Disability Blog

Outside of UAL, my creative practice engages regularly with disabled people – particularly adults with late stage dementia and young people with profound and multiple disabilities. I have always seen this work as fairly separate from my teaching practice and in this blog I want to think about how I could bring some of the learnings into the classroom.

For the last five years I have been developing Spark – a research project in collaboration with care home residents to design invitations and activities for people living with late stage dementia. While care homes are specifically designed around the needs of older people, the social model of disability is also widely exemplified: Many of the people I work with are excluded from regular care home timetabling by staff’s assumptions about their abilities and interests or the structure of activities often exclude residents who are non verbal, or who struggle with stimulating environments. Part of my work is questioning these barriers, and finding ways around them and designing alternatives that are multisensory, age appropriate and create opportunities for connection, as these individuals tend to be extremely isolated.

I also work in SEND schools, with students who are disabled in a wide variety of ways. These environments are designed around their students needs, but the wide range of access needs mean that inclusion is a constantly moving goalpost (as it should be perhaps). It is important as an artist coming into theses spaces to be endlessly improvising and adaptable. So every activity is designed with multiple entrance and exit points and flexible enough to pivot at a moment’s notice.

But however much thought you put into space design and activities, the real work of inclusion in my experience, is when I am in the room with people and I can be led by their interests as well as their needs.

The approach is difficult to apply in a university, which, as Cerys mentioned in her lecture, is an essentially ablist structure with academic barriers to entry. None of the students I work with in schools would be able to access UAL. In some ways it is a completely antithetical space, SEND youth and people with dementia are – in the neoliberal worldview entirely “unproductive” and exist only as a burden – this is OF COURSE a huge loss to our culture and society (but that’s for another blog). Whereas the university, is seeking to create and extract value from its students, in the form of good grades, which turn into good data, which turns into more money. This means the slow paced, exploratory nature of my practice would be hard pressed to fit into the learning objectives and assessment criteria of the course I teach on.

So what can I bring from my experience of creating accessible, exciting spaces in which everyone is held to make their best possible creative work – into the university?

• An openness to communicate in many different ways. During tutorials I tend to draw as I talk and often the visual laying out of what I am saying helps students access it more clearly than my verbal cues. I would love to expand on this in my intervention.
• Flexible planning and delivery – being open to sessions going differently to how I imagined, creating moments for students to take the lead in where the session might go – following their interests rather than my own. I felt Cerys modeled this really well in her guest lecture on disability frameworks, often checking in with the room, asking for feedback, stating when she was unsure or open to changing her mind.
• Object based learning – I almost never bring physical things into the university classroom whereas in my other practice I am always lugging around huge trolleys full of very carefully chosen materials. Having multisensory ways of engaging with the topics would be something I would love to bring into my teaching more and could benefit both disabled and non disabled students.
• Nuturing a culture of compassion in my students and myself. Sometimes I have struggled with multiple access needs and the friction that can create. But, it is helpful to embrace this friction and instead of trying to avoid it, make everyone aware of it and the extra care and compassion it demands. Thus we actively work towards the “Cross disability solidarity” the Ten principles of Disability Justice demands. As Disability Justice activists – calling up have stated:

“the concept of access frictions emphasises the need for flexibility, collaboration, and open communication to find solutions that benefit everyone. This approach recognises that access needs are not in competition with one another but rather reflect the diverse perspectives and needs of different individuals and groups.While access frictions are primarily associated with disabled people, the concept is useful in non-disabled exchanges as well.”

Bibliography

https://beyondthescope.substack.com/p/navigating-access-friction-in-teaching

https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607/24772

Access Friction Explained