Disabilities, Pushed to the Side

This story originally appeared in The Harvard Gazette. 

Thomas Hehir, Ed.D. ’90, the Silvana and Christopher Pascucci Professor of Practice in Learning Differences at the Harvard Graduate School of Education(HGSE), spent much of his career helping children with disabilities, including a decade teaching in Boston Public Schools. But when he came to Harvard to teach, he found a surprising number of students with disabilities of one sort or another in his own classes.

“I didn’t expect that I would have so many students who were disabled,” said Hehir, who was director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs during the Clinton administration. “It was very different from my experience when I was getting my doctorate at Harvard. Back then, I don’t remember a single student with a disability: no deaf students, no blind students, none who used wheelchairs or identified as dyslexic. So 20 years later, I was really interested in finding out how their educational histories led them to Harvard. So I asked: ‘How did you get here?’ ”

Hehir’s question became the title of “How Did You Get Here?,” a publication of interviews and stories from 16 undergraduate and graduate Harvard students with various disabilities. Speaking at the Ed Portal, Hehir and one of his co-authors, Laura Schifter, Ed.D. ’14, an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said recently that there were specific themes that ran throughout the stories — themes that were common across disabilities...

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