A New Vision for Disability Education

Abstract

Karen Myers urges us to move beyond the limitation model of disability education and design curricula, programs, and services to be accessible to all people from the outset, with no accommodations needed.

PROFESSOR MARTIN turns on her computer and opens her e-mail. There she sees a message from the university president. It reads: “I invite you, a valued member of our campus community, to participate in our university's time-honored tradition. On Wednesday at noon, we will gather in the University Commons Auditorium to learn even more about how to include every one of our students in every course and program we offer. This event kicks off our yearlong disability education project, during which we will focus on learning, teaching, and modeling inclusion. Together, we will create innovative ways to address disability in your classes and infuse disability issues into your programs and academic disciplines. I look forward to celebrating this momentous occasion with you and I will see you on Wednesday at noon.”

And then she wakes up.

This scenario does not have to be a dream. In this article, I offer suggestions for effectively addressing disability in and outside the classroom. I am buoyed by the knowledge that today's colleges and universities have proven that they can “do” diversity. Most have international weeks, multicultural weeks, women's weeks, and, yes, even disability awareness weeks. The disability services office, a student organization for people with disabilities, or the student government are most often responsible for coordinating disability awareness events, for offering informational materials, and for hosting other educational activities that typically include food in order to attract a crowd. Speakers, entertainers, and students with disabilities perform, and fundraising takes place. Presidents, vice presidents, and typically a handful of faculty and staff participate in these events in order to express their appreciation for the effort.

These types of events, unfortunately, are where disability education often begins and ends. After the events, life generally goes on as it has in the past, and people with disabilities continue to be excluded from daily activities, intentionally or not. Exclusion continues, despite the fact that according to the 2000 U.S. Census, one in five Americans identified themselves as having a disability. Disability is often missing from diversity lists that include race, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, and sexual orientation. Nonetheless, faculty members who are trained in infusing disability issues into their curricula and applying teaching strategies specifically intended to include all students in learning activities are fostering inclusive classroom environments for students with and without disabilities. Unfortunately, these practices are not the norm. Even after thirty years of practice, disability issues continue to be an afterthought in higher education. It is time to move on from disability education as an add-on.

Not an Outdated Topic

AT A RECENT MEETING of higher education professionals, I overheard some faculty members expressing their boredom with the topic of disability education. They agreed with one another that disability awareness is an outdated topic and one in which most members of their campus communities, particularly faculty members, are well schooled. In their eyes, equal access to learning means providing accommodations to students with disabilities. If institutions continue to operate within the current medical and functional limitations framework of disability, their comments may actually have merit. If, on the other hand, educators wish to move beyond disability models that imply deficiency, inferiority, and abnormality, and if they choose to accept responsibility for the barriers that have been created and for the conditions that have been defined, then they are ready for a new approach—the development and delivery of moral and civic learning opportunities found in a new vision of disability education.

Regardless of our perceived level of familiarity with the topic, I believe that everyone can benefit from the kind of disability education advocated in this article. Although I have worked in the field of disability for more than twenty years as a teacher, consultant, and trainer, I continue to learn from graduate students in my disability course, who have opened my mind to new ideas about disability through their research projects and interviews. When I shared an article about universal instructional design (an inclusionary approach to teaching that I will describe in detail later in this article) with a college professor with expertise in special education, she said that she had learned several new concepts to share with her students. A friend with a doctorate in disability studies read a first-person account about living with low vision and was amazed at the number of daily obstacles and issues that had never occurred to her. These are all higher education professionals who, one would assume, would know a great deal about the people with whom they work and about whom they teach—that is, people with disabilities. Yet these professionals openly admit that they are still learning about disability. If they are still learning, the likelihood is high that those who rarely come into contact with people with disabilities also have much to learn.

Exclusion Still Exists

I TEND TO BEGIN AND END my disability aware-ness training sessions with one question: Have you excluded anyone today? My emphasis on the word excluded is intentional. When asked about inclusion, most educators would say that they do their best to include all people in whatever they do, from teaching classes to coordinating out-of class activities. But asking whether they have excluded anyone today typically evokes deeper reflection. Here are some examples:

Exclusion Example 1

A student group that you advise is having an open forum on social justice. The members advertise that they will meet by the rose garden in the middle of campus. The rose garden is at the bottom of a hill with stairs leading to a concrete platform at the top of the hill. The students decide to meet on the concrete platform. Jill has multiple sclerosis. Her legs are weak, and she cannot climb the stairs. Bryan has a spinal cord injury and uses a wheelchair. There is no wheelchair access to the platform. Tina is blind. She can climb mountains, but she cannot see where the students are meeting and therefore does not know to climb the stairs. These students are immediately excluded from the discussion on social justice. Ironic. How many more students have been excluded or will be in the future? If the student group had decided to meet on and around the benches in the rose garden, could all students have been included?

Exclusion Example 2

As an associate professor in sociology, you teach a course each year called “Sociology of Diversity.” As you prepare your syllabus for the new semester, you plan to include discussions of gender discrimination in the workforce, racial inequality in prisons, and hate crimes based on sexual orientation, as you have in the past. However, nowhere in your curriculum do you address the impact of disability issues on society. Not only has disability been excluded from your definition of diversity, but you have also missed a key opportunity to infuse disability education into your course and academic discipline. You have missed the opportunity to expand your students’ view of diversity to include disability, which affects approximately 10 percent of their fellow college students and 20 percent of all Americans.

Exclusion Example 3

You are facilitating a committee meeting, and you distribute a handout for everyone to read prior to discussion. Text of the handout is printed in 10-point Times New Roman font. One of your committee members is legally blind and cannot read the handout. You have now excluded him from the activity. If you say you are sorry, that you know the font is too small and that you forgot, he is still excluded. If you or someone else offers to read it aloud to him, it has become a public issue and attention is being drawn to him and to the situation. Solution? Why not make a habit of having a large-print version of every handout? Or better yet, why not adopt a policy that all handouts distributed at meetings will be in 14-point Arial font (or whatever font size he requests). That way, everyone receives the same handout, and no one needs to scramble to make sure that one committee member is accommodated. Everyone present can read the handout. You might even discover that some other members are grateful for the larger font, which eliminates the need for squinting. And no one is excluded.

Universal Design Ensures Inclusion

THESE and other minor actions can eliminate exclusion and are at the heart of a new vision for disability education that eschews the limitations framework and makes way for learning opportunities for all students. These actions are built on educational applications of universal design, an architectural concept defined by the Center for Universal Design in 1997 as “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptable or specialized design” (p. 1). One example of universal design in architectural use is a curb cut. Although curb cuts make sidewalks and streets accessible to people who use wheelchairs, they are also beneficial to others who are using moving carts, rolling suitcases, baby strollers, bicycles, or skateboards. When applied in an educational setting, universal design evolves into universal instructional design (“pedagogical curb cuts”—a phrase used by Liat Ben-Moshe, Rebecca C. Cory, Mia Feldbaum, and Ken Sagendorf in their 2005 book title), in which curricula, programs, and services are designed from the outset to be accessible to all people, regardless of their background, learning preferences, abilities, or disabilities. The result is that few, if any accommodations need to be made for any one individual. No one is excluded.

The kinds of educational opportunities advocated in this article and facilitated by universal design were introduced to higher education more than ten years ago and are increasingly being applied on college campuses under a variety of labels, including universal design of instruction (UDI), universal design for learning (UDL), and universal instructional design (UID), a term coined by Patricia Silver, Andrew Bourke, and Kregg C. Strehorn in 1998. Federal funds now provide support for many educational applications of UID that are based on the principles for good practice in undergraduate education introduced by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson in 1987. The principles, as adapted for UID, include (1) creating welcoming classrooms; (2) determining the essential components of a course; (3) communicating class expectations; (4) providing constructive feedback; (5) exploring the use of natural supports for learning, including technology, to enhance opportunities for all learners; (6) designing teaching methods that consider diverse learning styles, abilities, ways of knowing, and previous experience and background knowledge; (7) creating multiple ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge; and (8) promoting interaction among and between faculty and students.

The University of Minnesota's Curriculum, Transformation and Disability project, led by Jeanne Higbee, offers resources for educators interested in applications of UID in the classroom, while the University of Minnesota's Pedagogy and Student Services for Institutional Transformation (PASS IT) project, led by Higbee and Emily Goff, provides information focused on UID applications for out-of-class programs and services. Included in the educational materials developed through PASS IT (see http://cehd.umn. edu/passit) are three UID checklists for faculty, staff, and students based on Chickering and Gamson's ideology and designed to determine whether and how UID principles are or will be used. (These checklists can also be accessed at http://cte.slu.edu/ui.)

While this new kind of disability education may simply sound like good practice, Goff and Higbee believe it has transformative qualities that apply to many forms of diversity: “Even for those of us who have always been very intentional and reflective in our work, UID has simultaneously broadened and focused our thinking. We think more broadly about the diversity of our students and how students’ social identities can shape their learning experiences, and meanwhile we are also more focused on how we can ensure that no students are excluded or marginalized.”

Shifting the Paradigm

A NEW VISION of disability education that moves away from a limitations framework emphasizes the humanizing of disabilities. In her 1996 article, “Toward Inclusive Theory: Disability as a Social Construction,” Susan Jones argues that members of American society must move away from the medical model of disability toward one in which they take responsibility for the definition of disability. In the medical model, disability is viewed as a biological flaw, a deficiency for which the individual with the disability is responsible. Social constructivism of disability (first framed by Adrienne Asch in 1984 and Asch and Michelle Fine in 1988), on the other hand, “distinguishes between the biological fact of disability and the ‘handicapping’ social environment in which the person with disabilities exists,” according to Jones (p. 351).

Jones and other scholars suggest that the attitudes of people without disabilities have created the structures, relationships, and institutions that marginalize and exclude persons with disabilities and shape the meaning of disability. In her 2006 California Psychologist article, “Disability and Clinical Competency,” Jennifer Gibson asserts, “Persons with disabilities traditionally have experienced systematic institutional victimization from all aspects of society including, but not limited to, the medical profession, the educational system and the workforce” (p. 6). She suggests that educators must recognize and act on the knowledge that disability is not an individual's sole identity. Likewise, Jones believes that a shift to the social construction model celebrates “the uniqueness of individual difference while directing attention toward social change and transformation of oppressive structures.” The infusion of universal instructional design principles into higher education practice is a welcome by-product of this shift in thinking and signifies increased inclusion of all students in the learning experience.

The Students Have Spoken

DESPITE the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of l973 (Public Law 93-112), the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 (Public Law 101-336), and some gains in the use of universal instructional design, disability has still been painfully slow in making its way onto the higher education radar in the United States. Some thirteen years ago, several students completing master's degrees in student personnel administration told me they had not enrolled in one course or had even one class session on disability issues during their entire graduate program. In fact, disability was rarely included on the list of diverse identities addressed in multicultural courses. They admitted that the information they had received about disability tended to be stereotyping and often misleading. Although these students saw a need for discussion of disability in their program, their courses continued to focus on issues related to gender, race, and sexual orientation. These student anecdotes were corroborated empirically in Donna Talbot's 1996 study, which revealed that “diversity needs to be defined broadly. … A narrow definition of diversity may lead to a distorted or skewed perspective on the needs and issues of diverse populations. A broader scope of diversity must be addressed, implicitly and explicitly, throughout the curriculum” (p. 75). And just this past year, during my Disability in Higher Education and Society course, which is required for master's-level students in student personnel administration, several students repeated what their colleagues at a different university had told me thirteen years previously. They revealed that until this class, they had not addressed disability in any of their undergraduate or graduate courses. Although there are graduate programs that include disability in their curricula, the topic of disability is still not widely addressed in American colleges and universities. While a standalone course about disabilities has advantages in terms of focus, the key is to infuse learning about disabilities across student experiences. Infusion might mean addressing disability as an identity in a human development psychology course; including disability in a discussion of underrepresented populations in a sociology course; describing the disability rights movement in an American history or political science course; covering disability law in a legal issues course; investigating how disability is portrayed in the media in communication, literature, theater, and first-year experience courses; including disability accommodations and access costs in a business or economics course; addressing access issues in an urban planning course; or incorporating the principles of universal instructional design into a cocurricular program for undergraduates or a college teaching course for graduate students.

In a 2006 national study published in Universal design in higher education: From principles to practice, I surveyed students in sixty-one graduate programs that included student personnel administration, higher education administration, educational leadership, educational studies, nursing, and allied health. Almost all of the 784 respondents reported that they saw a need for some type of disability education in their degree program. When asked about their knowledge and understanding of college students with disabilities, 53 percent of the respondents believed that students with disabilities do not fully participate in higher education and 62 percent reported that they do not know what steps to take to ensure that students with disabilities do fully participate.

The educators surveyed in our study believe that there is a need for disability education. To them, disability is not an outdated topic; rather, it is a vital piece missing from their academic program and professional development plan. They admit that they do not know how to ensure inclusion of students with disabilities on their campus. They wish to use appropriate language; they want to know how to communicate with people with disabilities; and they want to be aware of rights and responsibilities, including laws, policies, and procedures. They expressed a desire to treat students with disabilities as first-class citizens, and they want to do all they can to not exclude or marginalize them. They are seeking disability education that moves beyond a limitations mentality and toward humanizing disability both in and out of the classroom.

Respect, Comfort, and Awareness

IN MY 2009 BOOK, College Students with Visual Disabilities: Preferences for Effective Interaction, I present my findings that students with visual disabilities want to engage in communication practices that demonstrate respect, comfort, and awareness. They want teachers and other students to show them respect, and they wish to be treated as others would want to be treated—no better, no worse. They reported that they do not require special treatment. Echoing the words of Joseph Shapiro in his 1994 book, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement, the students emphasized that they are neither superhuman nor to be pitied like Tiny Tim.

Students with visual disabilities also want teachers to feel comfortable around them. They reported that many people talk loudly to people with visual disabilities or tiptoe around them, hoping they will not hear them walk by. They said that people seem embarrassed and do not know what to do. This lack of comfort bothers the students, and as a result, the students use humor to put others at ease. One student says, “I tend to laugh at myself and my faux pas, and try to make light of my blindness. I attempt to bring attention to myself as a human being rather than as a person with a disability. I want people to know that it's okay to be around me.”

All of the students emphasized the importance of disability awareness. They suggested that through classes, programs, activities, and educational media, teachers, administrators, and peers could increase their understanding of visual disabilities and, with this increased understanding, become more comfortable and confident in their interactions with students who are blind or have low vision.

These attitudes of respect, comfort, and awareness readily map to learning outcomes espoused by many colleges and universities. From humanitarianism and civic engagement to knowledge acquisition, cognitive complexity, and communication competence, learning outcomes such as those outlined in Learning Reconsidered in 2004 (edited by Richard Keeling) can be achieved by intentionally designing opportunities for students to demonstrate respect, comfort, and awareness in regard to students with disabilities. Such learning opportunities might include an introduction to the components of the Americans with Disabilities Act, connecting the principles of UID to student course work, or instruction in appropriate language and interaction techniques related to persons with disabilities.

Opportunities to achieve learning outcomes relevant to disability education are particularly rich in learning communities, as Cathy Engstrom and Vincent Tinto describe in the January/February 2008 issue of Change. Engstrom and Tinto suggest that learning communities, in which students in a cohort share two or more academic experiences, can set conditions for student success and can avoid the add-on approach that leads to marginalization. An effective learning community that fosters collaboration, growth, self-efficacy, mastery of learning, and connection to peers and to the institution is an ideal venue for disability education. Learning communities could take the form of a themed diversity or social justice learning community in which disability is a central topic or, better yet, in which disability is infused into the community's curriculum, programs, and core values.

Whether operating in the classroom, in a cocur-ricular program, or through a learning community, disability education as envisioned in this article creates a respectful, welcoming environment and relies on allies to support and advocate for the social justice of persons with disabilities. Educators can and should be such allies. Nancy Evans, Jennifer Assadi, and Todd Herriott (in their 2005 chapter in New Directions for Student Services entitled “Encouraging the Development of Disability Allies”) stress that from a social justice perspective, ally development includes disability awareness, disability education, the development of skills to counter oppression, and direct action to facilitate change. Evans and her coauthors suggest that through contact, information, and communication, disability allies can collaborate with others in a campus community in “taking action when oppression occurs and … work[ing] alongside individuals with disabilities to create a positive learning environment in which all students can succeed” (p. 77). A lack of knowledge about disability in general as well as a lack of experience in interacting with individuals with disabilities may result in some without disabilities experiencing fear and discomfort or even a sense of superiority, according to Deborah Marks in her 1999 book, Disability: Controversial Debates and Psychosocial Perspectives. Allies can help set a tone to change those attitudes.

Conclusion

I BELIEVE that a new vision for disability education that moves away from a limitations model and toward humanizing disabilities is crucial for campus communities. Through an introduction to universal design of instruction, universal design for learning, or universal instructional design, educators can learn to focus their pedagogy, assignments, and course or program objectives to reflect an awareness of ideal strategies for teaching different types of learners, including those with disabilities. Through curriculum infused with disability issues across a variety of courses, students can gain familiarity with and understanding of people with disabilities and disability in society. Colleges and universities are the ideal environment in which to begin to humanize society's view of disability and celebrate individual differences in all people. By employing these strategies, Professor Martin's dream of disability education can become a daily reality.

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