Worlds remade: inclusion through engagement with disability art

Abstract

This paper revisits the 2007 Disability Studies in Education Conference plenary session, ‘Using Disability Art in Teaching About Disability: Riva Lehrer, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder and Linda Ware’. The plenary coincided with a group show at The Arts Club of Chicago that featured multimedia works by artists who figure disability experiences into their art. The interdisciplinary panel presentation began with Lehrer’s overview of recent paintings and drawings and a screening of Disability Takes on the Arts, a film by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell in 2004. The panel concluded with examples that linked these works to enhance teaching about disability in teacher education by Ware, a professor and practitioner.

Notes

1. With apologies to Bruce Cockburn, the Canadian singer/songwriter who tells us in his 1983 song on the CD of the same name, ‘The trouble with normal is that it always gets worse.’

2. Issues in Secondary Education (0600) is a certification requirement for all secondary education majors at City College/City University of New York. The course was team taught by three instructors who were each assigned five weeks of instruction focused on issues of second language learners, on literacy, and on special education. The examples included here are culled from one class I taught in the fall 2005 semester under the theme of special education.

3. Although the ‘gaze’ is often linked to the work of Foucault (1965), disability studies scholars have also drawn upon notions of the ‘gaze’ specifically in relation to disability. Mitchell & Synder (1997), Davis (1995), and Garland‐Thomson (1997) are but a few. In the course at City College, the topic was introduced to students through the work of the journalist John Hockenberry (1995) in discussion of the gaze as both welcome and unwelcome.

4. CURR 320 is the only course in the Geneseo special education programme that departs from the presentation of typical traditional special education content (pathologies, patriarchy, and reductionism—also known as labels, categories, strategies, management and control techniques). To a one, the students are unfamiliar with the decades‐old critique of special education and none has prior knowledge of disability studies in education when they enrol in this course.

5. Field trips to area museums are incorporated into the course and as a consequence the course content changes to reflect rotating venues in the area. The semester described here included multimedia works from the temporary exhibition Transactions: Across and Beyond Borders (2007) on loan to the Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, NY). Before the introduction of portraits from the show, the students reviewed a podcast from National Public Radio (NPR) titled ‘Looking History in the Eye’. This account coincided with reopening of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, following its renovation in 2006 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5554510). The class discussion was prompted by the question considered by the NPR, ‘What makes a portrait, a portrait?’ In an extension, I presented two images taken from the Transactions website, which led to a large group discussion as students analysed these works in response to the questions: What do you see? What makes you say that? What else do you see? What might you need to know, so as to better understand what you see?