Melissa Marshall conducts disability diversity training by challenging her trainees, from high school students to corporate employees, to understand that people with disabilities are the same as everyone else. Melissa is a parent and an attorney; she has cerebral palsy.

Changing attitudes about disability requires equal parts art, science and magic. In Getting It: Persuading Organizations and Individuals to Be More Comfortable with People with Disabilitites, Melissa Marshall chronicles the development of her formula for presenting disability diversity training. She takes us from an inner city high school classroom to corporate training rooms as she explores various methods of having people "get it" about disability. What she wants them to get is simple: people with disabilities are the same as everyone else.

Getting It, like her overall approach to training is insightful, light -hearted witty and informal. Her philosophy is that training can be fun without sacrificing discussion of the political and cultural realities of having a disability in our society. She examines issues of race and class and how they compound disability-based discrimination. Never preachy, she challenges the reader to re-examine his or her own attitudes about disability, as well as about the world in general.

Whether you are a disability diversity trainer, a multi-cultural diversity trainer, a leader who wants to change attitudes in your own organization or someone who wants to increase your own understanding of disability issues, Getting It is an essential read.

Chapter 1 - Getting Started
Training Activity:Word Association
Training Activity:Masks
Chapter 2 - Trainers Just Want to Have Fun
Training Activity:Etiquette and Language
Chapter 3 - Venturing Out—Taking the Show on the Road
Training Activity:Out of the Box
Training Activity:Draw a Child
Chapter 4 - Adventures in an Inner City High School
Training Activity: Everybody Knows
Training Activity: Screw Driver/Wheelchair
Chapter 5 - Audiences: The Good, the Bad and the Usually Not Too Ugly
Training Activity: Them and Us
Chapter 6 - About Trainers
Training Activity: Images
Chapter 7 - You Can’t Get There From Here—The Trials and Tribulations ofa Disabled Diversity Trainer
Training Activity: Who Lives Where?
Chapter 8 - Limits of Training
Chapter 9 - Bringing Diversity to Your Organization

From Chapter One

…This book is a chronicle of my escapades. I am telling the story for a number of reasons. My primary goal in life remains to have people ‘get it’ about disability. I think that sharing my story about developing and presenting disability awareness or diversity training, is the most effective way that I can have you, as a reader, learn about the experience of having a disability at this particular time in our society. It is the best way that I know to challenge you to change your assumptions about people with disabilities and to motivate you to when necessary to change your behavior. It is also the best way that I can support you in facilitating attitude change in others.

I could have written a workbook full of lots of activities and exercises that I include in a training. You will have some opportunity to experience some training activities throughout this book. Carefully crafted training activities are essential, but meaningful training cannot be reduced to a set of recipes to be presented to an audience. Quality training lies in the presenter’s ability to engage an audience, to make them laugh, and ultimately, to make them learn. Successful training hinges on the presenter’s ability to shift the energy and attitude of a room as much as it does on a well planned activity. To say that training is more art than science, is an understatement. The truth is, in my experience, it is more magic than art. I can’t teach you that by regurgitating various curricula that I have used. I can best achieve some of what I might in a training, increasing your comfort level about disability, and suggesting ways that you might change your behavior by inviting you to come with me on my journey.

…Some of what I learned was about people’s response to disability. Most of what I learned was about how to identify and help get people get past the thing that was in their way of ‘getting it’. I learned what was most effective in getting people past their prejudice. To the extent that this is a ‘how to’ book, it is about how to engage an audience, how to get them to see your point of view and how to get them to change their behavior as a result of it…

I was born with mild cerebral palsy, which is damage to the motor nerve of the brain that usually happens sometime during birth or gestation. You know how this isn’t a legal treatise, but I know a fair amount about disability rights law? Well, it isn’t a medical treatise either. I know next to nothing about medical stuff. I do know how cerebral palsy affected me. It affected my balance and coordination and my ability to walk. As a kid, I walked more or less fine, albeit on my toes. As I got older, I injured myself frequently and used crutches a good part of my late childhood and adolescence. At one point I stopped being able to walk, had surgery on both legs and used a wheelchair. I had enough problems walking up and down stairs that I couldn’t go to the multi-building high school without elevators in my town.

I was one of the first kids for whom that it was legally required to be provided with an education, despite my disability, under a spanking new Massachusetts law that was later passed as federal law. I was also one of the first kids to experience that this law wasn’t always worth the paper it was written on if no one was willing or able to enforce it. Although I didn’t go to school a lot my first years of high school, I certainly got an education. Somehow, I don’t think that is what the drafters had in mind. Eventually, with lots of advocacy from my Mom, who made connections with some of the right people, I was allowed to go to school in an adjacent town with my home-town paying tuition and transportation costs. Being allowed to go to school was very different than having the right to go to school, or better yet, just going to school, but I survived.

I did graduate high school even though it was implied to me by administrators that I’d be better off and cause a whole lot less trouble, if I’d only drop out. As I chose colleges, the first aspect of any school that I looked at was its accessibility to me as someone who walked or as someone who potentially might use a wheelchair. I ended up going to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts…

At Hampshire, I took a course called ‘Law, Justice, and Education’…We started a disability rights group on campus even though there were only two students who identified as having disabilities there at the time. This project evolved in to a disability studies major…I looked at the political, legal and cultural ramifications of having a disability in or society. In my third year, I went to Berkeley to do an internship at a place called the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund where I learned about the disability rights movement as a national phenomenon first hand.

I went to law school in Connecticut…My thought was that I would use the law degree as a tool to do disability rights advocacy not to practice law. Most people verbally patted me on the head and said “You’ll change your mind dear” when they heard of my plans. But practicing law was exactly what I didn’t do.

Instead, I worked as a legal intern in a state disability rights agency, ran a mental health advocacy program at the same state agency and became the executive director of a center for independent living for people with disabilities.

About a year after I graduated from law school some thing interesting happened, kind of in the sense of the Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times.’ I got tremendously fatigued and among other symptoms stopped being able to walk. At least I couldn’t take more than a couple of steps and had to use a wheelchair…To make a long and not very exciting story, that is to anyone but me, short, over the course of the next ten years I used either a manual wheel chair or a battery powered scooter about fifty per cent of the time…

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Melissa Marshall is an attorney who graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Law and from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is a person with a disability (cerebral palsy) who lives in West Hartford, Connecticut with her husband Ken and their two sons, Nick and Liam.