Blog Task 1: Disability

A recurring theme highlighted in the interview is that disability is not seen as an impairment on a person, but as the barriers created by the environment/world/society that prevent individuals from achieving their full potential. This aspect of the Social Model of Disability is my main takeaway from the materials. In line with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1990), the social model identifies the societal attitudes such as stereotypes and prejudice (mentioned by Ade Adepitan), physical environments such as the mobility of a venue (mentioned by Chay Brown), and many other environmental factors as the main contributors to disabling experiences.

In addition, the intersections of disability and identity impact how individuals are included or excluded in various social contexts. For instance, Christine Sun Kim‘s worries about the effect of socioeconomic status on the support a citizen can receive, shows that identities can limit access to care and education; or having to go to the “hearing world” from the sign language community due to her identity as an artist, show that members of marginalised community can have the fear of attending to the “outside world”.

Disability considerations in my teaching context

At the UAL Creative Computing Institute, one of the disability considerations I have is that turning on the real-time automatic captions in PowerPoint during lectures can be really helpful (see the screenshot below, which can be activated simply by clicking an icon on the bottom of the slides). It was a really simple change to make, but I didn’t know about this until I worked with one of the students in a BSc unit, who has a hearing impairment. (Context: The main teaching activities in the unit are lectures and workshops, in which I deliver a 2-hour-long lecture, followed by class activities.) The student worked with two interpreters from UAL Disability Service who translated my spoken words into sign language.

I am really grateful for the support provided by the interpreters, and I found that it’s necessary for me to seek advice from students who are facing disabilities/challenges, and from people who work closely with them. As an education provider who is not familiar with the sign language community, I might not be aware of some of the facilities that are already there. For instance, I didn’t realise that the automatic captions nowadays are actually very useful until the BSc student prompted me, and even the student only found it out a few weeks ago when they were with another lecturer, who also has a hearing impairment themselves. It was the intersectionality of the lecturer who has multiple contexts and identities that revealed this technical affordances to us. This aligns with one of the recommendations from Lukkien et al. (2024) that the voices of minority faculty members with intersectional identities should be sought: (i) to help people who are facing disability to know the affordances and articulate their needs, and more importantly, (ii) to help educators who providing the learning environment (UAL, 2025) to understand what kind of supports are needed.

References

• Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299.
• Lukkien, T., Chauhan, T. & Otaye-Ebede, L. (2025). Addressing the diversity principle–practice gap in Western higher education institutions: A systematic review on intersectionality. British Educational Research Journal, 51, 705–736. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.4096 [Accessed: 24-Apr-2025]
• UAL. (2025) ‘The Social Model of Disability at UAL’, YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/mNdnjmcrzgw [Accessed: 24-Apr-2025]