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Disability in Sports and Education

On By Adhi AppukuttyIn GeneralLeave a comment

Welcome to our page!

Here, you can find an array of blog posts, containing stories, experiences, videos, visuals, and more! The purpose of this site is to introduce young adults and college students to various challenges that disabled students often experience in school and sports settings. Drawing from personal experiences, scholarly and community insights, and dialogue with peers, we sought to incorporate diverse materials on our page to make content as comprehensible and accessible as possible.

A primary motivation for this multi-media blogging site was to provide our input and thoughts that we have pertaining to disability justice, particularly discussing sports and education. Disability justice is a theme that we hope to shed light on through these posts. Many of you may or may not be aware of disability justice, so here is how we like to explain this complex topic:

Disability Justice: The collective effort to establish inherent, accessible practices and infrastructure to eliminate barriers for persons regardless of their abilities.

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Disability justice is extremely important because it is a fundamental responsibility of society. As a society, we are responsible for sustaining equity in everyone’s lives. In order to achieve disability justice, it is important to explore the topic of intersectionality. Like disability justice, this may be a new concept for some of you.

Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.

This is extremely important because everyone inherently identifies in numerous ways and these forms of identification can affect their lives in various ways as well. We wanted to bring light to how different identities can shape the way people experience sports, education or both simultaneously. We hope the materials we provided are great and insightful sources that will make you think deeper and reflect more about these topics.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, please feel free to leave them below. Happy reading 🙂

Disability in Education – Themes

On By Ahmad SaadIn Education, VisualsLeave a comment

Disability in Education

This word cloud represents the common words and themes that are often mentioned when discussing the issues in education with regards to the disability community. While words like disability, education and issues are expected to be common, given the topic, words such as difficult, might, and can say a lot about the disability community’s ability to receive a proper and fair education. There are many factors that make it more difficult for disabled individuals to receive an education, such as accessibility. While acknowledging these differences and issues is the first step to providing an equal space in education for disabled students, universities need to work towards making every campus as accessible as possible for every disabled student.

Inaccessibility

On By Ahmad SaadIn Education, VisualsLeave a comment
The table in this image is too high for some students with physical disabilities to access. While some disabled students will be able to use this table, it is important to make it accessible for everyone.
The doors in this image only open in one direction. This represents a challenge for disabled students in a wheelchair. If the student were coming from the side where they would have to pull to open the door, it may be difficult to open the door and back up in the wheelchair at the same time.
This image shows a door that does not have an automatic door opener and is thus inaccessible for disabled students.
This is another door without an automatic door opener, which creates a challenge for disabled students as it may be difficult to use a wheelchair and open a door simultaneously.

 

Accessibility in Education

On By Ahmad SaadIn Blogs, EducationLeave a comment

Before taking a course on disability studies, I never really thought about the accessibility issues that the disability community could face in education. After doing research on this topic I realized there are various issues at universities worldwide. Many campuses do not have enough services available to students with disabilities to meet their needs. This makes it difficult for them especially when physical inaccessibility limits their ability to participate in school activities.
It is also common for many parents to be unfamiliar with the choices that are open to their children in special schools with regards to support services. Even if they were familiar with the choices, it can be difficult to know how to access educational services that their children need. There is rarely a process for planning a disabled student’s educational goals and how they are established, which can be used to better understand how quickly the student is progressing. One common and crucial issue is failing to recognize or diagnose a student’s disability. This can make it difficult for the student to understand the material and could result in frustration. Recognizing the disability too late can also lead to delays in the student’s education.
These are common accessibility issues for disabled students. Even when schools place a lot of effort in making all areas on campus accessible, they can still be inaccessible. For example, having a stall in the bathroom that is larger for students who need a wheelchair can be inaccessible if the door to get into the bathroom does not have an automatic handicap door opener. Issues such as these are common and it takes time and effort to think through all the possible conflicts that disabled people run into when trying to access resources.
As students, it is important to be aware of the accessibility issues on campus whether they affect you individually or not. To get schools to focus more efforts towards making all areas as accessible as possible, the disability community needs everyone, disabled or non-disabled, to help advocate for them. This will help the community voice its opinion as well as provide much needed support.

Paralympics Undervalued, Underfunded, and Overlooked

On By Ahmad SaadIn Blogs, SportsLeave a comment

The Paralympics in London 2012 proved to be a huge success as nearly 2 million people visited http://www.paralympic.org to see how the games played out. The disability community, however, found the Paralympics to be successful for different, less obvious reasons. In 2012, Channel 4 made a conscious effort to include disabled presenters alongside established broadcasters. In addition, Paralympic athletes were beginning to be seen as extremely talented athletes in their own right rather than an inspiring and heartwarming store. These are among few of the reasons why the disability community viewed the 2012 Paralympics as a success. Disability activists argued that these games should be a celebration of fast-paced sporting excellence which inspires young disabled people to believe that they can live independent and successful lives. The 2012 Paralympics took a step in the right direction in achieving this image. The 2016 Paralympics, however, took a step backwards.
In 2016, the Paralympics was undervalued, underfunded, and overlooked. Paralympics in 2016 faced major budget cuts to event venues, workforce and transport. Funding for Paralympics was diverted to boost Olympics. Disabled athletes felt as if they were viewed as a poor relation to its able-bodied and higher profile sibling. Three-time Paralympic silver medal winning cyclist Jon-Allan Butterworth said it best: “I always feel second to my Olympic counterparts!” After considerable strides in the right direction for the disabled community in 2012, the Paralympics in 2016 did not improve upon its previous success and was nothing more than an afterthought.
The issues that have risen from the 2016 Paralympics need to be taken into consideration. These are common issues that occur within the disability community. Disabled individuals are often overlooked when compared to their “able-bodied counterparts”. Diverting money from the Paralympics to boost the Olympics is simply unfair. Having watched both the Olympics and Paralympics, the competition and intensity is similar across both events. There is no reason the Olympics should be prioritized over the Paralympics. This is a key issue in sports in the disability community and needs to be addressed right away.

Dream Crazy – Nike’s use of Inspiration Porn

On By Mohamed MazehIn Blogs, SportsLeave a comment

This past year Nike released a new commercial that was titled “Dream Crazy”. It was intended to send a message, that despite any obstacles or challenges that are presented before you, no dream is big enough to achieve. It featured a wide range of athletes, across many sports and holding many different identities, including students with disabilities. When I first watched this video, I felt incredibly inspired. Seeing these athletes excel within their fields despite hardships they have faced is nothing short of amazing. The commercial was able to accomplish its goal of motivating its everyday viewer. However, now that I have gained a further understanding of disability justice and the issues that plague the disability community, I attempted to view this commercial again, with this new found lens. This time, I was able to point out a number of concerns that were present within the commercial. The most glaring one is the use of athletes with disabilities as a means of inspiration porn, to motivate the “normal” individuals. It also presents there disabilities as obstacles that must be overcome. With this new perspective, this commercial becomes just yet another exploitation of athletes with disabilities.

Athletes with disabilities are often times given this spotlight in the media only when it is convenient for this companies to use them as ways of furthering their brands and marketing. However, this does little to help shed light on many of the everyday struggles that these athletes face in being apart of sports team. From middle school to the pros, there are countless barriers in place that discourage and make it difficult for these students to participate in everyday sports. They are constantly othered as if they are not capable of competing due to their “disabilities”. As an able-bodied person, I don’t have any personal experience with these struggles as I myself never faced them. Through research and learning about the experiences of others I became aware of these issues. I’d be interested to hear more about your thoughts on this, especially from those that have personal experience. Please feel free to comment with your insight below.

Stranger Things Star Aimée Mullins Gives Speech About Athletes With Disabilities

On By Mohamed MazehIn Sports, VideosLeave a comment

The following is a speech given by actress Aimée Mullins at a college commencement. She discusses her experiences with sports as an individual with a disability. She brings forth an interesting idea of how society views athletes with disabilities competing, simply as means of inspiration, and how this leads athletes with disabilities themselves to sometimes form a similar ignorant ideal on disabled sports.

Disability in the World of Sports

On By Mohamed MazehIn Sports, VisualsLeave a comment

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This world cloud was created as a means of representing many of the themes that students with disabilities face in regards to opportunities with athletics. The government spreads this false reality that equal opportunity does exist due to these law and policies in place. However, that is not the truth based on the experiences of many. There is not encouragement or opportunities present for students with disabilities to participate on sports teams despite the interest of many in wanting to. We live in a society that others disabled individuals as they feel that they are “less” than able-bodied individuals, especially in regards to sports. Teams are losing focus on the reason behind organized sports teams and how impactful they can be on students. Instead, they are depriving students with disabilities of their basic civil rights. This trophy represents the ability of all to succeed if just provided with the opportunity.

Implications of Special Education

On By Adhi AppukuttyIn Blogs, EducationLeave a comment

Special Education programs are designed to help disabled students learn in a comfortable and niche environment. However, there are many problems that arise with them. The very first problem with these program lies in the name itself, specifically the term “special”. This term creates negative implications for the disabled population. The word “special” is commonly used to sugar-coat segregation and societal exclusion.” In fact, it is non-inclusive, discriminatory language that is based on the medical model of disability. It considers disabled students as needing “special” education. In doing so, it aggregates disabled persons into one group, despite the differences and diversity that they may possess. It is clear to me that segregation creates many divides rather than creating collective efforts to achieve collective liberation, a key principle of disability justice. Rather than people coming together and collaboratively moving forward, language like “special” categorizes the disabled population as separate and exotic. Thus, segregation creates a misrepresentation of who these people actually are, and this plagues their lives and even the lives of those around them.

Segregation is an extreme problem; however, there is a solution that can overcome these issues. Inclusion can help accelerate the path towards disability justice by emphasizing the importance of intersectionality and diversity. People often believe that Special Education is a form of inclusion, but it falls short. Instead, it is a form of integration. The difference can be explained in the behaviors of schools. In schools, special education programs are within school systems, but the kids are still grouped together and isolated from their nondisabled peers. Inclusion means that all students work and learn together regardless of their ability status. Until full inclusivity can be established, special education programs are exacerbating these challenges even more. In the near future, it is imperative that educators redesign these programs and school systems overall to be more inclusive to students of all identities.