Discourses Faced By Children

Introduction
Stories can have an immense impact on how someone grows up. It is important for practitioners to understand that children grow up hearing stories that could shape their view of the world. For children with a disability, there are added challenges they have to face on a daily basis and the stories that have characters with a disability could have a massive positive or negative impact on how they view the world. This paper examines how some characters are perpetuated in children’s literature. The question that guided this research was how do practitioners work with someone with a disability when the stories that they are told during childhood are also the prominent discourses that are woven through the society they live in? From

When a child is learning about how to live respectfully and appropriately in the world the stories they are told and the characters within them can have an immense effect on them. “Studies have shown that exposure to book characters with disabilities can increase children’s understanding and acceptance” (Bland, 2013; Cameron & Rutland, 2006; Prater & Dyches, 2008; Smith- D’Arezzo & Moore-Thomas, 2010, as cited in Wilkins, Howe, Seiloff, Rowan, & Lilly, 2016, p. 234). Children learn through the discourses that society perpetuate, and this is evident in elementary schools, as this is where children start learning in an academic setting which makes it the perfect opportunity to start teaching about disabilities and using the proper literature to do this can

305). While there were many characters to pick from one example would be Helen Keller, as she was a real person who has had many biographies and stories written about her. It has been written that “Helen Keller has come to represent what disability activists call a “supercrip.” The mainstream media portrays certain persons with disabilities as victors over their respective situations, as if a disability is an “adversity to be overcome”” (Barton 185 as cited in Kunze, 2013, p. 305). Keller had to navigate her world and learned the best ways for herself to do that, but should society be holding it in such high regards? Doing so allows the discourse that those with disabilities need to overcome their disability to be a part of society which is not a positive message to be sending children. The concept of supercrip could be described in great length and there are many examples from the literature on it there is even more on the discourse of disability in