“Play my clip!”: arts-mediated agency in disability-centered learning and research

Abstract

The widespread myth that adults with intellectual disabilities lack agency still pervades learning and research spaces, justifying ableist teaching and research methods. Bringing critical, socio-cultural perspectives on disability together with Disability Justice principles, I present a joyful counternarrative, illustrating how a group of adults with intellectual disabilities exercised agency in and through one drama-based learning and research context. Using data generated through participant observation, group interviews, and analysis of short films, I illustrate how characteristics of this drama-based context—creativity, flexibility, multimodality, and supportiveness—afforded disabled participants’ interdependent agency. I explore tensions that arose during research regarding the nature of truthfulness, “good” storytelling, and systems of power. Results suggest an argument for the arts in learning and research with disabled participants, grounded not in their therapeutic benefit but in their capacity to afford agency, with implications for teachers and researchers looking to engage disabled participants in emancipatory work.

Keywords:

• Disability justice
• agency
• disability studies in education
• theater and drama
• arts-based pedagogy

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Drs. Margaret A. Beneke, Katherine E. Lewis, and Molly Shea, and my fellow doctoral students in the UW College of Education for providing invaluable mentorship throughout this research process. Thank you to Northwest Drama’s staff, volunteers, and most importantly CLAP participants without whose wisdom this work would not exist.

Ethical approval

The work in question was submitted for review to the University of Washington IRB. In accordance with federal guidelines, the IRB determined that the work did not fall within its purview and required no further review.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 I use person-first and identity-first language interchangeably to honor the disability community’s diverse language preferences.

2 “A system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness… deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism” (Lewis, 2022).

3 Following Schalk (2018), I use “bodyminds” to indicate the “the inextricability of mind and body” (p. 5).

4 I follow Linton (1998) and identify as “nondisabled” to strategically center disability. While I recognize that disability is a permeable and ever-shifting identity that gains its meaning from sociocultural context, I do not at this point in my life identify as a member of the disability community.

5 All names in this paper have been changed to protect participants’ anonymity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maddie N. Zdeblick

Maddie N. Zdeblick (she/her) is a Seattle-based teaching artist, director, and PhD student in education at the University of Washington Seattle. Maddie’s research focuses on exploring new approaches to transformative arts education with disabled students through critical qualitative research methods which foreground Disability Justice perspectives. Maddie holds a master’s degree in Education from UW Seattle, a bachelor’s degree in Theater and Sociology, with a focus in Theater for Young Audiences, from Northwestern University, and is a 2019 graduate of the Washington State Teaching Artist Training Lab.