Anti-Ableism in Education with Elijah Armstrong and Anna Landre

About Elijah Armstrong

Elijah Armstrong is an activist from Jacksonville, Florida, who received his Bachelor of Science in Education and Public Policy from Penn State in 2019, and his Master of Education Policy and Management from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2020. With the funds from the 2021 Paul G. Hearne Emerging Leader Award, Elijah is going to start the Heumann-Armstrong Award for Education Activism. This will give monetary awards to students who have experienced ableism in education, while also driving a conversation around ableism in education that is centered around the experience of students with disabilities.

Elijah is an epileptic who was denied accommodations in high school, and was thus motivated to prevent the same thing from happening to other students. He founded Equal Opportunities for Students in 2015 and published pieces in Education Post and Faces of Education. He can be heard telling his story through his Ted Talk or his interviews with NPR. Elijah was an AAPD intern in 2018 in the office of Senator Bob Casey (D-PA). He served on the DREAM (Disability Rights, Education Activism, and Mentoring) National Student Advisory board for three years, and also branched out into other forms of activism while at Penn State, helping to plan a multi-day program around sexual assault prevention and cofounding No Hate Penn State with three other students. In his time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Elijah was president of the Black Student Union.