WebinAAR | Teaching with Disability (Inclusive Pedagogy Series)

This is the first in a four-part webinar series organized by the Status of People with Disabilities in the Professions Committee. The second in the series will be on UDL 3.0 and will take place in late July.

If one was to explore the literature on disability and pedagogy, they would quickly find that that majority of scholarship in this area relates to disabled student bodies and able-bodied teachers. Of course, those of us who have disabilities and teach in postsecondary spaces recognize that there are relatively few of us here (or at least, relatively few of us here who identify as disabled). We also know that the weight of the stigma surrounding disability that we carry comes with us into our graduate school, job interviews, and places of work. Unfortunately, the feeling of being unwelcomed and the other’s implicit desire for able bodies is sometimes affirmed, which can make such spaces difficult to access and even more difficult to remain within. Nevertheless, we are here, and we are valuable members of our professions in spite of and because of our disabilities.

In the scholarship that does exist on teaching with a disability in higher education, conversations tend to fall into three categories. The first, and arguably the most prominent, centers on the challenges associated in teaching with a disability (i.e., institutional, personal, and societal). The second identifiable theme relates to the value of a disability perspective in teaching subjects at the intersection of disability studies. Finally, and maybe most subtly, there is a conversation about the broader value of disability perspectives in the classroom, ranging from conversations on our acute awareness of building universal design into our courses to the strategies we use in navigating the world (and our classrooms in those worlds) within our own bodies that have had profound effects on students, which could be used by all faculty to enhance student learning.

This webinAAR invites conversation around these three themes, encouraging scholars with and without disabilities to share their stories to build community and inclusivity in our professions and to celebrate the value of the disability perspective in our classrooms.

For more on what to expect, watch the introductory video below featuring Nick Shrubsole, chair of AAR’s Status of People with Disabilities in the Profession Committee.

Nick Shrubsole is an Associate Lecturer in Humanities, Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. He is chair of the Status of People with Disabilities in the Profession Committee at the AAR. Nick is a legally blind person who has lived with a visual impairment for most of his life. His primary research area is in law and religion, author of What Has No Place, Remains: The Challenges for Indigenous Religious Freedom in Canada Today (University of Toronto Press, 2019). More recently, he is interested in exploring the scholarship and the practice of the value of disability perspectives in the higher ed classroom.

Mary Jo Iozzio is Professor of Moral Theology at Boston College. Her thought has been formed by both religious and secular education systems including the Dominican Sisters of Newburgh, New York. Her personal and professional life have been marked – happily she adds – by the Jesuits, Dominicans, and Benedictines (whose monks welcomed her into their daily life at the Abbye du Mont/Abdij Keizersberg, Leuven, Belgium. She is the Series Editor of Content and Context in Theological Ethics, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Her service to the profession includes: Task Force on Disability (2001-2006), inaugural and current member of the Committee on the Status of People with Disabilities in their Professions, and co-chair of the Religion and Disability Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion.