What Is The Importance of Person-First Language?

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            I want to keep writing this week about the meanings behind person-first language, and about some of the implications of this kind of language in terms of best educational outcomes for students. 

            The emphasis for person-first language has been on not saying, “Ishmael is disabled,” but rather “Ishmael has a disability;” not “Christopher is autistic,” but rather “Christopher has autism,” or “Christopher has ASD.”  The political reason for this – what I’ve heard said, derogatorily, as “PC” – is that no one is disabled, that nobody is defined or essentialized by his or her disability.  However, this also means that a disability becomes something that you have – we have transitioned from talking about disability as something that you are to talking about it in terms of something that you own.  Disability, in this sense, becomes property. 

            On the other hand, dis-ability means quite literally the absence of a property, of not having the ability to do or to grasp something.  So a disability becomes something that a person has that is marked by a lacking or an absence.  (This makes me think back to my Collaborating with Families class, and how many mothers of persons with disabilities talked about their feelings of guilt and of loss when their children with severe disabilities were born.)  My student Baldur has a physical disability, it is something that he owns, but he has it based on the criterion of what he cannot do – walk down stairs without assistance, run for long distances, etc.  So why should we talk about his disability as if it is something of value that he has, hung around his neck like an albatross?

            What does this look like in the classroom or in the community?  I still want to be thinking about disability as something that is context-dependent, and therefore not a permanent or unchanging state of being.  But this perspective gets challenged by thinking about disability as a property.  I am responsible for my property – for my clothes and books and food and school supplies.  I also have certain rights because of my property – I can tell a teacher if someone steals my pencil, I can use the money I earn at work for snacks off the snack cart, I can shoot someone for breaking into my house.  But then, what rights and responsibilities do I have for my disability?  Thinking about disability in this sense gives students a basis for advocating on their own behalf because they can point to their rights and responsibilities that they have because of their disabilities.  On the other hand, this also means that students with disabilities can’t easily “pass” from one environment to a different one and leave their disability behind; it becomes something, something that they have ownership over, that they have to carry with them from place to place.  And so, in this way, disability, which we thought we had demystified through the practice of person-first language, becomes reified as property. 

More on Disability and Etymology

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            One of the advantages of conducting community-based instruction with students with disabilities is that you get to see how these students “perform” across different environments and in different contexts.  This is a part of conducting environmental inventories for your students; in each of the disparate environments in which the student is likely to be, you need to be able to know what assets are at-hand for students, and what situations can best emphasize their strengths and abilities.

            When we approach special education from this perspective, it helps us to rethink how to consider disability.  We talk a lot about the importance of “person first language,” but often do not interrogate why this is important, or why we must mean what we say.  Because a person is never “disabled” – this is not some kind of essential or fundamental part of an individual’s identity. (Or, perhaps more accurately, this shouldn’t be the case.)  Rather, being disabled, in the verb usage of the word, not the noun, entails being in a context where there is something lacking at-hand. (“Able” comes from the Latin habilis, which means “easily handled,” “easy to be held,” “apt,” and “fit for a purpose.”  Our English words “handled” and “habit” are related.) We are disabled when we literally lack the tool necessary for the purpose at-hand.  I have said this before, but a short person is disabled when he needs the brand of detergent on the top shelf; the tall person is disabled sitting in coach class on an airplane.  A student with a reading disability is disabled when she has to read Romeo and Juliet; she isn’t when she watches it on stage. 

            This is, of course, also true with students with “severe and profound” disabilities, and those following alternate, life skills curricula. My student Odin has autism and a cognitive disability.  But he knows how to use the internet, how to conduct a Google search and check his e-mail, and he’s memorized all the lyrics to the songs by Meek Mill.  My student Forseti is mostly non-verbal and has a hearing impairment.  But he can work the school snack cart almost entirely independently, and memorize routes for us to take as we go door-to-door selling chips and soda.  The question, then, is how we apply these students’ abilities to other environments, how we enable them to possess the tools they need to for the purposes they will encounter.  (This is part of my attempt to trace disability back to the concepts of ownership and property rights.)

Images of Disability in Twin Peaks

Happy 20th Anniversary of David Lynch's "Fire Walk With Me".

Joel Wright ‏@joelwrig

Going to teach a functional life skills class after watching a bunch of David Lynch clips. I am the best special-ed teacher ever. 

Joel Wright ‏@joelwrig

Speaking of which: Who's written about Lynch and images of disability? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More on the social construction of disability

Here are a few of the articles that I have read today, and pieces that I plan to incorporate later into some of the larger themes of this blog, themes of inclusion, education, and access.

First, is this op-ed in Education Week by Rick Hess, a fellow at the conservative American Education Institute.  Mr. Hess is concerned about certain criticisms of charter schools in Washington, D.C., specifically, that critics of these charter schools will not be able to "meet the needs of low-performing, English-language learners and special education students."  Mr. Hess believes that highest achieving students in the D.C. area deserve to have access to better performing private/public charter schools, and that it is unfair for bureaucrats to prevent the upward mobility of these inner-city students because of the needs of low-performing students.  He goes on to say that "the notion that families and students in DC shouldn't have access to a high quality liberal arts curriculum just because many students in DC need something more remedial in scope strikes me as a perverse vision of 'social justice.'"

I disagree.

Second, is this piece from Disabled World on the social construction of disability, a topic that I briefly touched upon yesterday, by Wendy Taormina-Weiss.  Ms. Taormina-Weiss emphasizes the application of new technologies such as email, web conferences, and cell phones, that allow persons with disabilities the ability to access situations in which they do not manifest themselves as disabled.  She says:

The world today still finds many people viewing those who experience forms of disabilities in ways that are incorrect or misconceived. For example, some people still view the experience of a disability as the person’s entire life instead of something that is located within their body or mind and merely a part of who they are. Social constructions identifying people with disabilities with the diagnosis they have received from a physician such as autism, intellectual disability, cognitive disorders, or many other forms of disabilities identified through use of medical terminology are still used to label and somehow construct the entire perceptions of some in association with a person who experiences a disability.

I like what Ms. Taormina-Weiss says about the construction of disability, and I applaud her efforts.  However, a part of me wishes that she would go ... further ...  That she would take a stand that is, maybe, a little more radical.  Specifically, that she would get rid of the notion that a disability is located at all in the body or the mind, that, instead, that it is entirely a social construct.  I think she is right to say that a disability cannot define the totality of what a person is, but she should push this thought further, to the point that a disability exists only in context, is only something that is socially constructed, and that exists only outside of the body and the mind.

On the other hand, this contention may work against another principle that I think is important: that individuals with disabilities ought to take ownership of their abilities, and take responsibility for them.  (This is not a real contradiction, just one that I am entertaining for the moment, in blog form.)

Rethinking Disability in Contexts

Also, another reason why I wasn't blogging was that bad stuff just kept happening.  One of the things we talked about in my Education and Technology class this Summer was whether or not we need the ability to "tune out"* all of the media and information that we are bombarded with on a constant basis.  I hardly ever watch television, but between Twitter, Facebook, my iPhone, my online classes, and my job researching online, I am pretty much attached to some stream of news and information for my entire waking experience.  The singularity approaches. 

So, one bad thing that happened that I would like to share with you is that a judge in Pennsylvania decided not to issue an injunction blocking the state's voter identification law.  Hopefully you know this by know, but voter ID laws in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states are being passed in an attempt to suppress voter turnout amongst the poor, students, and minorities this November.   Why should someone in special education care about this?  Well, in a word, accessibility.

Part of the definition of "disability" is that a disability necessary restricts access for a person to something.  A physical disability restricts access to certain physical environments, a reading or learning disability restricts access to texts, a behavioral disability restricts access to social environments and cultural exchanges.   Voter ID laws disable a huge amount of the population - as many as 1 in 7 in Pennsylvania and as many as 1 in 3 in Philadelphia - by restricting their access to the voting booth.  Call it a political disability.  And the connection to disability rights is very real; according to this study from USA Today, only 27% of polling places in the U.S. are unobstructed, which may prevent 3.2 million Americans with disabilities from voting in 2012.

I have read some very good literature this Summer about how we need to rethink the ways in which we consider disabilities, and how a disability is constructed through context. There is a tendency to think about "being disabled" as a permanent state, but it's not, it is a state of flux.  A person in a wheelchair may not be disabled working as the IT lady when your cable is on the fritz; a student with a reading disability may not be disabled when she's on the track team; another student with an emotional disorder may not be disabled when he's in the chemistry lab.**  The big idea here is that "disability" is not something that people are born with and always have, but it something that is created when an individual's access to something desirable - a job, an education, an ID card, leisure time, the brand of dish soap on the top shelf of the grocery store, a vote - is restricted. 

Or what about liberty?  Being a minority student may be considered a disability in New York City, where more than 95 percent of the 882 students arrested during the last school year were black or Latino.

* "Turn off, tune out, drop in"?
** Or maybe they are still disabled.  What happens when the Chem teacher decides that 50% of the grade is based on class participation and etiquette?

Preparing for Returning to the Classroom

I haven't been writing in this space for the last couple of weeks.  Robyn and I have been pretty busy having fun here at the end of Summer.  We went up to Chicago for her birthday, and saw Goodbye Cruel World by one of our favorite theater troupes that we also saw three years ago.   Two weeks ago, we went to New Hampshire for Robyn's cousin's wedding, and we got to spend some quality time with her family, and then last weekend we got a visit from my sister and her family, and then went back up to Chi-town for sole and very serious purpose of introducing my brother-in-law to Chicago-style pizza.  Phew!  Now, we are in that brief, two week period between the end of summer semester and the beginning of fall, and have some time to catch up on things like blogging and jogging and, um, clogging?  (Also, I am a level 15 orc!)

So, there has been those, practical reasons for why I have been absent longer than intended.  The other reason has been that, sometimes, the absurdity of certain things is just too sad to write about it.  For example, in education and specifically special education, we speak often of the school-to-prison pipeline, the mechanism in the United States by which disadvantaged students are moved from the public education system into the penal system.  Think cradle to grave, in a very real sense. 

However, when we speak of this system, we have not meant it in the most literal of meanings ... until know.  According to CNN.com, Lauderdale County, Mississippi, has been incarcerating students in a local prison for school disciplinary actions.  The Justice Department is planning a suit against Mississippi, and is citing that, "Students most affected by this system are African-American children and children with disabilities." 

The alleged mistreatment included youngsters being "crammed into small, filthy cells and tormented with the arbitrary use of Mace as a punishment for even the most minor infractions -- such as 'talking too much' or failing to sit in the 'back of their cells,'" the [Southern Poverty Law Center] said in a statement.

One of the issues that I consider to be the most pressing for special education teachers is the ways in which race, poverty, and disability intersect in the lives of their students.  In June, I attended a conference on Critical Race Studies in Education, and came away with a lot of exciting ideas, which I plan to put into action over time here and in other spaces.   However, one of the things that always unsettles me is how, as a teacher, I see the theories and ideas and philosophies that are bandied about in university lectures and conferences having real, sometimes terrifying, effects on the lives and the bodies of students.  This is very real, very serious work, and when teachers fail, they are not the ones who feel the worst of the consequences. 

Sunday Reading List/ I Don't Wanna Do My Homework!

I hope everyone is having a nice Sunday afternoon.  If you need some more help procrastinating, here's some stuff that I've been reading on the great big series of tubes:

On the trail of the Piggyback Bandit - The weird and tragic tale of Sherwin Shayegan, an adult with an intellectual disability, possibly an Autism spectrum disorder, who has been banned in five states for jumping on high school athletes' backs. 

Texas's road to victory in its decades long fight against voting rights - I don't mean to be picking - "messing," I guess, would be the term - on Texas here.  I'm a big fan of Texas toast.  And, um .... Tim Duncan.  But, historically, Texas has been on the vanguard in opposition and resistance to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Something I learned was how the existence of the poll tax has morphed throughout the decades.  As Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo and proud racist prophesized: "“If the poll tax bill passes, the next step will be an effort to remove the registration qualification, the educational qualification of Negroes. If that is done we will have no way of preventing the Negroes from voting.”"

 Moving Beyond the Stereotypes - Thinking about images of persons with disabilities in the media.  Your always either Quasimodo or Captain Ahab, Tiny Tim or Richard III.  Is this changing?  Also: Peter Dinklage fan club!  He's going to be rocking my alma mater this summer. 

And now for something completely different: Yesterday was Bastille Day.  Also the anniversary of the beginning of the Third Reich's program of sterilization of persons with disabilities.  Fucking Nazis.
Finally, ForgetBobbyJindal. #FBJ: The boy-faced governor of Louisiana continues to dismantle his state's education system through voucher supported private schools. (i.e., public funding for private institutions.)  From the article:

A big chunk of the money already out there is being snapped up by conservative evangelical schools with exotic and hardly public-minded curricular offerings, with the theory being that any public oversight would interfere with the accountability provided by the market.

 At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains "what God made" on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution. "We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children," Carrier said.

Unfortunately, because the true core of the voucher movement is made up of social conservatives who just want taxpayer help sending their kids to Bible schools and consider "accountability" to be a code word for an assault on religious freedom, he's not likely to do anything of the sort.

This is the model for education that Mitt Romney has endorsed.