Step 1 Too many disabled students fall through the cracks and are made to feel like there is something inherent about them that means they will find it harder to navigate institutional systems – such as emails, communication, timetables, locations, school start times, reading comprehensions and engagement with lectures, skills and resources. The factors of chronic illness and physical disability play a large role in the impairment of cognition, executive dysfunction and mentalising/holding a mental load, meaning that many comprehension faculties or components of disability associated with neurodivergence and disabilities of emotional and mind health impairment, are also associated and should be taken into account for those with long term illness, pain, mobility issues, and physical and ‘visible’ disabilities.
There is a correlation between race and disability disclosure, and that because of racism many staff do not initially believe Black and POC students are struggling with an underlying disability and begin to lean on unconscious bias and assume students are struggling because there is something inherently deficient in their learning capabilities, rather than observing or seeing the clear obstacles to their true potential. Or a lack of considered compassion in identifying students who are clearly struggling with mental, physical disabilities and neurodivergence.
Black and Brown students are less likely to have had access to diagnosis, and correct support before coming to university, and many will likely have internalised feelings of otherness, inadequacy and feelings of failure. They may well have found several ways to compensate, hide and mask their difficulties which in turn will make it harder for them to be seen as valid, and struggling with a disability that may impact their performance, their output and ability to perform/participate with higher education, to travel to be on site on campus and benefit from the university experience like their peers.
Step 2 I would like to collect data from interviewing disabled staff and their own experiences of these very situations, apply it to current teaching conditions, and find out if disabled staff who have experiences of being a disabled student, can further develop insights from that student experience, and how it may in fact impact their own teaching, how they may identify and support disabled students themselves, because of this identification, and relation to other disabled students, and how this may impact the teaching experience for current disabled students themselves?
What would this change look like? What would this set of disruptions look like?
Step 3 How can disabled staff be objects or tools in themselves to see through the obstacles, measure the performance and output of disabled students and see where certain students are falling through the cracks and identify what should be there to step in and fill that gap?
Step 4 How have the changes noted made an impact, what works, what doesn’t?
Is there a noted correlation between the teaching practices of disabled staff that impact the teaching and learning environments? (As well as the one to one tutorials that take place) Has this been affected by disabled staff and their own experiences within the institution at differing capacities? How do these actions tackle ableism in arts education, as well as improve possibilities of access?
In this way we can seek to transform and co-create access that is built on relationships between colleagues, administration departments, students and tutors themselves, taking note of Kershbaum & Price, in this quote , as well as understanding the embodied parameters of the interviewing itself within disability research frameworks, as well as how can these ideas operate within higher education spaces too? Constituting core ideas of interdependence and collaborative efforts that are needed to ‘construct access’
“This means we recognize our mutual dependence on one another and others as we collaborate together to construct access, that we recognize our strengths that stem from disability, and we make access a higher priority than maintaining consistency across different interview modalities.”(Kerschbaum & Price 2017)
Kerschbaum, S.L. & Price, M. (2017,) “Centering Disability in Qualitative Interviewing”, Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 98-107.
Chaudhry, V. (2019). Centering embodiment in disability research through performance ethnography. Qualitative Social Work, 18(5), 754-771. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473325018767728
Make note of changes, observations and repeat.