Americans with Disabilities Act

Class begins with a collaborative source analysis activity in which students examine a series of posters featuring veterans with disabilities. Depending on students’ familiarity with analyzing visual sources, the teacher may want to model how to interpret one poster with the whole class by identifying its intended audience, message, and use of imagery and text. Students collaborate in small groups to analyze the remaining poster, identifying the central message of each and recording their observations in a graphic organizer. After analyzing the posters, students move to the deliberation stage by sorting a series of disability rights laws (teachers may consider cutting these into individual cards) and titling each group. The teacher may circulate throughout the activity, asking students to justify their decisions and prompting them to connect the themes from the posters to the purpose of each law. Students finalize the graphic organizer by producing an evidence-based claim that answers the compelling question.