2023/24
I returned to finish the PG Cert, after a break from the course because of a bereavement, and began thinking through how I could use the Action Research format to further the research idea I had started in 2022. I had taken a break from teaching, so I could not rely on a study that I could test this year, but instead would lean towards building upon the themes and tests in other areas of my PG cert.
I was keen to embed a social justice frame work, within a beginning set of action research cycles, that could then be tested at a later date.
Areas of research I have previously looked at, were de-colonial/anti-colonial tool kits in design pedagogy and changed textile design curriculums to focus not on euro centric ideas of design as a hierarchy above making, but to start from the body instead as tool of embodied knowledge. After changing these curriculums we noted what worked, what didn’t and what could be built upon. A paper was written and shared at a national conference about turning some of these educational models, in built into textile education, on their heads.
In previous projects I have tried to create interventions within UAL that bring students of colour together, and within specific brave spaces, and focus on disability. I have written previously on the failure of UAL systems to capture and retain disabled students and intersectional disabled students, who bear the impact and pressure of formal education.
I had noticed that other staff did not pick up on smaller cues that drew attention to students who may not be passing deadlines and hand ins, due to possible disabilities, that the student may not be aware of. I was confounded with a grading system that didn’t account for the missed opportunities due to students who were under the radar of services, and that there was a greater correlation between students of intersectional experience, navigating neuro-divergence and/or mental health conditions.
I was reminded of my own time at UAL, and how as a physically disabled student with invisible and very visible disabilities, the whole architectural environment, space, building, infrastructure digital and non-digital, people/hierarchies within in the school, systems, navigations through the city to get to school, an explicit inaccessible public transport system (a student who was using crutches and couldn’t walk) there were barriers upon compounded barriers that I had to navigate, with help or without it. I often now encounter disabled students, 10 years later, still struggling with similar issues and navigating the institutional systems at university. I wanted to measure or create a social justice inquiry into the cycles of barriers of education, what had changed, what has to change, and what possible futures could we suggest to transform the environments we were operating in.
I now as a staff member then had to navigate what it means to be a disabled staff member; teaching students and trying to do that well with heavy workloads and the double experience that lent me. I wanted to interview disabled staff members about their experiences as disabled students, and how this operates within the class room, what do they notice, and how similar is it to their own experience?
Disabled staff are negotiating the institution as well. Dealing with hardships/ the fall out gap between getting their access needs met and the fear of asking for their access needs to be met in the first place, – for having to ask for help- as well as trying to perform within a job to the best of ones ability.
The discrimination and shame that comes with living with disability your whole life, the internalised ableism, that somehow you are lesser than, and not good enough to be in your job, and ultimately your contribution to the world does not suffice compared to others. This structural and institutional ableism is within all of us, as any capitalist society, depends on those within in to function within it, work, be of use and sell your labour and contribute to society – pay your taxes – and therefore your worth is tied to your labour, and your ability to be productive according to capitalist notions of labour, and if you cannot fit within the confines of the rules set out, like everyone else then your value must be less.
My social justice practice that is within my teaching, and evidently in others as well, is universal access and design, lifts everyone up, and the parameters of operating within the systems and structures we teach in, need to be transformed themselves completely to truly address the fall out in education as we see it today
Baldridge, D. C., & Swift, M. L. (2013). Withholding Requests for Disability Accommodation: The Role of Individual Differences and Disability Attributes. Journal of Management, 39(3), 743-762.
Leigh, J., & Brown, N. (2020). Internalised ableism: Of the political and the personal. In J. Leigh & N. Brown (Eds.), Ableism in Academia: Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education (pp. 164–181). UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xprjr.16