college of education | fall 1998

Department a Pioneer in Adapted Physical Education

Janet Wessel

The Department of Kinesiology has long been committed to service, and especially to making a difference in the lives of children.

The Youth Sports Institute is one example; the Motor Performance Study is another. But perhaps no area is more illustrative of that commitment than the department’s work in adapted physical activity.

The term refers to physical education and activity for people with disabilities.

Disabilities can range from such things as cognitive to physical to sensory disabilities.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was a movement to deinstitutionalize people with retardation in state-run homes. That meant that large numbers of children from these institutions began entering the public school system.

Schools found themselves essentially asking universities "What do we do now?"

Professor Janet Wessel responded.

Seeing teachers with few resources for providing effective physical education, Wessel developed the groundbreaking "I Can" program.

It is a detailed program for teachers, instructing them how to work with these young people. She structured the assessment-based curriculum in a way that understood that most school teachers did not have the appropriate background to teach physical education to their disabled students.

"Understanding the context in which she did this is really important," said Professor Gail Dummer, who has continued the department’s work in adapted physical activity. "There was this huge need that emerged all of a sudden, and we had people who were good teachers but knew little about physical activity or disability and they were being thrust into it."

Gail Dummer

"A lot of schools adopted the material as basically their curriculum and we still get calls today wanting to know about updates to ‘I Can.’ In the context of the times, it was incredible work. Janet Wessel was definitely one of the pioneers."

For Wessel, who is now retired, "I Can" was as much a learning experience for her as it was for the teachers who used it. She began working with mentally retarded children from the Lansing School District in the late 1960s and by 1970 had received the first grant the U.S. Department of Education ever issued related the physical education of students with special needs.

"Marv Beekman from the Lansing School District called me and said ‘Get out of our ivory tower and help me find out what do with these kids,’" she said. "So I went down there with my graduate students: I told them ‘We’re going to learn from these kids,’ and we did.

The grant allowed her to write "I Can," but it took her two years to find a publisher. "Nobody wanted to publish it. They said there wasn't a market for it. Teachers would never use it. I told them that they would never use it if they didn't have it."

"I Can" has remained in print ever since and the new edition revised by Wessel was published in July 1998.

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