Christine’s Video was really inspiring, I kept coming back to two thoughts while I watched it, Individually and as groups, we like to categorise things, Sounds are something that is sorted out and categorised from a very young age. Babies are able to distinguish their parent’s voices from an early age for instance. This relationship that we have with actions and things with the sounds they make is very strong and quite difficult to break. Christine is not chained to these associations and as a result, she is able to make the connections in a meaningful way to herself. Our brains are wired to connect A to B and the more we see or hear that connection the more indelible it becomes.

I found how Christine had created her own links really interesting and wondered if only someone in her position could have to do what she was doing?

My second thought was around Synthesis, where someone’s brain muddles up the inputs coming into the brain so someone may see sound, such as colours for instance.

Within my academic practice, I need to make sure that students that see and hear the world differently are able to access resources in a way that they get the most out of them, We have installed Blackboard Ally last year which helps students with resources that have been uploaded to Moodle, they have the options to download the resource in a format that helps them, from an audio file through to braille.

One of the main aspects of digital learning for me is how it can really help with accessibility. I really struggled at school due to being an undiagnosed dyslexic, there was one way of learning and if I didn’t understand it, there was little help to understand it and pressure to move on, So I would get further and further behind. It wasn’t until I started to really have coping mechanisms in place that was I able to keep up, but the connection between A and B usually went through to C and D before heading back to B!

I’m always a bit wary of using the term Dyslexia, not because I’m embarrassed about what I am, but because it’s much too broad a term. The issues I have are very different from another person with dyslexia. I struggle to make visual connections, this manifests itself as misreading words and sentences. I can misread a sentence and if it makes logical sense as a sentence, I will keep misreading it, usually until someone corrects me. This made for some very low marks during my a-levels when I would misread an essay question and write about something completely different.

As educators, we really need to be looking for the signs that someone may be dyslexic. The biggest turning point for me was asking to be tested in my third year at university and finding out I was dyslexic. Knowing that my brain was wired differently and that I wasn’t just ‘thick’ made a big difference to my outlook on life, and also knowing what my issues are helped me to overcome anything that may arise.

I hope that we are getting better as a society at improving representation. A lot of TV and Films have a much more representative casting. I have two small children and we watch a lot of films on Disney+ I’m amazed by how some of the characters are represented. We still have a long way to go, In High-level sports, for instance, there are very few professional coaches and management that are black or from ethnic minorities, even though there is a high proportion of BAME professional players. When Andy Murray decided to have a female coach, Amelie Mauresmo. There was a lot of backlash in the press about his choice. Simply because Amelie was female, regardless of her own excellent professional playing career and her ability as a coach.

I think that the article about the confronting whitewashing of disability was really interesting, The idea that you can’t be black and disabled reminds me of the controversy around Alison Lapper’s sculpture of her pregnant naked body on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square. If the sculpture was of an able-bodied woman there wouldn’t have been half the controversy around it. In An article in the Disability Studies Quarterly, by Ann Millet, where she states that people tended to fall into a number of different viewpoints, where there was a desire to make the work into a lesson about a disabled body to justify its display, or that it “provoked a fear that the disabled body will reproduce another ‘damaged’ child!

I have come across hidden disabilities a few times in my life and have always found it must be very difficult to not only live with chronic pain such as Khariani Barokka. I had a colleague that had broken his back and the only fix for this was to have an operation that would fuse a number of his vertebrae together, which was an invasive and high-risk surgery that didn’t always relieve the pain. As a result, he tried his best to live a normal life despite the pain. However because he was a young man, who for most of the time walked normally, he felt he couldn’t ask for a seat on the train even if he was in a great deal of pain, although he had a disability passed, along with a blue badge for parking,  he didn’t want to explain himself every time and potentially have an argument with someone. I have experienced people coming up to him when he had parked in a disabled space and saying he was not disabled and shouldn’t have a pass.

To try and sum up this rather rambling blog, We need to be more aware, that we are not all the same and that we don’t fit into simple boxes, and that we need to make sure that we make sure that as many people as possible have the same access to opportunity. We have moved away from seeing disability as some sort of sin or punishment, as it says in the Shades of Noir terms of reference our views are evolving, and hopefully, we are moving in the right direction.

References

Shades of Noir: Journals. (n.d.). Evolution of Disability Models. [online] Available at: https://shadesofnoir.org.uk/journals/content/evolution-of-disability-models.

Millett, A. (2008). Zola Award Honorable Mention: Sculpting Body Ideals: Alison Lapper Pregnant and the Public Display of Disability. Disability Studies Quarterly, [online] 28(3). doi:10.18061/dsq.v28i3.122.

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