Disability in Higher Education

A Social Justice Approach

Nancy J. Evans, Ellen M. Broido, Kirsten R. Brown, Autumn K. Wilke

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118415689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Create campuses inclusive and supportive of disabled students, staff, and faculty

Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach examines how disability is conceptualized in higher education and ways in which students, faculty, and staff with disabilities are viewed and served on college campuses. Drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks, research, and experience creating inclusive campuses, this text offers a new framework for understanding disability using a social justice lens. Many institutions focus solely on legal access and accommodation, enabling a system of exclusion and oppression. However, using principles of universal design, social justice, and other inclusive practices, campus environments can be transformed into more inclusive and equitable settings for all constituents.

The authors consider the experiences of students, faculty, and staff with disabilities and offer strategies for addressing ableism within a variety of settings, including classrooms, residence halls, admissions and orientation, student organizations, career development, and counseling. They also expand traditional student affairs understandings of disability issues by including chapters on technology, law, theory, and disability services. Using social justice principles, the discussion spans the entire college experience of individuals with disabilities, and avoids any single-issue focus such as physical accessibility or classroom accommodations.

The book will help readers:

• Consider issues in addition to access and accommodation
• Use principles of universal design to benefit students and employees in academic, cocurricular, and employment settings
• Understand how disability interacts with multiple aspects of identity and experience.

Despite their best intentions, college personnel frequently approach disability from the singular perspective of access to the exclusion of other important issues. This book provides strategies for addressing ableism in the assumptions, policies and practices, organizational structures, attitudes, and physical structures of higher education.

PART ONE
FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS

CHAPTER ONE
A HISTORY OF DISABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

I grew up before the passage of the ADA [Americans With Disabilities Act]. Although I learned to be self‐sufficient and mentally strong, I certainly experienced the effects of discrimination that the ADA later addressed. For instance, the college I had my heart set on attending advised me not to enroll since, because of my disability, they did not believe I could be successful there. Instead of giving up on college, however, I found a school that was willing to admit me, ended up graduating with a 3.23 GPA, and became student government president. Unconsciously, I think I needed to prove that I could succeed regardless of what the first school told me.

—Nancy, faculty member

In this chapter we present a history of disability in the United States, with particular attention given to disability in higher education. We started this book by writing a chronological history of disability in higher education, and about 120 pages into that chapter we stopped. (A chronology is in the chapter appendix.) We cannot tell you all of that rich, deep, and diverse history in this book, because the history of disability in higher education is a book unto itself—and to shorten or condense that rich struggle down to a single chapter is unethical. We would not be authors of this book, or even people with a college degree, if it were not for the disabled people who came before us; they made higher education a possibility for women like us with physical, learning, and mental health impairments. So rather than trying to squeeze 200 years of history into one chapter, we have selected three historical themes that show why social justice is imperative. In doing so, we know that the scope of the three themes or stories represented in this chapter—Deaf education, the influence of war veterans, and disability activism—is limited and represents only a fraction of the disability history of the United States. However, our goal is not comprehensive coverage; rather, we use these stories to illustrate why social justice is necessary. Furthermore, although attitudes about disability have evolved to some extent, astute readers will notice that bias, prejudice, and the prize of normalcy continue to exist and have systemic legal and societal impacts on the inclusion of people with disabilities.

Disability cannot be understood without examining the many historical connotations leading to different ways of viewing, interacting with, and treating individuals who have been labeled “disabled” (Nielsen, 2012). Burch and Sutherland (2006) pointed out that “social values and cultural perceptions have strongly framed what qualifies as a disability and have influenced the responses” (p. 129). While individuals with disabilities have always experienced their situations in various ways, what has been shared among disabled individuals throughout history and across categories of impairment are “experiences of cultural devaluation and socially imposed restriction [and] of personal and collective [struggle] for self‐definition and self‐determination” (Longmore & Umansky, 2001, p. 4).

In addition to excluding people with disabilities from most of the privileges of citizenship, the concept of disability itself was used to exclude other groups from citizenship, namely women, people of color, and immigrants (Baynton, 2001). Each of these groups was assumed to have physical, emotional, intellectual, and/or psychological flaws that precluded their ability to carry out the responsibilities of full membership in society (Baynton, 2001). And in arguing for full rights to participate in society, these groups used the argument that they were not disabled, thereby suggesting that it was legitimate to discriminate against those who did have physical, mental, or psychological impairments (Baynton, 2001).

Historically, position in society has largely dictated who was educated and how that education occurred. As Bryan (1996) stated, “In American society, education is a prerequisite to almost any endeavor one may undertake” (p. 15). While opportunities for higher education became broader over time, the further people were from positions of power, the less likely they were to be afforded the benefits of a college education (Thelin, 2011), which continues to be the case. And as we discuss in this chapter, people with disabilities have, for the most part, been very far from positions of power and have had to fight to legitimate their very existence in society, as well as their right to an education. Indeed, in the leading book on the history of higher education in the United States, A History of American Higher Education (2011), its author, John Thelin, made no mention of the education of students with disabilities or of laws that have mandated the inclusion of disabled students, such as the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

Here, we offer a counternarrative: we proudly show how disabled students, faculty, and staff have been an important part of higher education by examining the themes of Deaf education, veterans, and disability rights activism. We chose these themes because they have influenced the education of students with disabilities in important ways. First, Deaf children were the first group of children outside the boundary of those considered physically “normal” to receive an education. They were also the only group to have an institution of higher education specifically established to provide them with a college education. Second, throughout history, war veterans who became disabled as a result of their service to their country changed the nature of the student body entering higher education. To prepare disabled veterans for careers they could enter, state and federal governments established policies to fund their pursuit of higher education, leading to increased numbers of disabled students on college campuses and the development of programs and services to support them. Finally, disability activism illustrates the roles that disabled individuals have taken to enhance their education and establish their civil rights and equitable treatment in society.

Deaf Education

During the colonial era, higher education was primarily for wealthy White males, particularly those intended for careers in political leadership or the clergy. Colleges, in effect, established which individuals would make up the elite members of colonial society (Thelin, 2004). Certainly the chances that disabled individuals would receive any type of education were almost nonexistent. One exception was the deaf offspring of a few of the wealthiest Americans who were sent to deaf schools that had been established in Europe in the 1700s (Leigh, 2009). Deaf education in the United States itself began in 1817 and has shaped and influenced the inclusion of disabled people in education.

Early Deaf Education

During the Second Great Awakening, a period of spiritual resurgence and zeal that occurred in the United States between the 1790s and 1830s, a belief in people's ability to become better human beings through education and moral enrichment, emerged (“Educating the Senses,” 2014). This positive belief system led to a social reform movement in which upper‐ and middle‐class urban inhabitants worked to improve the conditions of the poor, the sensory impaired, the mentally and psychologically disabled, and others whom they perceived to be spiritually impoverished (ushistory.org, 2016). The development of common schools was a result of this philosophy (Warder, 2014). Horace Mann, labeled the Father of the Common School Movement, who served as secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education starting in 1837, believed that the best way to achieve “the moral and socioeconomic uplift” of all citizens was to establish universal, free, nonsectarian, and public educational institutions—common schools (Warder, 2014).

At this time in Europe, several Catholic clergy became interested in finding ways to communicate with deaf and blind individuals and developed sign language and braille to do so (Griffin, Peters, & Smith, 2007; Patterson, 2009; Stiker, 1999). In the United States, as a result of the Second Great Awakening, evangelical Protestants took on the mission of educating deaf and blind children about Christianity using the same tools (Burch, 2001; “Educating the Senses,” 2014; Nielsen, 2012). By the late 1840s, advocates for disabled children, especially Samuel Gridley Howe and Hervey Wilber, argued that in the appropriate setting, these children, as well as children who were psychologically or cognitively impaired, could be educated and prepared for work (Nielsen, 2012). Disabled children were considered “trainable” if they were in controlled settings where they could receive moral and humane treatment (Byrom, 2001; “Educating the Senses,” 2014; Stiker, 1999; Trent, 2009). As a result, special schools for disabled children emerged during the 19th century.

At the urging of several parents of deaf children, the first school for disabled children in the United States, the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons (which became known as the American Asylum for the Deaf), was founded in 1817 in Hartford, Connecticut (Cerney, 2013). The parents, led by Mason Fitch Cogswell, convinced Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a hearing minister, to travel to Europe to learn how to educate deaf individuals and then to open the school in Connecticut (Crowley, 2014). In Europe, he met Frenchman Laurent Clerc, who was himself deaf and had graduated from the National Institute in Paris, where he learned sign language, and he convinced Clerc to return to Connecticut with him and teach at his school (Cerney, 2013; Crowley, 2014). Additional residential schools for deaf children developed across the northern and midwestern states (Cerney, 2013). While children who attended residential deaf schools received an education, it was mostly vocational and few were prepared to enter college (Griffin et al., 2007).

Fewer deaf schools were opened in the southern states during the 1800s, and those that were available were racially segregated and of lower quality (Nielsen, 2012). The problem of the lack of schools for deaf children in the South was compounded by the reluctance of wealthy White southerners to send their children to racially integrated deaf (and blind) schools in the North that were often run by abolitionists (Burch & Sutherland, 2006; Nielsen, 2012).

Although deaf schools in the West and North were integrated by the mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Introduction: A Social Justice Foundation
• Part One: Foundational Concepts
• Part Two: Population-Specific Experiences
• Part Three: Environmental Issues
• Part Four: Serving Students
• Conclusion: A Social Justice Approach to Disability in Higher Education: Strategies for Inclusion
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement