How Does Disability Affect Children's Literature?

Introduction

Stories can have an immense impact on how people grow up. It is important for practitioners to understand that children grow up hearing stories that could shape how they see the world as well they could see what the world thinks of them. For children with a disability, there are added challenges they have to face on a daily basis and stories that have characters with a disability could have a massive positive or negative impact on them. This paper looks at how characters are perpetuated in children’s literature, from the research found characters are generally seen as a superhero, a positive supporting character, or as a generally unrelatable character. An unrelatable character is those who are generally liked but are not a full

Pollard (2013) explores the idea of policymaking for people with a disability in literature. The article looks at how disabilities studies have developed as an interdisciplinary, which is important to understand in policymaking to ensure as many contexts as possible are being considered. Pollard delves into how disability is portrayed in literature and explores "the six pitfalls of disability fiction" (p.264). These pitfalls tell how characters are portrayed negatively many times in literature, from being non-human and too different to not getting a happy ending because of their difference. Pollard then discusses these six pitfalls within his own experience of teaching disabilities in literature, mainly in Shakespearian literature where disability was seen as evil and the characters not fully human or to complex for the other characters in the story to understand. Lastly, Pollard writes about essays that represent disabilities in a good healthy way which give a positive light to the otherwise negative characters discussed in the article. These essays and this article give an opportunity for policy as well as a more positive understanding of what disability in literature could look