31 Jan – Inclusive Teaching and Learning: Disability

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31 Jan – Inclusive Teaching and Learning: Disability

Terminology

I found it helpful to look into the terminology of the subject before completing the blogging task and this is what I found. ‘Disability’ is not a description of a personal characteristic. A disabled person is not a ‘person with a disability’ as the person does not own the disability in the way that you might be ‘a person with brown hair’. Consequently, the opposite of ‘disabled’ is not ‘able-bodied’ or ‘abled’, but ‘non-disabled’ or ‘enabled’.

Understanding the critical difference between these two terms allows us to talk separately and clearly about:

a named individual = the person

• impairment = their functioning

disability = society’s barriers 

Further reading: http://www.equalitytraining.co.uk/images/news/language_of_respect.pdf 

Christine Sun Kim

I hadn’t come across Christine Sun Kim’s work before so the film was very informative, and triggered a few other thoughts. In the film she details her struggles with language, and in particular communicating with her family: ‘I had ideas I wanted to express but I couldn’t, I felt like my voice was being suffocated.’ This made me reflect on how this can happen even if a student is non-disabled. But also how, in the built environment, there can be options for both those with a disability and those non-disabled, yet, like Christine Sun Kim’s experiences, this doesn’t mean their experience of the world is equal. For example, if there is a long, steep staircase in a building, just because there is lift access doesn’t mean all people’s experiences of that space are equal. Travelling in a lift is not the same as experiencing a staircase, and so the gesture is fundamentally one of experiential inequality — the lift may make the building physically accessible, but not physiological accessible in a way which is equal to a non-disabled person ascending a staircase. Taken to its extreme this is a form of experiential oppression, the space disabled rather than the person, which is itself a pervasive form of control — sharing traits with what Christine Sun Kim described. 

Lots of the built environment believes a lift to be the same as a staircase. However there are some examples where architects have attempted to equalise the experience of those with, and without, impairment. Though I can’t find the name of the architect, the entrance to the RIBA headquarters (see image) was recently renovated.Instead of segregating stair and ramp the new staircase integrates the two so everyone entering that building experiences the same spatial experience. 

Image: Royal Institute of British Architects, 66 Portland Place, London: the front entrance

I think Christine Sun Kim experiences of sign language are similar. This system of communication may have allowed dialogue but it’s a universal system that is the same for everyone. By developing her own permeances she was able to develop a system of communication which expresses her own personality — like the staircase analogy, meaning her own personality is not voided in communications.  

Near the end of the film Christine Sun Kim reminds us to listen with our eye and not just our ears. Through my own teaching I have tried to do the same by exploring essay structure through architectural floor plans. Kim does the same by making language into a space, one that is universal and one everyone can engage with. This is something I would like to explore further in my artefact. 

The #DisabilityTooWhite ​interview with Vilissa Thompson explores the lack of diversity in representations of the disability community. The tag seems to have been successful in stimulating conversations about disability and what it means to be of colour and disabled, and some of the disparities surrounding that, in short to diversify disability (something I had not considered). Mainly, it made me think about how twitter and other digital spaces might be more accessible for the disabled community, and I plan to do more research on this.  

This links to ideas around diversity around platforms and spaces of expression, Christine Sun Kim, Vilissa Thompson and Khairani Barokka have all found platforms for expression — visual, verbal, written and movement.   

In ‘Deaf Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons from Touring Eve and Mary are Having Coffee’ by Khairani Barokka, the writer and artist makes it clear that you can’t always see impairment. Barokka also encapsulates  art can be a very affective platform to stimulate empathy in a person viewing the work, to make them understand someones pain to, as Barokka writes, ‘to transfer someone into our bodies to experience what we feel’, in short to ‘see through sometimes skin’ which I find a rich image which can be a touchstone in so many ways. The comments on the negatives attributes of the health system are also poignant; just because a support system is place, like with my stair and lift analogy, doesn’t mean it solves the problem, it can even make it worse.

In other blog posts I have written about how education (Newman, Morris and Rousseau) is about learning to develop ones own personality, values and how one relates to the world around them (Cardinal Newman’s Gentlemen’). This is something Barokka extrapolates in the latter parts of the text, and how a persona should consider the wellbeing of their audience just as much as the work itself, which in turn chimes with my ideas about how the university should be an expanded enclosure that incorporates life more than work, and then considers the audience as well as the student (see my post on COVID-19). 

I found the Mental Health & Creative Healing publication clear and informative. It caused me to reflection on the issues of definition and labelling. I remember reading an article a while on stammering, and how, sometimes, if a stammer is identified it gets worse rather than better (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9566.12025). It makes me wonder whether the same could be true of other impairments, and what other methods their could be for talking about them beyond the stigmas triggered syntactical determinacy. Could space be the answer?