Constructing Disability: The Second Class Citizen

In 2008 I wrote a post with a title similar to this about the construction of disability. Consider this "part two."

On Wednesday night I was at the Comparative and International Education Society Annual Conference at The Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. I was exhausted from a day of rolling a wheelchair over vast distances on very thick carpet. My leg hurt like a m..., well, it hurt in ways that pain meds weren't touching. And my arms, shoulders, and hands were burning from the "work out" of the day - which had begun with an 8.00 am presentation.

But I really did not want to hide in my room. The real reason anyone goes to a conference like this is to get to meet, and talk to, the brilliant, fascinating people who are there - people from everywhere on the planet. So I pushed through my room door, wheeled through the long corridors, rode down in the tiny elevator which barely fit my chair, and went down to the grand lobby where two big receptions for conference attendees were being held, one sponsored by my university, the other by Teachers College of Columbia University.

I rolled through the lobby and met a friend near the base of the stairway below, which led to one of the receptions:

Entrance to the Empire Room at The Palmer House

"Are you going in..." my friend asked, voice trailing off as he turned to look. "Oh." "Yeah," I said. Now - I'm sure there is another route. I've ridden in my share of kitchen elevators, etc. But as I looked, realizing there was no indication of a disability route, no statement at all of accessibility, I decided I didn't want to be carried in through the back door to this event.

So I said goodbye to my friend and moved toward the Teachers College reception in the hotel's Honore Ballroom. There, I met another staircase only entrance, also without disability signage. Worse, Teachers College - one of the foremost and forward-thinking education schools in the nation, had placed their "check in" table on a landing in the middle of the stairs. Again - I'm certain that there is a way in - but why should I, unlike everyone else, have to beg for admission.

Blocked from the free food, and hungry, I turned into the hotel bar. But service was either unavailable to those unable to climb the six stairs to the bar itself, or I was invisible, because I sat at a table for 20 minutes, attempting to corral a wait staff member, quite unsuccessfully.

So I went back up to my room, crawled into bed, and spent a small fortune on room service. As I ate, I realized that the Thursday night dinner, the "big event" of the conference for which I had purchased a $65 ticket, was being held in the Empire Room - that first place with the big, beautiful stairs. I called downstairs, cancelled my stay Thursday night stay, and arranged to leave early Thursday afternoon.

Now, let me pause to say that I have no complaints about The Palmer House. In fact, I have never been treated so well in any hotel anywhere. Except for the bar staff, every employee was not just helpful and kind, but positively wonderful, and - and this matters - was clearly perfectly trained in disability etiquette, offering help without pity, treating me as fully human at every turn. The service was so good I thought I was on the Titanic - without the whole unfortunate iceberg thing.

Monroe Street Entrance

And it is not the fault of The Palmer House that they are trying to fit modern function into a landmark 1871 hotel. I believe in aesthetics - I don't want them hacking through 130-year-old marble to install an elevator next to the Empire Room stairs. I could ask for better signage, sure, but historic facilities are historic facilities, and people choose their conference facilities either considering access, or not.

So, Michigan State University, as conference host, chose a facility without wifi (blocking many free accessible technologies), with poor 3G reception (blocking others), with long, deeply carpeted corridors that made mobility really difficult, with major reception rooms with stair-only main entrances, with many tiny meeting rooms which wheelchairs could barely - or simply not - fit into. This was not a "single oversight." Those checking people in to the conference sat behind a tall desk I could not see over. No conference signs referred to accessibility, either for mobility, or hearing, or vision.

There has been only a very few times in my "mobility-challenged" experience when I've been told more consistently, or more repeatedly, that I was not "fully human."

As when my university chose to favor football tailgate tents over disability access to an educational event, it was more personal, because this conference was organized by people who know wheelchair users, and knew wheelchair users were coming. It was organized by people I know.

It is not malice. No one organizing this event set out to make anyone's life miserable. But that does not make it better. I can fight malice. Instead, my disability was constructed by educators I know through complete indifference, through complete lack of empathy. That is much harder to fight, If any of these people read this they will likely be horrified. They will be apologetic. They may be even resentful that (a) I didn't help with the organization, and (b) that I didn't ask them repeatedly for help, rather than launching this "public attack." They may, even, in regard to those latter two issues, be partially justified. I did not help. I did not ask.

But should I have to? Back in 1998, when I was at Grand Valley State University, I was explaining to the Academic Computing staff why we were going to put accessible computers in to every computing environment on all of our campuses, and why we were not requiring "disabled" students to show some kind of ID card to use these workstations. One of my co-workers there got it immediately. "We don't ask anyone else to go somewhere special to use a computer," he said, "we don't ask anyone to show an ID to use a monitor or a keyboard."

That was 12 years ago. I don't know if the term "Universal Design" had entered education yet - surely I had never heard of it - and yet, people knew what was right. Today the expectations should be much higher.

There were many fabulous things about this conference. Great people. Great sessions. Great ideas. Great conversations. I would say that I would love to go to CIES2011 in Montreal, but at this grand international event, my fellow educators, grad students, and researchers were willing build my disability into something so big I felt not just like a Second-Class Citizen, but as someone less than fully human. If they'll do that here, to me, what are they doing to the students in their classrooms?

I hope the person I gave my dinner ticket to enjoyed... I hope they had no problem with the stairs.

- Ira Socol

How Social Networking Liberates Teachers

This week I presented a second version of the paper on Twitter as Teacher Liberation Technology that I presented last fall at Kent State University. This time, for the 2010 conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, I discussed Social Networking as Liberation Technology for Teachers and Students.

Teaching remains one of the most isolating professions I can think of, especially since lighthouse keepers have largely disappeared, and this isolation not only has profound effects on the individuals who teach, but on all of their students as well.

Even in large urban schools most teachers spend the day essentially locked within their own classrooms. Contact with their fellow professionals is limited to short lunch moments, conversations in the parking lot, and poorly designed professional development sessions. There is none of the "just-in-time" consultation which the other "professions" - doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers - have, almost none of the collaboration which routinely define those professions. There are not even "post-mortems" to challenge and advise when things go wrong.

Of course in much of the world the isolation is near total. Rural teachers may be one of two or three, or even the only teacher in a village. They may be hours from other teachers, and completely removed from any possible physical connection to teacher training institutions.

In addition to this lack of collaboration and internal support, these teachers also lack real visions of change, real alternate solutions. Teachers don't see examples of the best schools. They don't see what a real universal design school looks like. They don't see schools-without-walls. They don't see multiage or great mobile learning, unless it is right in their building.

Finally, teachers' "sight" and "reach" are constantly being restrained by national and local hegemonic power systems. Those who fund education, those who make "the rules," are politicians imposing their own vision of social reproduction on teachers. These rules - or the design of teacher education itself - constrict the sense of possibility in education. It might be the time schedule - what you can do with students in a 50 minute period is so different than what you can do in a flexible schedule. It might be how teachers are trained - in the US Teach for America workers have just six weeks of training, often devoid of alternative ideas or ideas for differing students, while in Northern Ireland, a single-year program, "just does not give us enough time [to really transform new teachers regarding inclusion]," a University of Ulster professor told us on Tuesday, and in many education programs Special Educational Needs are, at best, a tiny sidebar and Universal Design is not demonstrated at all. It might be barriers erected to learning - teachers given laptops which block certain content and certain social networking sites, or which prevent teachers from installing and discovering new learning technologies. It might be national laws - which prevent invention and experimentation. It might be locally instilled fear - many of us have seen or heard the "be scared of the internet" presentation given by poorly educated educators, politicians, and law enforcement personnel.

The result of this isolation is teachers who get stuck, who get frustrated, who are left alone to problem-solve without support - and students who too often sit through unimaginative, unchanging pedagogy.

 

A small primary school in Scotland met the scientists at the New York Hall of Science because the teacher was willing to let the students crowdsource a question about gravity and the vacuum of space

Social Networking changes the space in which teachers act
Social Networking allows an altered flow of power

I combine concepts from two philosophers to explain what I think happens when social networking tools such as Twitter and blogs enter the lives of teachers. From Michel Foucault I bring the idea that we best observe human action by watching what they actually do in a conceptual transaction space. That "space" - the "playing field" on which we operate, is shaped  by the limitations we have constructed through our own cultural experiences. And from Antonio Gramsci I bring the slightly advanced Marxist Philosophy view of power - that all humans have power in some way - that there are ways in which people resist and attempt to subvert structures imposed from above (the colonial imposition of hegemony), and it is important to watch those flows of power to understand.

Teachers seem to begin using these tools tentatively. First blog posts are often a basic question, or a happy report on something in their classroom. First tweets are typically a "hello," followed by a period of lurking. Many teachers go no further. Many of those who go no further describe the experience as "boring" or "confusing."

But for those who stick with it, those who are active enough to allow themselves to be drawn into conversations, start to see their transaction spaces change. New ideas flow into them which begin to widen horizons - they meet a classroom team running an inclusive classroom, they meet a latin teacher working without paper, they meet an American special education teacher challenging convention - or an Australian one. they see classrooms unimaginable to them, they meet new professors with different ideas - and the walls which have surrounded their perceptions - and which have appeared to limit their possible actions - begin to fall.

At this point, they begin to reach out and ask for help, they begin to wonder about possibilities, they begin to document their own experiments - which expands the circle. And then, teachers begin to collaborate.

They collaborate on pedagogy, often linking classrooms together - sharing book groups, blogs, skype calls - across their nations and around the globe. And they collaborate on power, asking for assistance in changing policies and structures, and getting it. These power collaborations range from technical advice on blocked internet applications to support for tenure.

And, once this happens, students begin to see the benefits, both indirect - teachers willing and able to attempt change, and direct, actual classroom involvement in the world.

Liberation through Social Media

View more presentations from Ira David Socol.

- Ira Socol