Activities

Case Study: Do-it-yourself Multilingual Universal Design, September 1987

In the following section, we share an autoethnographic account from David, one of the authors of this chapter, which attempts to spell out why it is essential to hear from Disabled learners when planning for multilingual learning and additional language classroom experiences. Readers are welcome to read along with a particular curiosity about those aspects of Disabled experience that may be new to them, particularly as regards language learning.

Why I know it was 1987 has little to do with school records or any other written documentation I might have access to now. It is solely thanks to a strong memory of the phrase “J’ai onze ans” (“I am eleven years old”), one of the most powerful mnemonics of my life thus far, which I was reading aloud over and over that Fall from a yellow mimeographed sheet of paper in my French class. It was a symbolic talisman, that phrase. At that juncture in my young learning, new importance accrued to being able to say “I” and “I have” and “I am”—in a language that no one else in my hometown seemed to care a lick about. Apparently, I felt good, indeed better or best, when accounting for my life, its span, its proportions—in French.

Even seven years into Reagan’s high-stakes America, no one at all was telling me French was good for my résumé, for future workforce competitiveness and industry needs, or for any utility whatsoever. It’s just what you did in sixth grade. Right then, I was entering a first potent phase of alienation from what I would later learn to identify as the ableist capitalist individualist neoliberal white supremacist settler cisheteropatriarchy of American institutions. And, as befit such emerging alienation, I was sitting in the back row of Mountview Middle School, Room 300, on the far right, practicing what Amy Thompson (2017) has called my “anti-ought-to self”. I believe there was no one else behind me in that back row; I had cornered the corner, reduced approaching threats to my person. There was one window in Room 300 of that fortress(-like) building, and I was next to it. I do not know which “View” of which ”Mount” was alleged to be out that window. Did anyone see it, or was it just me that didn’t see it? What’s with all these ableist names for schools: Bella Vista, Buena Vista, Mountview, Crestview? It quite literally eludes me.

Mountview Middle School Room 300 was a very different scenario of learner subjectivity for me than Dawson Elementary School had been prior. Dawson had provisioned me with all sorts of assistive technologies for my visual Disability, called ocular albinism: predominantly telescopes of varying strengths, from 6-power to 8-power to 2-power. I don’t know if the town’s Department of Education paid for these, or if my parents did. There was no Americans with Disabilities Act yet, so we were still making do, making it up as we went along. I remember the 2-power telescopes weren’t strong enough to see the blackboard with, the 6-power ones broke too easily when your classmates borrowed them and dropped them on the floor. The 8-power one was sturdy.

Whoever made the decisions at that school had default-positioned me in the front row of every class when there were rows, which was about 50% of the time. I don’t remember much in the way of parental intervention, pursuant to this “must-be-in-the-front-row” purpose. But in retrospect I know full well that my mother or someone else in loco parentis contacted every single elementary school teacher to let them know that “David needs to be close to you.” Many of them knew already, because seven years earlier my brother had been through the same school, had the same last name, and the same Disability. Dawson School remembered.

As a result, my elementary school experience feels pleasantly teacher-centric, and I do not remember struggling to access educational materials of any sort. It was too early in the history of American education for IEPs, Educational Assistants, or the like, and my parents had chosen a path for me that was decidedly not special-education-oriented, decidedly assimilationist and assimilative. Had the discourse of “learners with exceptionalities” been around in the 1970s when we came through the public schools, I think my parents would have waved it away.

My brother was born in 1969 and seemed to be in fact blind during his first year of life. Alarmingly, he didn’t connect with my mother emotionally and visually in the way she had presumed a baby should. One doctor, himself burdened with the “exceptionality” of Marfan Syndrome, set the tone for how my parents, and the community they developed around us, would approach our Disability. Said the doctor to my anxious mother in 1970: “Just take this baby home and love him.”

Seventeen years later I was “onze ans” and, suddenly and intentionally, sitting in the back of the classroom to see what it was like not to be “close to the teacher.” My collared shirts, my eager-beaver willingness to contribute, the unfathomably inappropriate attempts to integrate me into team sports that centered around small, fast-moving balls, had all waned. What I had most powerfully in hand now, as a DIY form of universal design, was a yellow mimeographed sheet, with key French phrases printed in blue ink.

I likely could not have been in a position to value that resource, had it not been for all of the foundational work on my behalf in elementary school that was undertaken to assure me that I, too, was entitled to access to knowledge and information. But the real and vivid experience of subjectivity, of universal access, commenced when I was able to establish on my own an intensive connection with knowledge-in-hand, at a scale I could manage, and with a promise of self-directed wide-rangingness. Because wide-rangingness was precisely the set of experiences and promises that my Disability was most threatened and precaritized by. Not being able to see and recognize people from more than ten feet away, it takes a cultivated imagination to figure out how and why to access the foreign. The foreign, for someone with a (visual) Disability, is often much closer in, and more threatening, than for those without.

Our textbook for French from that year, Son et Sens, is a bit of a blur to me, save for the cover. I do not remember much from it, nor from the various audiolingual exercises about Jacques and Sophie at university. What counted as true and effective universal access for me, as a ‘universe accessible’, was expressed and enacted solely by that one piece of yellow paper that I could work with iteratively, on my own, that I could have an effective, affective, and ongoing renewable relationship with. I believe this is the case because the scaled-down, all-in-one resource of that one piece of paper excluded a lot of textbook volume and text-wrapping that would have caused me exhaustion and self-disappointment in the learning experience. Because it was in my hand, was compact, and was reiterative, I felt independent, good-to-go. There are many such game-changing one-sheets in my past.

This is an idiosyncratic experience, but I suppose the point is that all Disabled experience is made of idiosyncratic experiences. It is these that in fact add up to universal design and access, or do not.

In this brief contribution, we have sought to pose the following, initial questions: What do Disabled people our/themselves say about their/our own experiences of language learning, about their/our experience of meaningful forms of access and inclusion, and about what language learning teaches them/us about access and inclusion generally, beyond the language classroom? How do these experiences mingle with their/our experiences of gender, sexuality, race, class, migration, ethnicity, and family support—as these, too, unfold in the language(s) classroom? How much special responsibility do new or veteran language teachers have toward Disabled students’ experiences, and how can that responsibility be best expressed and replenished over time? What tends to get in the way for Disabled learners, which an educator (Disabled or non-Disabled as they may themselves be) might not be able to recognize at first? These are just some of the reasonable, complex, and important questions we hope to stimulate discussion about in this short exploration, while proposing a strengths-based, culturally inclusive approach to learning.

Of course, Disabled experiences are unique and subjective. Disabled learners do not have all the answers, but they can often tell teachers how they are experiencing the learning in any given moment, if asked. In the end, how students benefit from attempts to create accessible and inclusive learning opportunities will depend on multiple factors. The second-language exemption process can become extremely rigid in terms of access and outcomes, and always needs to be tested against the actual experience of the learners it attempts to serve. Meanwhile, there is mounting evidence that Anglo-monolingualism might unduly shape policymaking and implementation around Universal Design for Learning. Independent learning initiatives that involve student input and assets provide the most important stakeholders a seat at the table.

Exercise Questions

• Consider the data from David’s story above. As an educator, busy with many classroom needs, how do you work to understand the elusive strengths and desires of learners who may or may not self-identify as Disabled? What additional efforts might you make after having read this chapter?
• What strengths and curiosities might Disabled students have in your classroom that non-Disabled students likely may not have?
• What kinds of ongoing interactions and conversations can you have with various students that give you reliable information, as an educator, about the experiences of students who may be living with the effects of a Disability? What subtle words, phrases, and nonverbal cues might you try to be on the lookout for when communicating with them? What kind of communicative tools do you have, or do you aim to cultivate, so as to communicate with them effectively about their experiences, desires, and needs?
• When there appears to be a conflict or tension among the views of a parent, an administrator, and the learner themselves on these questions, whose account are you inclined to treat as most credible, and why?
• How can you as an educator make it easier and more convenient for Disabled learners to self-disclose to you as Disabled in ways that best protect their privacy and dignity while ensuring they have access to the learning outcomes everyone else does?
• What do you have yourself believing about the inherent or manifest “difficulty” of various languages, and about the beneficial accessibility of English among your learners? Do you find yourself thinking that plain language is always best, and that plain language means the same thing for everyone?
• What strategies will help you incorporate an asset-based learning model for Disabled learners, without necessarily adding large amounts of prep time?
• When you encounter conversations and materials about Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning, what do you notice about the linguistic, multilingual, translational, and/or monolingual dimensions of those conversations and materials?