Inclusive and accessible learning
Inclusive learning is a declared priority at NCAD.
Framing inclusion
An intersectional approach to inclusion recognizes that students ‘do not live single issue lives’[1] but experience multiple forms of intersecting exclusions. Further, an awareness of the complexity and inter-relatedness of social, cultural, political, economic, geographic and material systems recognises the contextual embeddedness of experience and the meanings we make of them. This approach moves away from deficit-theorising to a recognition of the role of context in raising barriers that perpetuate privilege and replicate forms of inequality based on identity.
Disability frameworks
Inclusion and access may be general goals of groups working in this area, but different approaches to the framing of disability will have implications for the kinds of actions that are likely to follow.
The Medical Model of disability considers people as disabled because of impairments or conditions that they have.[2]
In the Social Model of Disability, people experience disablement because social and physical contexts have been designed in ways that exclude them. Removing the barriers allows more people to participate freely.[3]
Disability Justice[4] is a social justice movement which acknowledges the intersectional experience of disability and ableism with other forms of oppression and identity such as race, class and gender.
[1] Lorde, A., 1982. Learning from the 60s. Sister outsider: Essays and speeches, 13444.
[2] Sense (2024) The social model of disability. Available from https://www.sense.org.uk/about-us/the-social-model-of-disability/. [Accessed 31/07/2024]
[3] As above
[4] Sins Invalid. September 17, 2015. 10 principles of disability justice. Available from https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice. [Accessed 31/07/2024.]
Past workshops and seminars:
Annabel Crowley: Encounters in Orbit (2023)
Annabel Crowley presented three ‘Encounters in Orbit’ seminars for NCAD staff members. Espousing a disability justice perspective, Annabel proposes a pedagogy of inclusion in which participants are empowered to identify the conditions that enable participation in learning and collaborative contexts.
