2020, pp. 340–343). These strategies allowed students to model the very work that disabled activists and educators in the movement did every day—leadership and writing skills enabled them to support their own needs and raise funds for their causes.
These hands-on projects parallel modern efforts to design authentic activities, where learners engage deeply with concepts by producing outputs that mirror real-world work products. In modern courses, authentic assessments can include portfolios, multimedia projects, or workplace-style tasks. These options have become even more popular in a world in which generative AI is available, where a common strategy for AI-inspired redesign of assessments is to make them more authentic (Khlaif et al., 2025). These educators’ example might inspire us to specifically target the authentic activities we choose to implement. Does a chosen activity just happen to be something that is done in the field, or is it a critical, central part of that work, the way that leadership and writing were to these activists?
Creating Communities
Education for these activists entailed more than knowledge acquisition; it was also designed to promote belonging, both within a disabled community and in the wider world. Students within the movement’s schools and institutions formed connections not only within the walls of their classrooms but across miles, through organizations, letters, and publications. Organizations like the “Do It Well Club” and publications like The Round Robin News encouraged collaboration and collective identity between children in many different places and sustained their connection with a disability community even after they left a school. Many classrooms appointed designated correspondents with these organizations, who would report any exciting events or updates to the larger group (Duncan, 2020).
In today’s online environments, intentional community-building—through student-student engagement practices such as discussions, group projects, or peer review—remains critical for student persistence and success. In fact, one of the most frequent concerns faculty members express about teaching online or hybrid courses is the ability to encourage and sustain that sort of connection within a digital space. We might look to these historical thinkers for inspiration on how to encourage the kinds of connection that we’d like. Can we give learners shared ownership of connection through reporting out for a group or providing jumping-off questions for a discussion? Can we incorporate asynchronous touchpoints to sustain connections via formats that feel natural and welcome to learners?
Self-Direction and Co-Creation of Learning
Activists frequently emphasized giving children agency in how to develop and showcase their knowledge. One example comes from Blanche Van Leuven Browne’s spelling instruction, where students selected the words they most wanted to learn, grounding the lesson in their own interests (Duncan, 2020, pp. 338–339). This emphasis on learner choice aligns with contemporary practices like project-based learning, which can give students the ability to choose a project that will fulfill the criteria needed for success, or other assessment options that offer multiple formats or pathways, cultivating flexibility and ownership while maintaining rigor.
These choices often meant that students were creating their own learning materials, which then, in turn, informed other learners. Students at one Minnesota school, for example, were inspired by a class reading and drawing activity to mount a rudimentary moving picture show that built upon that lesson, complete with a box office and other classrooms as attendees (Duncan 2021, pp.163). This story is reminiscent of ways that student-generated content is used to increase student engagement, understanding, and connection, as well as to reflect and incorporate the diversity of students’ experiences (Snowball & McKenna, 2017).
These examples might influence us to take risks and think creatively about incorporating choices into coursework. Educators often offer students a set menu of options. What if we broadened that scope, leaving space in a course for students to pursue a striking new question or explore one topic more deeply than anticipated?
Conclusion
The history of disability activism in education offers more than a story of a journey to legal compliance. The strategies these early leaders used—authentic learning, community-building, and student choice—still resonate in today’s digital classrooms. As we design for new technologies and diverse learners, their example encourages us to find opportunities for student authenticity and agency. Today’s faculty can learn from these strategies to design more flexible, inclusive, and durable digital classrooms.
References
Byrom, B. (2006). The progressive movement and the child with physical disabilities. In P. L. Safford & E. J. Safford (Eds.), Children with disabilities in America: A historical handbook and guide (pp. 49–64). Greenwood Press.
Duncan, L. (2020). “Every one of them are worth it”: Blanche Van Leuven Browne and the education of the “crippled child.” History of Education Quarterly, 60(3), 324–350.
Duncan, L. (2021). Changing bodies and minds: “Crippled children” and their movement in the United States, 1890–1960 [Thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign].
Khlaif, Z. N., Alkouk, W. A., Salama, N., & Abu Eideh, B. (2025). Redesigning assessments for AI-enhanced learning: A framework for educators in the generative AI era. Education Sciences, 15(2), Article 174.
Snowball, J. D., & McKenna, S. (2017). Student-generated content: An approach to harnessing the power of diversity in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 22(5), 604–618.