“Figuring out what questions to ask in an interview or a conversation is not only a matter of content. The ways we ask questions may have a big impact on the interview too: on how participants experience the situation, and on what they decide to share” Thanem, T., & Knights, D. (2019). Embodying interviews and conversations. In Embodied Research Methods (pp. 78-91).
I had initially wished to create a focus group with staff at UAL, test research questions, identify the specific areas addressing disability and access within the teaching environment, that could be worked on or possibly changed.
After these initial findings, a second set of research methods would test these findings in a discussion, and I would then bring practitioners and educators together in the same room using participatory action methods to put these findings into practice. Use them in the classroom, and see if the changes worked.
I may eventually decide to do this specifically within an action research context, to measure impacts or changes to learning within the curriculums. But the focus group seemed too large a task whilst navigating my health, and I wanted to concentrate on small case studies to first investigate what issues were at play, for disabled staff, and the impacts of their experience on their teaching. I of course reflect that this was a constraint on the methods of research that were used, and the research could have been different if using the other forms of research initially, but this may prove possible in the future for further action research cycles.
The methods I used, were recorded audio interviews, long form questionaries and conversations carried out over voice notes, with a fixed set of questions.
These long form questionaires, allowed in depth recorded audio responses, that allowed the participants some distance, and space, but we could have the audio recordings which allowed for richer, longer responses that enabled the participant to focus on the responses they felt connection to.
There were a number of ethical concerns to working and using action research with students themselves with this topic, and it was deemed too sensitive. The premise of the work was to focus on Disabled staff, and hone in on particular findings, to then take to put into practice itself. My hope and approach is to work with other educators, and disabled faculty/staff to find out the kinds of approaches they use themselves, have worked on, and have been seen to work, and to also map the commonalities and failings that students are experiencing, in the hope they may be addressed in future cycles of action research, to positively test ways that shift and transform teaching practices that create social justice.
Academics with chronic illness, disabilities or neurodiversity are practically unseen and starkly under-represented in comparison to students with disabilities or disabled people in the general public (Brown and Leigh 2018).
There are not that many small scale studies on disabled staff themselves, bearing in mind UAL has a large number of disabled students who are neurodivergent as an arts school, which would lead us to thinking that there must be a large set of disabled staff members also, which we don’t often or are able to be cognisant of.
Transforming teaching practices with social justice, is not only incorporating the ways disabled students can succeed and thrive – and not only measured as ‘ just receiving disability support, and having accommodations put in place’ but for ‘liberatory access’ and universal design to be seen as way to radically transform the inherently ableist systems that formal education has primarily built into its design.
Within this, disabled staff play a huge role, as they navigate institutional violence as well, and potentially are re-traumatised just by working here. But they are able to be a particular bridge, they can see students struggling, they can witness the systems that are failing, and also what is needed to short circuit, rewire and reconfigure. We can also argue there is no fixing and tweaking, there is no use to only focus on logistics, as Mia Mingus says, but to focus on the relationships that are at the heart of making and practicing access. Social justice isn’t just about opening a door a little wider, so more people can enter or sit at the table, and have dictation software. It’s about the system itself that was not made for disabled students, and no tweaking here and there is ever going to fully provide the full transformation we seek. It is about understanding that there are no single interpretations of a disabled student’s experience, that a student with multiple marginalised identities such as race or of trans experience or that intersect with class, will be different experience of disability altogether with someone from a more privileged class background.
Kerschbaum, S.L. & Price, M. 2017, “Centering Disability in Qualitative Interviewing”, Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 98-107.
Disability under protected human rights legislation includes neuro-diveregence, mental health conditions, long term chronic illness and physical impairment/disabilities, visual/sensory impairments and d/Deaf communities.
Mingus, M. (2017) Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice –https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/ accessed 3 Dec 2023