As educators, we are always looking for better ways to support students with disabilities. There is widespread public acceptance of an inclusive vision of disability and public education. However, goodwill and openness are not all that is required to make inclusive education a success. The how and when continue to pose challenges to our schools despite the why being relatively undisputed.
We are part of the how in our Inclusive Education and Disability Studies diploma program in the Disability and Community Studies department at Douglas College, where we prepare students for educational assistant positions and other community disability support fields.
As for the when, we encourage our students to keep in mind the range of skills and competencies that will be important for the whole lifespan of the students they meet, not only K to 12 relevant skills. Disability justice perspectives can be a helpful framework for understanding key elements that make a good life for folks with a disability. And, by extension, for shaping the strategies and foci of support for students with disabilities.
A disability justice-centred practice is hard to sum up in a few practical strategies! In fact, it strongly resists the idea that a strategy or model is somehow the answer to approaching disability and supporting disabled people. Instead, it is a set of principles that inform our relationships with disability and the contexts and frameworks in which we live and through which disability becomes salient.
Although working as inclusive educators can be challenging, it is also an honour to work against longstanding and established barriers. It’s not easy! Change doesn’t happen quickly and requires constant critical thought and intention. One of our colleagues likes to say, “We must all hold on to our pickaxes and keep chipping away, a little at a time.”
Relationships and Communication
Relationships are the key to student support for those with or without disability. Making connections and forming relationships with students should always be the first and most important strategy professionals use. We tend to look at disability as fundamentally different, requiring expert knowledge to help tell us how to interact. But discovering an individual’s interests, finding commonalities, uncovering passions, and using humour are all important first steps, as they would be with any other student.
Communication is a central part of establishing and strengthening relationships. There are cases in which communication with students with disabilities will look different. It’s important to honour the preferences of each individual and use person-led communication forms and rhythms. Some of these might include augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) tools or apps, sign language, and/or body language. It’s also possible the rhythm of communication will be different. Time, space, and context are important factors to keep in mind. And it is essential to keep in mind the adage that all behaviour is communication.
Disability Leadership
A disability justice perspective encourages us to accept “leadership of the most impacted.” This means listening to and centring the voices and lived experiences of individuals with disabilities.
As professionals, it can be transformative to our practice and empowering to those we work with to learn from them and to follow their lead. While experts, research, and models can all provide important tools, it is essential to seek out and learn from the voices of disabled community members and disability activists as well. There is a multiplicity of voices available via blogs, YouTube channels, websites, books, etc. One person’s experience will not apply to all, but it is so important to have a sense of the range of what people are talking about and sharing in disability communities.
Lifespan Perspective
When supporting students with disabilities, it is of central importance to keep in mind the lifespan perspective and to centre the experiences, competencies, and skills that will lead to a full and meaningful life with dignity, community connections, and close relationships. This means thinking about how to support self-determination in a variety of ways, such as:
• decision-making
• goal setting and taking action
• active participation in planning
• self-advocacy around their disability
As the lives of children and youth generally, and those with disabilities especially, are often structured for them, it is of utmost importance to create many opportunities to support such skills in meaningful ways. Collaborative education planning, transition plans, and even individual classroom goals can be great places to start involving students in making their own decisions.
Planning, Collaboration, and Conflicting
Access Needs Different students (and different professionals) may have conflicting access needs and require very different approaches or accommodations. In these cases, educators have a wonderful opportunity to focus on conversations, collaboration, and negotiation. More often than not, the individuals involved will be able to find a solution or work out a compromise through dialogue with a little support.
Principles of Universal Design are also key here. Proactive planning, where a full range of accessibility is incorporated in consultation with students from the design stages, is much more effective and efficient than reactive re-planning. Try to identify and challenge the ways in which you plan for typicality right from the start.
Limitations
There are many factors that get in the way of providing comprehensive and individualized attention, and there are significant challenges and barriers in schools. To name just a few:
• structural and systemic limitations and inflexibility
• critical lack of funding
• ongoing personnel shortages in both teaching and paraprofessional roles
• limited opportunities (and time) for disability-specific knowledge and training in preservice programs and professional development
The invitation to students in our programs at the Faculty of Applied Community Studies at Douglas is to pick up their own chisel or pickaxe and join us in reconstructing inclusive spaces in education and community. We hope you might also want to join us in the conversation! For further exploration, The Ten Principles of Disability Justice can be found at the Sins Invalid website: https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kari Gustafson
Kari Gustafson has been an instructor in the Douglas College Disability and Community Studies department since 2021. They received their PhD in Education from Simon Fraser University and their MA in Education Psychology from Aarhus University. Kari’s research and teaching philosophy is grounded in disability justice, with a focus on autism and neurodiversity, self-advocacy and games-based practice, and focuses on inclusive curriculum design for postsecondary education. They have personal as well as professional connections to neurodiversity, and are also active in community advocacy.
Sandra Polushin
Sandra Polushin is has been an instructor in the Douglas College Disability and Community Studies department since 1994. She is a PhD candidate in Educational Technology and Learning Design at Simon Fraser University. Sandra’s areas of instruction focus on disability studies, universal design for learning, inclusive learning design, and person-centered planning. Her teaching practice is informed through personal and professional connections to the community living sector. Sandra is also providing research assistance to the Youth with Disabilities Transitioning to Employment research project at UBC.
This article is featured in Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Spring 2025 issue.
