Making space in higher education: disability, digital technology, and the inclusive prospect of digital collaborative making

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ways that the intersection between disability and digital technology in higher education unfolds collaborative experiences that include disabled students through what I call ‘Digital Collaborative Making’. Students who participate in Digital Collaborative Making collaborate on multimedia video projects that tell stories about their relationship with digital technology. As a research-creation approach that weaves academic research and artistic practices together, Digital Collaborative Making invites students to devise creative methods of critiquing the social and cultural impact of digital technology. While digital technology can improve accessibility in education, ableist dynamics and ‘disabling’ ideologies remain pervasive in universities. By engaging students with different identities and lived experiences, Digital Collaborative Making presents opportunities for students with disabilities to openly express their creativity and subvert normative perspectives that stigmatise disability as a deficit. In turn, non-disabled students can learn what it means to be open to the presence of disability and difference. To illustrate these points, this paper considers the inclusive prospect of Digital Collaborative Making in Digital Lives, an undergraduate communications course at the University of Waterloo.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• digital technology
• inclusive education
• collaboration
• making

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the students in the Spring 2016 and Winter 2018 sessions of the Digital Lives course for allowing their video projects to be discussed in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Fernandez

Stephen Fernandez is a lecturer at the University of Waterloo, where he teaches rhetoric, disability studies, and digital media studies. He has published peer-reviewed work on the topics of disability, performance, and digital media. His current research explores the inclusivity and accessibility of critical making as a research-creation pedagogy that fosters collaborative relationships between disabled and non-disabled students.