How to Promote Disability Awareness in Useful Ways
Raising awareness of disability issues through activities can be fun, instructive, and useful—whether you are a teacher who wants to promote disability awareness in the classroom, an individual or group trying to spread awareness in your community, or a workplace that wants to promote disability awareness and positivity among colleagues.
Fortunately, there are many different activities that can be used to teach children and adults about a wide range of different conditions, from mental disabilities to physical disabilities. And whichever activities you choose to implement, the resulting increased awareness of the issues that surround us—including disability—inevitably leads to a more accepting and understanding environment and more appropriate behavior when we meet people who are different from us.
Disability Awareness Games for Schools
According to the last census in 2019, over three million children (4.3% of the under-18 population) in the United States were considered to have a disability. Though this poses some challenges to schools, it also offers them an opportunity to raise awareness of issues disabled people face every day, to teach acceptance and empathy, and to cultivate an inclusive culture.
Teachers who wish to raise awareness of different disabilities have a great opportunity to educate their students through games. This can be particularly important in schools with students who use mobility aids or have a physical or intellectual disability.
Fun Games that Promote an Understanding of Physical Disabilities
Invent a New Paralympic Sport
This is a great activity for older students and encourages them to think about the challenges that people with physical or motor disabilities face. It can be used in conjunction with a project or lesson about athletes with disabilities.
Discuss. Students can discuss the Paralympics, the sports offered, and how they're adapted from Olympic sports. Students in mountainous regions such as Denver, Colorado, can extend this discussion to winter Olympic sports and how they are adapted for disabled athletes.
Invent. After the initial discussion, students can work together to invent and propose a new Paralympic sport. This can be framed in more than one way; students' suggested sports can be focused on one disability or they can be given free rein to invent something they would like to see in the Paralympics.
Have an Open Discussion About Disabilities
Having students discuss their own experiences with disabilities can be a great way for them to open up and understand how other people live. Many students will have grandparents or other family members who have been affected by disability. Frank but respectful discussions about disabilities, how they affect people’s everyday lives, and how a disability makes someone feel can be a great exercise in understanding and empathy.
Use Motivational Quotes About Disability in Class
Disability motivation quotes can be incorporated into the classroom in various ways. For example, quotes can be used:
As a springboard for a project or web quest about disabilities or disabled people
As daily motivation for students
To encourage the sharing of different perspectives
Games About Visual Impairment
Many games can be used to teach children or young people about living with blindness or visual impairment:
Blindfold Game
Blindfold the children and ask them to do an everyday activity without the use of their eyes. This helps children understand how difficult even simple tasks can be for blind people.
Eye Patch Game
Have the children wear eye patches for a while to show them how differently people with one eye see the world, and how depth perception changes with the loss of one eye.
Wear Someone Else's Glasses
Have the children do a five-minute activity like reading aloud or playing with a toy while wearing a classmate's glasses to understand how their friends see their world.
Important safety note to prevent eye infections: If you plan to use any of the above activities, start with one clean blindfold and eye patch for each child and wash them thoroughly afterward. Don’t allow any child with conjunctivitis or pink eye to share glasses or eye coverings with the other children.
Games About Hearing Loss
Though it's difficult to simulate hearing loss, children can work on empathy and understanding by trying to understand somebody else in a challenging situation.
Lip-Reading Game
Have the children read short phrases from a book by mouthing the words to their partners. The partner then writes down what they think they heard. The children in each pair take turns to mouth phrases and share what they wrote at the end.
Take an American Sign Language Lesson
Bringing someone to the classroom to explain ASL and teach some basics like greetings and spelling your name can be a fun introduction to Sign Language and the challenges deaf people face to communicate. Learning some basic phrases can be turned into a game by having the children guess what another person signed.
Disability Awareness Activities for the Workplace
Education doesn't have to end at school; workplaces too can make a positive difference in how people perceive disability by incorporating fun activities, open conversations about issues facing disabled workmates, and changing language to avoid stereotypes and the use of outdated terms.
Celebrate Disability Awareness Days
It doesn't matter if your workplace has colleagues with disabilities or not; celebrating Disability Awareness Days can be fun and informative, and will set your workplace up for embracing disabled colleagues in the future. If your business has any employees with disabilities, celebrating their days is an inclusive activity that can help them feel welcome and valued.
Get Involved with Awareness-Raising in the Wider Community
If none of your employees have any disabilities, Disability Awareness Days provide the opportunity to connect with the wider community. Why not invite people with disabilities to visit your company or take part in a community activity that celebrates or supports people with a specific disability?
Invite a Guest Speaker to Come and Talk to Your Employees
Larger businesses will almost certainly have somebody connected with a disabled person that you as a business can learn about; invite this person to visit your company as a guest speaker and share a bit about their life.
Ultimately, there are hundreds of ways to promote disability awareness in creative and productive ways in the workplace.
Promoting Disability Awareness Helps Everyone
Promoting an inclusive environment at school, work, or in the community through awareness-raising activities encourages positivity, tolerance, and an appreciation of diversity. With so many creative ways to raise awareness around disability and celebrate differences, disability awareness activities or events are something that can be incorporated into programs on a weekly or monthly basis.
Teaching about disability in useful ways can help children understand and relate to people with differences in appropriate and non-judgmental ways. In the same way, exposure to people with various disabilities in the workplace can open people's minds as to what's possible and prepare employees to treat disabled colleagues as they deserve.