Disabled Learners in Language Education

Learning a new language in an instructed classroom setting is sometimes regarded as less than essential—or just too much trouble for what it’s worth—for those Disabled learners of various kinds and backgrounds who make it into higher education settings (Sparks, 2016). Variously Disabled learners are often nudged or outright directed by parents, curricular advisors, and public opinion to focus on what these authorities believe to be the baseline essentials that we as Disabled people need most urgently, to adapt to workforce vocational and social needs. Beyond the many faulty presumptions that keep those beliefs about us going (Sparks, 2016), what if it turns out that precisely those classes that teach additional languages sometimes offer Disabled learners a unique and eventually cherished onramp for expansive learning and transformation, and a place where we can flourish in ways non-Disabled authorities may not be aware of?

Writing 75 years ago, the applied linguist Paul Pimsleur reflected on the general topic of aptitude tests, that

Schools should equip themselves with the best possible means for selecting the correct classes for their pupils, not only in fairness to the majority of pupils, but also out of consideration for those few whose sole chance of excelling academically may lie in their talent for languages [emphasis added]  (Pimsleur, 1968, p. 99).

Even without giving credence to Pimsleur’s deficiency-based premise here, his recognition that language learning can open up key new types of experiences for diverse sets of learners might spark a larger conversation. Might language courses be, in fact, a particularly fruitful, transformative, and enlivening space for Disabled students, rather than a mere obstacle to be avoided or replaced?

After bruising US Supreme Court cases like Guckenberger et al. v. Boston University (1997) twenty-five years ago now, many institutions of higher learning defaulted to the presumption that Disabled students wish on their own accord to opt out of additional language classes (see for instance this example of the exemption process) and to replace them with an Anglophone “culture” class. In a competitive university environment, these exemption policies inadvertently preempt parents and learners from contemplating the potentially transformative role language learning can have in a young person’s emergence as a connected world citizen. There is a world of difference, of course, between a learner choosing to opt out of additional language classes after a thorough and supported exploration of the options they are entitled to and, on the other hand, doing so because, in many cases, a monolingual, Anglophone, non-Disabled advisor or parent said so. Alas, many decision-makers in Disabled students lives remain habitually inclined to nudge us toward what they see as the safest and quickest path possible to graduation or work placement.

This latter tendency regularly prevails in the United States, despite the US Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act’s (2004) insistence that free and appropriate public education be available to all students with Disabilities. And, according to the Rehabilitation Act (1973), “No otherwise qualified individual with a disability … shall, solely by reason of his or her [sic] disability, be excluded from the participation in … any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance” (29 U.S.C. § 794, 1973). In the end, as Wight (2015) summarizes, individual K-12 school districts end up being “charged with developing their own criteria through which students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) are allowed access into the foreign language classroom and which students are denied such access” (p. 43), a devolution of responsibility that frequently occurs in post-high school educational institutions and settings as well, despite the absence of institutional IEPs. Such a do-it-yourself, unfunded-mandate approach to federal education rights management exposes Disabled students to a great deal of discretionary power on the part of K-16 institutions, while burdening individual language teachers with the ongoing challenge of creating and maintaining their own home-grown accessibility resources in the range of languages they teach—whether Ukrainian, Cree, or Spanish.

True, learning additional languages—like any endeavour in the world that invites us into both abstract conceptualization and embodied practice in intensive ways—is not supposed to be easy. Despite historical attempts to make them so, new languages (especially those learned in late adolescence or adulthood) are not known for being friendly and accessible to outsiders (i.e., new speakers) who approach them as either heritage or from-scratch learners. This means that access and universal design are tricky topics when it comes to learning new languages of any sort, especially when spelling and script do not correspond intuitively with the sounds learners hear. While sciences, mathematics, engineering, geography, Anglophone literature, and business can strive credibly to make themselves easily accessible and transparent as subjects to be studied and learned, there will always be a certain unique opacity to languages that is ancient, essential, and good for worldly diversity. But this does not mean that language learning is destined to belong only to an elite few.

Given the complexity of languages, one might reluctantly assume that Disabled people are (for better or worse) less likely to be avid or apt learners of languages. But it is just as likely that language classrooms offer the chance to undo, slow down, dimensionalize, or question the broader culture of institutional exclusion and high-stakes testing/credentialling. Foregrounding additional language classrooms as a key site for pursuing accessibility for Disabled learners might even augment and improve the accessibility provisions available in Anglophone classrooms.

What Gets to Define Universal Design?

Additional language classrooms can help us, whether new or veteran teachers, think boldly about what we may have ourselves believing about inclusion, access, excellence, and diversity more generally. The multilingual spaces of our classrooms can help us rethink what we might be presuming about the needs, desires, and backgrounds of Disabled people of all backgrounds, whether they have physical, cognitive, learning or other combinations of difference in their/our lives. The additional language learning setting also helps us question some of the ways that Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an inclusive paradigm developed over the 1990s, might still implicitly leave out additional language classrooms and multilingual learners in its various contexts of practical implementation.

Originally developed for architectural planning (e.g., avoiding prohibitive staircases and narrow hallways), UDL ambitiously aims to reduce barriers to access for all potential participants, so that no individual accommodations need to be made after the fact. But in envisioning a world made up of settings and situations where there are no barriers or limits whatsoever, UDL avoids the quite inconvenient truth that human language is not by nature plainspoken or monolingual. The world’s language “barriers” are essential to our worldly reality and to our humanness, and there is no reasonable scenario in which English counts as the most universally accessible language. For instance, conflicts emerged in 1949 around the drafting of the supposedly omnilingual Universal Declaration of Human Rights around various senses of the words “torture,” “occupation,” “dignity,” and even “rights” in different languages (Kellman, 2016), leading drafters to question whose global languages get to count as “accessible” and why.

When norms for teaching and learning are set for classrooms, especially those that incorporate learners from Disabled backgrounds, the process often does not involve hearing from the learners directly about their desires and needs, thus leaving most of them out of the decision-making process. It is crucial to consider formulating our own learning outcomes and program outcomes that upend these norms, and that help define Disability according to Disabled people. For instance, concepts like Disability Wisdom and Disability Justice can be incorporated into teaching methods and curricula, as spelled out by Canadian poet and Disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Lautermilch 2022). In Care Work, Piepzna-Samarasinha centers intersectional Disabled QTBIPOC knowledge, embodied experience, and history in the context of support, care, and pedagogy for and with Disabled people.^[1] Only then can we truly claim to center Disabled people’s perspectives, needs, and desires in educational policy and design.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is one of those broad Disability-affirmative learning models that nonetheless must be assessed ongoingly in terms of how inclusive they end up being in actual diverse classrooms, and not only based on the abstract virtues they programmatically profess. Griful-Freixenet et al. (2017) have studied the impacts of the one-size-fits-all UDL approach by conducting qualitative research in higher education contexts. They found that while UDL generally does support Disabled learners, issues such as overreliance on the provision of online notes, increasing disengagement among students in class leading to decreasing attendance, the discomfort experienced by Autistic learners via sensory inputs from PowerPoint presentations, and lack of individual guidance, undermine the promised goals. In language classes, the provision of multilingual support is even more complex to get consistently right, and UDL principles cannot be transported wholesale into them. These actualities prompt us to ask: How often is “universal design for learning” truly universal in a multilingual learning setting, and what does it look like when it is not? Are curricula sometimes arbitrarily inclusive and equitable along certain dimensions of UDL, while neglecting or exacerbating others?

One problematic assumption is that everyone has equal and democratic access to English language-dominant tools and explanations (even in German classes, for instance, with Anglophone grammar explanations). Every year, hundreds of thousands of higher education learners in North America—among them tens of thousands of Disabled learners—are learning in English as a second, third, or fourth language. When they enter the additional language classroom (in Portuguese, Ukrainian, Hindi, or Haida), they are often faced with not only the target language but the invisibly accompanying vehicular language of English too.

Alas, language diversity has generally not been taken into account in broader conversations about UDL. Pre-COVID, most assistive technologies introduced a strong though implicit inclination toward Anglo-monolingualism in universal design. There were some shifts through the COVID-19 pandemic, when most classrooms moved online, using platforms like Zoom to augment various dimensions of Anglophone accessibility. In some cases, the convenience of subtitles and recording abilities helped bring language diversity into the picture by enabling users to have subtitles available in other languages, even when the speaker is speaking in English.

Too, the enduring problem of nativespeakersim represents pedagogical ideologies that center “native-speaker” teachers and teaching materials (Holliday, 2006, p. 385), and native speakers are frequently figured in ableist ways. Tavares (2022) notes that there is persistent discrimination, disempowerment, and a sense of inferiority in the colonial idea of the native speaker, which cannot be separated from racism (p. 2), and, we would add, ableism. Tavares (2022) further explains that no language is truly monolingual or “uncontaminated,” given social interactions between languages; thus, to assume that English is the best path to guarantee UDL will soon become inadequate when viewed in a multilingual frame (p. 3). A multilingual framework for universal access would begin by helping learners grow to enjoy spotting differences in language, style, meaning, and expression as a benefit to everyone, as an enrichment of the social and cultural world. Learners need excellent tools and guidance on how to interact graciously and fearlessly, even in settings where they do not understand all or most of the words being said. This capacity for tolerating rudimentariness is a hallmark of true human maturity and humility in the real world, rather than a deficiency model that insists that the world bend itself to one’s presumed access needs before one acknowledges that world.

As an alternative to Universal Design, in recent years scholars have been increasingly adopting a strengths-based approach to teaching, which employs existing capabilities of a group or an individual to complement learning scenarios. Ramatea and Khanare (2021) have studied this approach in the context of improving the well-being of learners with visual impairments (LVIs) in Lesotho, who were viewed not through a “deficiency paradigm” but as agents and experts who share ideas and resources to inform decision-making and teaching pedagogies. Problems, like the use of small fonts and the lack of teachers experienced with ability difference, were cited by the learners in this context, keeping in mind the rural setting and lack of resources that may not be a barrier in North American cities. Yet, a strengths-based approach such as that advocated in Lesotho for LVIs, which is ultimately possible in any learning context regardless of resources, may specifically help mitigate hidden problems of prescriptivist Anglocentrism and monolingualism in UDL. Hearing directly from learners and adapting and shifting pedagogies for specific classrooms and learners are useful ways forward. All new and veteran teachers can take time with their new students to formulate learning outcomes that draw consciously on the needs and desires that those learners express—either in small groups, one-on-ones, or in plenum. Coming to an additional language class setting with co-developed, community-tested, learning outcomes is an important guard against presumptions that eclipse the actual experiences of Disabled and non-Disabled learners alike.