Beyond Accommodation: Changing the Disability Frame

Topics

We're in a university environment that like most universities sets rather ablest terms for its norms. If it didn't for instance, it would be entirely imaginable by every member of this university to have disabled people seen as an integral part of this university.

Mel Chen

Beyond Accommodation: Changing the Disability Frame | Teaching in Troubled Times | UC Berkeley

Event Description

Berkeley faculty, graduate student instructors, staff, and students sought to expand the dialogue around disability on college campuses, which often focuses on how we can support and accommodate individual needs and meet compliance requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Participants were invited to think in creative ways about culture, structure, teaching and learning, and broader institutional transformation. Some key discussion questions included:

How can we as a campus start to look at disability from a framework of equity, belonging and social justice, rather than solely as a matter of individual accommodation?
What is the range of disability-related experiences in our classrooms, departments, organizations and campus community? What strengths and assets do they offer?
What challenges are created by the structures, spaces, assumptions, and narratives about ability and disability within which we work?
How do they normalize certain types of experience?

How do they impact the distribution of power and resources? How do they affect individual success and well-being? How can we address these challenges?
What are some creative ways to think about curriculum, pedagogy, advising, mentoring and classroom culture that move us beyond “accommodation" to full inclusion and belonging?
What does new research tell us about how to think about all of these issues?

Panelists

Berkeley Disabled Students Program (DSP)

The Disabled Students' Program promotes an inclusive environment for students with disabilities. DSP equip students with appropriate accommodations and services to achieve their individual academic goals. They are dedicated to supporting students and collaborating with the campus community to remove barriers to educational access and embrace the University’s values of equity and inclusion. They believe that an accessible environment universally benefits everyone. Contact Carolyn Swalina (cbs@berkeley.edu), Lead Disability Specialist, if you have any questions!

Berkeley Disability Studies

Disability studies provides a space to explore questions like these: How has disability been defined in various historical moments, in various cultures and eras? While impairment has unquestionably been a frequent experience throughout human history, has disability-the construction of impairment as a generic social category — been a historical constant, or is it a modern invention? What social ideologies, cultural systems, and societal arrangements have shaped the meaning and experience of disability? How has disability been defined or represented in cultural and artistic productions, public laws and policies, modern professional practices and in everyday life?

Berkeley Disability Access and Compliance (DAC)

Disability Access & Compliance (DAC) connects the UC Berkeley community with the resources, training, evaluative tools, and services that support equal access to students, staff, faculty, and visitors with disabilities to participate in university-sponsored non-course-related programs or activities. DAC offers a combination of direct services and accommodations to people with disabilities, consultations for campus units in support of people with disabilities, accessibility assessments, and compliance mandates in accordance with federal, state, and local law.

Berkeley DSP TRiO

DSP Trio provides students with the following support services: Individualized Academic Coaching, Advising, and Goal Setting, Education to Improve Financial Literacy, Financial Aid and Scholarship Assistance, Graduate/Professional School and Career Counseling, Academic Soft Skills Training, Community Building and Cultural Events

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 As Amended

In 1990, Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and amended it in 2008. This site provides the legislative text and introductory and detailed information to make the information more accessible. It also discusses the key components of the ADA, such as Title II which prohibits disability discrimination by public entities including local and state governments, and Title III which applies to businesses and nonprofit organizations. Both Title II and Title III require that people with disabilities receive equal access to programs, services, activities, and accommodations.

Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The United Nations Treaty intended to protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities. Expands on the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Convention was negotiated during eight sessions of an Ad Hoc Committee of the General Assembly from 2002 to 2006, making it the fastest negotiated human rights treaty as of its adoption in December 2006.

The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public by Susan M. Schweik

Susan M. Schweik, UC Berkeley Professor, uncovers the murky history behind the laws, situating the varied legislation in its historical context and exploring in detail what the laws meant. Illustrating how the laws join the history of the disabled and the poor, Schweik not only gives the reader a deeper understanding of the ugly laws and the cities where they were generated, she locates the laws at a crucial intersection of evolving and unstable concepts of race, nation, sex, class, and gender.

"The Right to Live in the World: The Disabled in the Law of Torts" by Jacobus tenBroek

Dr. Jacobus tenBroek, disabilities rights activist and former UC Berkeley Professor, wrote this paper based on the arguments that undergirded the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Here, Dr. tenBroek, articulated how people with disabilities, too, had the right to participate and live within society. This groundbreaking paper would go on to become the blueprint for the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Passion & Advocacy: The Impact of Disability Movements on Educational Reform and Beyond

Historically, eugenics was misleadingly presented as a scientific way to ‘enhance’ the human population, claiming to improve public health, reduce poverty, and prevent diseases. In reality, the government and academic institutions were using multiple efforts to discourage procreation amongst those with ‘undesirable traits.’ These efforts included involuntary sterilization and involuntary institutionalization of those who were poor, disabled, and culturally or racially inconvenient and were carried out to prevent “the germplasm of disability [from spreading] to the rest of society”. Public discontentment around eugenics increased, birthing numerous movements aimed toward providing justice to those impacted by this marginalization.

[14:53] In the 1960s, Jacobus tenBroek wrote The Right to Live in The World based on arguments from the 1964 Civil Rights Act that people with disabilities also have a right to participate and live within society, which later became the blueprint for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

[15:57] As disabled students were increasingly admitted to Cal, they organized together in a group called The Rolling Quads to create accessibility programs such as the Disabled Students Program (DSP), curb cuts for wheelchairs, and expand their collaborations into the community to create the first-ever Center for Independent Living.

[17:35] These changes laid the groundwork for increasingly impactful creations such as Dr. Victor Pineda’s contributions to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities which took the ADA, enriched it, and shared it with a worldwide audience, allowing 177 nations to ratify it.

[18:12] The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act by Judith Humans ensured K-12 students with disabilities were allowed accommodations, specifically enhancing early intervention which aims to identify and address the challenges of students at risk or experiencing developmental delays, disabilities, or other special needs to enhance the child’s development, support families, and improve long term outcomes. As of this recording, there are over 3,000 disabled students at Cal.

How Stigmatization & Marginalization of Intersectional Academic Accessibility Impacts Students

[19:20] The U.S. claims to be a meritocracy, but allegations of the Disabled Students Program being a cheat code represent a pattern of US society’s villainization of struggling groups who successfully break into already established systems. Consider women entering politics in the last century, Black Americans during reconstruction, LGBTQ+ community entering marriage, all of whom have been accused of being fraudulent, unworthy, and of causing an undermining of the validity of the system. Disabled people often face more disparities because they often have intersecting identities with other marginalized groups such as being of color or indigenous, being immigrants, being LGBTQ+, etc.

[20:51] Growing up in the U.S. where there are such established systems designed to deter marginalized groups creates an unconscious bias that needs to be recognized and fought against by deeply understanding how to include disabled people in our work and lives. -Ella Callow

[24:19] There are numerous structural disadvantages that target marginalized individuals, particularly those with intersecting identities, that don’t allow students to enter on the same grounds if they enter at all. The University of California, Berkeley was built upon ableist assumptions about education, and as a result, its infrastructure also reflects those biases. For example, declarations that “higher education is about cultivating the life of the mind” and considerations of the university as “an engine of capacity” imply that bodies are invisible mercenaries to the minds that are at stake in the university. For these bodies to operate the life of the mind successfully, there are many required conditions including hope for the future and a daily routine void of vigilance–these bodies must be able to focus on more than survival. Yet, these conditions don’t exist inside educational institutions for many students living with disabilities and or intersecting identities. -Mel Chen

Recommendations on how to Implement Lasting Disability Awareness & Rights Across Campus

[31:35] Intersectionality as a framework recognizes that many systems of privilege and disprivilege accompany us in our respective positions and communities. Instructors should cultivate sensitivity and alertness to the possibility of students at Berkeley living at those intersections. The university itself should aim to see itself engaged with social justice at every level, rather than ideas of superiority and providing help to struggling communities that are closely related to ideas that originally began the eugenics movement. -Mel Chen

[38:49] Although the disabled student population has exploded, as of this recording disabled faculty demographics have remained stagnant. Diversity and inclusion need to be implemented into everyday thought processes, not just talked about in hushed tones and behind closed doors. Many attitudes that faculty bring into various campus spaces such as classrooms also follow them into faculty meetings, hiring processes, and retention, but also into self-reporting of disabilities–leading to many faculty being “in the closet”. -Karen Nakmura

[44:15] Faculty have to fundamentally shift to consider what it would mean to have a classroom environment in which every student can thrive intellectually and maximize their 4 hours a week for 13 weeks a semester. -Karen Nakmura

[46:13] Faculty must ask themselves “how to prepare students for an environment in which they can thrive in the world, to find their voice, to be able to self advocate, to find employment opportunities where they can best be suited, or to feel empowered to create such employment opportunities.” -Karen Nakmura

[1:00:33] “Many students are afraid to take advantage of Disabled Students Program’s accommodations that they are entitled to because of fear that they don’t qualify, fear to announce it, or lack of knowledge about DSP existence. It is a part of the faculty's job to indicate to students that DSP exists for them, like other resources on campus, and for professors to make students comfortable to disclose their needs.” -Georgina Kleege

It was government and academia that launched the very darkest years for people with disabilities. It's the government and academia together that must continue to partner with disabled people, and shed light on the right of this community to live in the world.

Ella Callow