Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Stories and Handicapped Children Not all good writers write good disabled charact

Not all good writers write good disabled characters, nor are all books by good writers appropriate for public school students. The teacher choosing a book, especially for objectives in the affective domain, must consider the author last. First, the book must be within the reading level of the intended students. Second, the characters need to be real or realistic. Both cardboard and unreal disabled characters more likely strengthen stereotypes than weaken them. Third, the story should lend itself to exercises students can complete.

Young Mutants (438), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, is a collection of short stories by different authors. Unifying each of them is a young protagonist who has some genetic mutation. Though many of their mutations are beneficial, they are nonetheless of a sort that another disabled child might be able to sympathize with.

Unfortunately, what a child would be less likely to sympathize with would be the way in which each child finds a situation where his or her particular "disability" is actually useful. Wish fulfillment is a common element of science fiction. The teacher's use of this collection of stories would have to be at the discretion of how much the stories would engender unreal expectations of wish fullfilment on the part of the disabled students. They are more than likely not supermen. While imagination is important, the older the child is, the more he or she needs to prepare for the reality of adult life with a disability.

On the other hand, the child may be inspired to try things otherwise thought impossible. In the play (and movie) "Butterflies are Free," the blind protagonist complains about his mother's outlandish stories of an unsighted superhero. Later, his mother's defense consists of reminding him that it was these stories that motivated him to keep trying. That he was renting an apartment on his own validated her method of raising him.

...

Page 1 of 10 Next >

More on Stories and Handicapped Children Not all good writers write good disabled charact...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Stories and Handicapped Children Not all good writers write good disabled charact. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:51, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708809.html