Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

CONTENTS OF CURRICULUM UNIT 13.04.06

  1. Unit Guide
  1. Introduction
  2. My Students
  3. Objectives
  4. Rationale
  5. Normal and the birth of the deviant
  6. Ed Roberts and the Disability Rights Movement
  7. Universal Design and the ERC
  8. Social Justice in Special Education
  9. Activities
  10. Resources
  11. Appendix
  12. Bibliography
  13. Notes

People with Disabilities: An Invisible Community

Benjamin Barnett-Perry

Published September 2013

Tools for this Unit:

Activities

Investigating Barriers

This activity seeks to make the invisible visible. My students all have disabilities though only a few of them are physical. These invisible disabilities are often difficult to identify for students. Some of them are aware of the barriers they are up against and some have no idea. To bridge the gap between the very visible barriers of the physical built world and the invisible barriers of the educational and emotional world, students will partake in a simulation exercise. Students will be investigating the built environment with a "physical disability". This can be done with actual implements that people in the disability community use, such as wheelchairs, white canes, etc., or students can simply be asked to survey the environment for obstacles that might impede the movement or restrict people with physical disabilities.

Students will be instructed to navigate through the city of Berkeley in chaperoned groups and take note of obstacles and barriers they were and were not aware of. A graphic organizer will be employed to focus students on the obstacles they come upon as well as ideas of what accommodations or modifications could be put in place to overcome them. After navigating different parts of the community with different "disabilities" the students will take a tour of the Ed Roberts Campus to contrast the environment they just navigated with one that was built specifically for optimal accessibility. Students will note which of the alterations of environment would have been beneficial to them earlier in the exercise.

Notes on Disability Simulation

The stated objective for students during the disability simulation will be to investigate how barriers impede their movement within an environment. Making this objective clear is of the utmost importance, lest students begin to feel pity or disdain for those in the disability community. Sally French makes the point that often when the aim of the disability simulation is to emulate the experience of someone that has a disability for the sake of emulating what life would be like, it does very little to change attitudes towards the lives of the people in those communities. In many cases it ends up doing the reverse. 52 It is silly to think that blindfolding a person for an hour will give them the experience of being blind, rather than simply disorienting them. This is one of many reasons that French advocates for disability simulation never being used; it often highlights the negative aspects of disability, those in line with the medical model. This in turn causes students to think of those with disability as having difficult or even horrible lives. 53

Burgstahler and Doe state that this issue can be overcome by focusing the simulation on strategies and structures that can and should be in place to accommodate for the differences in people. They also note that it is imperative that the objectives of the simulation are clearly stated and tightly focused on a particular outcome. 54 It is highly recommended if not essential that teachers who are interested in disability simulation first read Burgstahler and Doe's Disability-related Simulations: If, When, and How to Use Them in Professional Development. Details will follow in the resources section.

Unpacking What Was Learned

The class after students return to school they will use the information they took down to have a fishbowl discussion about the differences in the medical and social minority models. Students will be encourage to apply the concepts they learned about the medical model as it relates to physical accessibility to other forms of accessibility including social, educational, economic and so on. As an extension to the discussion students will be asked to write down three things they interact with in their lives that, with their new knowledge of disability inequality, they feel needs to be improved to become more inclusive. This could be a physical structure or object. It could also be an assignment in school or an emotional or behavioral situation. Examples can be given to get the ball rolling. Students should also be encouraged to think of family members, specifically those who are elderly or disabled for inspiration.

Fishbowl

In a fishbowl discussion a small group of students are randomly or selectively placed inside a circle of the remaining students. The students in the middle are in the "fishbowl" to be observed by those outside of it. The students inside the circle are directed to have a conversation about a specific topic. Students can be asked to do this on the spot or given time before the activity begins to write some thoughtful responses to the prompt. The students in the outer circle are given observation tasks, such as noting who speaks and how often which will then be shared with the entire group at the end of the activity. After the observers share their findings, they are allowed to weigh in on the different points raised throughout the activity and on the benefits the activity lends to a topic of this kind.

What Do You See As A Curb?

Students will be asked to share out the barriers they have identified in their lives. They will then be placed in assigned or self-selected groups of three to five and tasked with discussing the barriers that each of them brought with. Through this discussion, students should select one barrier that they as a group agree is the greatest barrier. Students will then be asked to create a detailed model, either with the modeling materials or as a model design on paper. Modeling materials can either be provided by the teacher or brought from home by the students. The first design or model should detail the barrier as it currently exists and students should label the different parts of the designs that exclude groups of people and how/why this occurs.

The second part of this activity will involve students recreating this (former) barrier with Universal Design. As students rebuild or redesign their barrier to be as inclusive as possible a similar procedure will follow. Students will make note of each change, giving reasons for the change and highlighting who this will increase accessibility for and why. The project will culminate with a gallery walk in which all students will participate.

Gallery Walk

A gallery walk is an activity in which projects are peer reviewed and constructively criticized. In this particular gallery walk each student will be asked to give feedback to at least five of their peers, but can give feedback to as many as they would like. This feedback can be written on small sheets of paper that can be folded and placed in a pile or on the back of a sticky-note, that can then be stuck to the desk or table the project is on. A discussion about what constitutes constructive feedback will precede this activity. Positive feedback should be highly encouraged.

Alternative: What For You Is A Curb?

An alternative activity special education students, though it could be used with the general education population as well, is to focus on what for that particular student is a curb. Students will focus on something that they personally struggle with, an individual barrier. Rather than think about what they could do to "fix" themselves, students will be asked to detail what accommodations and modifications can be put in place within their environment to allow access to whatever their end goal may be. Students will proceed with this project much like the activity previously listed: They will outline what for them is a struggle, then detail each barrier that makes what they are attempting to do difficult. They will then Universally Design this task putting in place environmental accommodations and modification they believe will be beneficial. Students should also include a section on how and to whom they will advocate for these changes. A Gallery Walk or a short presentation to discuss their findings will follow to wrap things up.

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