CAST Symposium 2020, Day 2

I have provided a way for you to listen to this post here.  Or you may continue on to read it yourself.

The day began with a keynote, "Designing for Justice and Freedom" by Lydia Brown, (Twitter: @autistichoya, pronouns:  they, them, their). **please note Lydia was gracious enough to let me know I had their pronouns incorrect in this post, I have since changed them in the writing, but not yet in my video recording for the post- I will record a new video that is correct.

They began by inviting us to tune into what our body needs, and assured, "We are often more in tune...than we allow ourselves to be."  and affirmed, "We deserve to have our needs acknowledged and supported" Our body/minds are all different!
They spoke of diversity as meaning peoples minds and bodies are all different and that is Natural and Normal!


BIG QUESTION:  Why does our Education System... including expectations for students, pedagogical expectations, methods for teaching, assessing, and displaying learning... Why does it design for IMAGINARY people??? Why not design for real people?


Imaginary Person=  "Magically capable of being constantly ON, of paying constant and perfect attention, of having perfectly able to achieve according to specifically scheduled measurements of progression, of being able to demonstrate prowess, skill, knowledge and ability according to very arbitrarily and narrowly defined expectations for what constitutes legitimate knowledge, legitimate skill, legitimate learning."

My sketchnote about the Education Systems as hoops for an able bodied person to jump through

Lydia confronted the idea of what "normal expectations" are, and where they come from... they addressed the mental framework of "Ableism" through which many decision makers (many people) look at the world and thus look at students, teachers, and our education system.  Lydia boldly suggested that many of us in schools, are "Shut Down, by Design!"

Ways of thinking about Disability

They discussed the ways of thinking about 'disability' and defined disability as:

 "Both defined by social and cultural values, and our bodily minded experiences.  Part of the fabric of human existence and experience."

We often think about segregation and inclusion without considering the other words on this arrow.  They noted that it is not just about segregating people, but explicitly called out the deliberate exclusion of disabled people from participation in society, including ideas of people as unfit, undeserving, as wrong, broken and burdensome.  They highlighted the relative newness of rights to education for Black, Brown, Native and Asian students and the fact that the law doesn't necessarily make it a reality.

**"I do not want to be integrated in a system where my humanity is predicated by someone else's inhumanity!"  -LB.  

"I do not want to be integrated into a system that was made for someone else!" LB

They challenged us to look for new systems that put marginal students in the center of change, at the center of our education system.  They encourage us to change the frame, the lense, the system.  They insisted, We need a system that WANTS everyone included, because "Access means nothing if I am not desired!"

"There is a need to put disabled people in the center of what we are doing, so the ones in the margins are designing and telling us how to design." LB

UNIVERSAL DESIGN AND ACCESS CULTURE:"

"There is no such thing as one size fits all access or accessibility, so for me when I speak  of Universal Design, I speak instead of Access Culture as the principal and ideal for which we ought to be striving and practicing for constantly, that is integrating into our active consciousness and into our principals, that access is a value, in and of itself, that it is fluid, messy, complicated, imperfect, constantly shifting and changing depending on collective work, collaboration and interdependence, and for the benefit of ALL.  And what it looks like changes from context to context, situation to situation.  How we build access in, how we bake it in, looks different from one place to another."

Lydia went on to talk about Ableism, they put up this slide.

This entire portion of her presentation makes me thing deeply about the subjectivity in our education systems, in our school systems, schools and classrooms, and I wonder, who gets to decide what the norm is?  What a first grade reader or 4th grade reader should look and sound like.  What paying attention should look, sound and feel like?  What is 'bad behavior" really?  I'm questioning large scale tests, and day to day grading systems?

• "Ableism teaches us to be ashamed of things we struggle with, to hide where we struggle, to hide our dependencies and to shame others for their dependencies."

• "Ableism teaches us to fear, to shame."

• "Ableism is both dependent on and necessary for every single form of oppression."

A couple of the Quotes mentioned about DISABILITY JUSTICE:

• "Honoring the whole humanity of every human." - Talila A. Lewis
• "Moving beyond Access to Wholeness and finding Home."- Mia Mingus
• Lydia described this idea of "home" as "Welcoming, belonging" because, "Access means nothing if I am not wanted!"
• "Creating Access Culture."-  Mikael Lee
• "Active Love." K'tay -D. Davidson
• "Making sure we leave No body behind" -Shaine E. Neumeier
• "The art and practice of honoring the body/ mind/ all bodyminds." -LB

MULTIMODAL ACCESS for Communication.  

Lydia urges that a key component of access culture is to acknowledge that communication is variable and that we as educators must not just allow for, but plan for,  it's many modes!  specifically, "encouraging, respecting and validating the use of multimodal communication". The graphic below identifies 7, using 7 hexagon shapes arranged in a honeycomb shape.  Modes included, one to each hexagon, with Movement in the middle, typing, at the top, then to the right, writing, pictures, echolalia, speech, and sound.

ON the left of the slide in big, bold lettering: "Communication happens in many ways. All are equally valid and deserve respect and patience.'

In finally, Lydia encourages teachers to acknowledge that many things many of us "Assume are irresponsibility, inattentiveness, disrespect or even disruption, are ways of being present, and are valued or valuable, even and especially when you do not understand, and when it makes us uncomfortable."

They said, "Trust your students, believe your students."

And ends by essentially asking us to think about how to design "With radical acceptance and active Love." How to design for Disability Justice.