Am I the curriculum?

Abstract

When we consider disability and the curriculum, we usually mean preparing professionals to work with people with disabilities or including students with disabilities. Here, I provide a personal description of these ideas colliding. It's Fall 2017, and I'm taking a course on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). That means it's about disability, or really, about certain services for people with disabilities. My classmates are studying to be speech language pathologists. I'm Autistic, and I use AAC part time because I can sometimes, but not always, speak. I'm the first AAC user to take this class. As we go through, the professor keeps saying how much they're learning from me, as an AAC user. So: am I the curriculum or the student? Am I both? Could I be a teacher? As I work on and eventually publish my class project, an overview of AAC use by speaking autistic adults, am I the object of research or the researcher? Am I both?

Keywords:

• Augmentative and alternative communication
• autism
• disability studies
• student and teacher experiences
• higher education
• personal essay

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Dalton, the professor for my Augmentative and Alternative Communication course, for her support and encouragement as I took her class and as I continue to work on this topic. The awkwardness of being a student, a teacher, and the curriculum is about systematic issues interacting with my identities and not her teaching. I would also like to thank Dr. Melanie Yergeau for her major influence on my style, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions about my manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No financial conflicts of interest exist. No other conflicts of interest exist.

Notes

1 Perspectives on Augmentative and Alternative Communication was one of the ASHA Special Interest Group publications. These publications merged as of 2016.

2 Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who worked in quantum theory. He proposed the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat to illustrate an issue with one interpretation of quantum mechanics, when applied at everyday scales – the issue where a cat would, under that interpretation, be simultaneously alive and dead until observed, at which point the cat's status collapses into one state or the other. Calling my speech Schrödinger's speech is a reference to Schrödinger's cat – my speech is either functional or not (or maybe it's both?), but I definitely don't know until I check.

3 The AAC textbook and the typical autism essay both use statistics, such as the number of people whose disabilities make AAC relevant, the portion of children diagnosed as autistic, or the eugenicist “cost” of disability, to illustrate the importance of AAC and autism. These tend to relate to the importance or effect of our disabilities on other people, rather than the importance of disabled people ourselves.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any grants. The author was supported by a graduate tuition scholarship and Ryan Institute for Neuroscience Fellowship while completing the work.

Notes on contributors

Alyssa Hillary

Alyssa Hillary is an Autistic PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Rhode Island. Depending on the moment, they study brain computer interfaces, augmentative and alternative communication, neural engineering, and/or disability studies. Their work can be found in several Autonomous Press anthologies, and they blog at yesthattoo.blogspot.com.