Different Hands — One Shared Miracle
Exclusion often starts with assumptions; inclusion is seeded by trust and flourishes with opportunity.
Every year, schools host a holiday poster contest. Expectations for the SPED department, however, are often set low. In my work with students, I take a different approach: I set a high bar—not for performance, but for meaning. The project brings joy to our students and allows them to feel themselves woven into something shared.
This year, I suggested a handprint-based art project from our SPED classroom. It was a simple idea, but one grounded in close, daily attention to how my students engage with the world. It didn’t come from a curriculum guide or a planning document, and it wasn’t meant to demonstrate a particular skill or outcome.
Instead, it grew out of everyday work with my students—from noticing how much they learn through movement, touch, and shared activity, and how often their understanding shows up first in their bodies rather than in words. In our classroom, learning frequently begins with hands: reaching, pressing, hesitating, exploring.
Rather than designing something for them, we chose to create something with them: an experience shaped by participation, presence, and trust. The project wasn’t about producing a polished result. It was about making space for students to contribute in ways that felt natural, accessible, and genuinely theirs.
What mattered most wasn’t the final poster. It was the process—hand by hand, moment by moment.
We gently dipped students’ hands into paint. One by one, they placed their handprints on paper. SPED role was simple: cut, arrange, support when needed, and assemble the pieces into a single artwork.
It was sensory, playful, and deeply human. Students participated through motion and touch. Adults practiced stepping back. No one was rushed. No one was corrected into conformity.
At that moment, inclusion wasn’t a policy or a statement. It was a choice—made repeatedly, hand by hand. And each handprint was different—size, pressure, shape, color—yet together, they formed something whole.
They fidget, flap, hesitate, reach out, pull back… They explore before they explain… They communicate… They learn…
And in SPED classrooms especially, hands are often where learning begins.
That is how I understand special education: not as a system that tries to make everyone the same, but as a space where differences are recognized—and allowed to belong.
I’m sharing this project as part of my professional reflection as a future SPED teacher. Not because it was extraordinary, but because it was ordinary—and still so often withheld.
Inclusion doesn’t always look big. Sometimes it looks like paint on small hands, time taken without urgency, and students trusted to participate.
Different hands. One shared miracle.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Colorado Springs, 2025