Jonathan Gibson is an Academic
Co-ordinator at the English
Subject Centre, and also writes
and researches in the areas of
Early Modern and Renaissance
studies.
Inclusive English?
Presentations have been quite hard, for I get very stressed and anxious.
The deadlines are ridiculous sometimes. I had to give in three 3,000 word essays in three consecutive days.
Feedback is rare, as my tutors are very busy. I only really receive productive criticism of a paragraph, maybe, per essay.
Revision is hard, because English is a very vague subject.
The points made in these rather sobering student quotations will be familiar to us all – predictable, even. What is striking, though, is their context of utterance. All the comments come from a recent survey of disabled students of English run for the Subject Centre by Kevin Brunton of London Metropolitan University. Respondents had been asked to comment specifically on ways in which their disability had affected their studies. In the results, certain key problems kept popping up across the full range of disabilities: in many cases, what was a problem for students with specific learning differences also proved to be a problem for students with mobility problems and for students with visual impairment – and so on. Difficulty in concentrating is a case in point: students with different conditions found it difficult to concentrate for a number of different reasons. In all cases, though, certain practices by lecturers exacerbated the difficulty – and also, it can be assumed, exacerbated the problems of non-disabled students with poor concentration. Changing these practices would clearly help students across the board, as well as mitigating the effects of specific impairments.
The survey also, of course, revealed disability-specific problems: a student with mental health problems who found it impossible to work on texts with death as a theme; students with mobility problems unable to enter lecture theatres. Its overriding message, however, is that in a limited number of important areas it is within the gift of departments and lecturers to put a few things in place – more ‘scaffolding’ in lectures; staggered deadlines; the facility for students to submit essays online – that would benefit both the majority of disabled students surveyed and a sizeable number of their non-disabled peers.
For this reason, when planning our report, Kevin and I decided to divide the sections offering practical advice to lecturers into two parts: a section on measures which English departments can take which we think would be universally helpful and a section on student-specific adjustments which lecturers might consider making to accommodate the needs of particular disabilities.
This approach of ours can be linked to wider debates in disability studies. Since the 1970s, the UK disabled rights movement has been underpinned by what has become known as the ‘social model’ of disability. This way of thinking was constructed in opposition to a ‘medical model’, conceiving of disability as a physical condition requiring treatment and entailing personal tragedy. Per contra, the social model minimises the significance of individual impairment, arguing that ‘disability’ is a social phenomenon – the product of environmental, economic and cultural barriers erected by an oppressive society: ‘impairment’, that is, only becomes ‘disability’ by virtue of inadequate and discriminatory social arrangements.
The social model (which has a striking resemblance to the feminist distinction between sex and gender) has been influential in the framing of recent disability legislation, specifically in the emphasis which runs throughout the Disability Discrimination Act (1995 and 2005) on the need for institutions, such as universities, to be proactive both in (a) anticipating the possible needs of disabled people and (b) accommodating these needs in advance by removing those ‘barriers’ that the social model would argue constitute disability in the first place. Via this legal gloss on the social model, pressure is put on society – in little, the higher education institution – to mend its ways.
The social model has recently come under attack from the sociologist Tom Shakespeare. Shakespeare accepts the importance of social factors in disabled people’s experience (and of the dramatic improvements in disabled people’s lives that can be wrought by social change), but he also stresses the reality of physical impairment, stating, categorically, that, ‘The problems associated with disability cannot be entirely eliminated by any imaginable form of social arrangements’. He goes on to make the obvious, if not always sufficiently recognised, point that: ‘Impairment is a universal phenomenon, in the sense that every human being has limitations and vulnerabilities’ (2006: 56, 64). Our report’s two-pronged approach maps quite neatly onto Shakespeare’s model, isolating, as it does, both individual, impairment-specific, need and social practices (or ‘barriers’) that are problematic for a majority of disabled students – and also cause difficulties for the ‘non-disabled’.
Implicit in all this, surely, is the desirability of teaching ‘inclusively’ – in a way that acknowledges the diversity – on many different levels – of our student population. One might expect that English Studies, a discipline much preoccupied with alternative and marginalised voices, would be eager to sign up to this agenda. As the philosopher Alastair Macintyre stated,
interest in how the needs of the disabled are adequately voiced and met is not a special interest, the interest of one particular group rather than of others, but rather the interest of the whole political society, an interest that is integral to their conception of their common good. (1999:130 cited in Shakespeare, 2006: 67).
References
Macintyre, A., 1999. Dependent Rational Animals. London: Duckworth.
Shakespeare, T., 2006. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge.
