Keene State College has been awarded a nearly $100,000 Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) grant for a project to advance teaching disability history in rural communities.
The grant provides one year of funding with the possibility of two additional one-year grants contingent on the successful delivery of TPS educational projects based on the Library’s digitized materials.
Since 2006, Congress has appropriated funds to the TPS program to establish and support a consortium of organizations working to incorporate the Library of Congress’s digital collections into educational curricula. Members of the TPS Consortium help tens of thousands of learners build knowledge, engagement, and critical thinking skills with items from the Library’s collections.
Keene State will host a one-day conference on July 8, 2025, of school-age teachers, instructors of pre-service teachers, disability historians, disability studies educators, and disability rights advocates from across the U.S. to discuss ways to expand and strengthen the teaching of stories of disability history in K-12 schools. Participants share the curricula and projects they are working on and strategize ways to enlist new teachers in this movement.
In future years, project partners will host this annual conference at the Harkin Institute at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Graham Warder, chair of the Keene State History Department, will direct the project.
Warder has been active in disability history, beginning in 2000 as cataloger and acquisitions director of the all-digital Disability History Museum. A National Endowment for the Humanities partially financed the disability history curriculum on that website We the People grant awarded to the college, Becoming Helen Keller, for which Warder served as project director. PBS broadcast an American Masters film of that title in 2021.
Warder served as lead historian in developing the nation’s most comprehensive K-12 disability history curriculum: Reform to Equal Rights, published online by the Emerging America program of the Collaborative for Educational Services.
Emerging America also published an online exhibit with Warder’s guidance featuring stories of disabled Civil War veterans and the people and institutions that supported them. Both projects were funded by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. The principal author of the curriculum, Rich Cairn from Emerging America, will collaborate with Keene State on the new project.
Other Keene State faculty who will assist with the work are Lance Neeper, Nancy Peck, and John Sturtz, all members of the Education Department, and Rodney Obien, head of special collections and archives in Mason Library.
Local teachers will be engaged to develop a series of guides to conduct research on disability history in middle- and high-school classrooms. Topics will feature the experiences of people with disabilities, including rural citizens, in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Texas. Disabled veterans; almshouses / poor farms; county homes; centers for independent living; schools for deaf, blind, and deaf-blind students; students with intellectual disabilities; asylums; and the disability rights movement are other topics that will be explored.
The guides will help teachers support students’ investigation of local stories of disability, including individuals and institutions in students’ communities, and direct students on how to search and use primary sources from the collections of the Library of Congress and other national and local archives and libraries.
Featured Library of Congress collections will include the Historic American Buildings Survey, Sanborn maps, American Folklife Center, StoryCorps, Veterans History Project, and historic newspaper articles from Chronicling America.
Project partners will extend the virtual conversations to the Teaching Disability History Interest Group, comprised of almost 100 teachers, scholars, and disability activists who meet quarterly to share research and work on the curriculum. The group also discusses efforts to help teachers meet state standards and mandates to teach disability history in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other states.
Anyone interested in learning more, joining the interest group, or participating in the July conference can contact Graham Warder at gwarder@keene.edu, or Rich Cairn at rcairn@collaborative.org.
