Overview
What is disability justice teaching?
Disability justice seeks to identify and disrupt the systemic influences that lead to the exclusion of people with disabilities. Teaching practices grounded in disability justice seek to create any learning environment, service, instructional strategy, or tool accessible to everyone regardless of neurodiversity, dis/ability, and health.
Barriers related to disability have always been a persistent issue in higher education. These barriers often involve intersectionality in disability, where people with disabilities may also identify as a person of color, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, or belong to other intersectional categories. Awareness regarding issues related to intersectionality are becoming more transparent along with more commonly identified barriers related to accessibility, educational opportunity, passive and active discrimination, and other ways people with disabilities have been marginalized within educational contexts. The fields of scholarship within disability studies, ableism, and anti-racism have made significant progress in exploring issues in society that create obstacles for people with disabilities. However, accessibility and progress within communities and educational environments continue to be slow.
This article provides an overview of disability justice in educational environments, highlighting the two commonly seen frameworks: the medical and social models. It also discusses efforts towards positive changes for people with disabilities in the current higher education context.
A History of Disability Justice At UC Berkeley
One of the significant steps towards supporting and providing accommodations for people with disabilities in public spaces and employment access was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which included Section 504. Section 504 prohibits any business receiving federal funds from discriminating against a person with a disability, and it says that “no otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall solely on the basis of his
handicap, be excluded from the participation, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Despite tremendous legal efforts by the disability advocacy community between 1973-1977, no regulatory issues moved forward. As a result, the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities (ACCD), a national cross-disability organization, was formed to respond. In 1977, Judith Heumann, known as "the mother" of the disability rights movement and a Berkeley alum and advocate, led a 28-day 504 Sit-In in front of San Francisco's federal building to fight for the legislation to be implemented. However, Section 504 was not strongly enforced and did not provide enough comprehensive support for people with disabilities. Building upon the progress made, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in the 1990s, launching substantial change within communities. The ADA requires accessible communities, workplaces, and higher education, and prohibits universities from discriminating against students and staff/faculty with disabilities. Institutions are obligated to provide access, accommodations, and auxiliary aids, including communication support and aids, to students with disabilities.
UC Berkeley is considered the birthplace of the disability rights movement with notable connections to the movement, such as famous alumni, Judith Heummann. In the 1990s, Professor Ray Lifchez, together with Professors Susan Schweik (Department of English) and Fred Collignon (Department of City & Regional Planning), began developing disability-centric course offerings at Berkeley. By 2000, a formal Disability Studies Minor was established, one of the first degrees in Disability Studies to be offered in the world. Currently, faculty members in the Disability Studies Cluster work to understand the meaning and effects of disability socially, legally, politically and culturally, and seek to eliminate barriers to full social inclusion and advance the rights of people with disabilities. In 2020, Ray Lifchez gave $2.5 million to the College of Environmental Design to endow the Lifchez Professor of Practice in Social Justice. The endowed professorship incorporates accessibility and disability justice into design education and will continue to have an impact on many students' lives to come. In addition to the Disability Studies Cluster, the Division of Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, and Justice has curated a comprehensive landing page for disability justice at UC Berkeley. In addition, the historical context of our Disabled Students Program at UC Berkeley outlines the advocacy path for students, which began in 1962.
Evolution of language and terminology in disability advocacy
The language used in disability communities has gone through considerable transformations over the several decades and continues to be debated. For some individuals, person-first language is an important way to ensure that they are first a person and second a person with a dis/ability For other individuals, their self-identification within a specific disability culture is a meaningful counterpoint to societal stigmatization of dis/ability. Additionally, written language related to “disability” can also reflect the intention of the information being shared. Using “dis/ability” or disability is meant to deemphasize the deficit-based language used to describe disabilities with the goal of emphasizing ability/strengths. Stanford University provides a comprehensive discussion on language use, emphasizing how critical it is for us to avoid using patronizing euphemisms such as “special needs” or “differently-abled.”