The Social Model of Disability
Purpose
This blog is intended to communicate the broad features of the ‘social’ model of disability in the context of HE education in a way which is welcoming to someone who isn’t familiar with the ideas.
This piece was stimulated by reading an excellent paper by Bunbury, which I strongly recommend if you want to read more.
Disability: incidence and individual experiences
Disability is an everyday feature of human experience, not some exceptional or unusual situation: something like 15-20% of people in Britain are disabled; HESA data suggests that about 10% of students declare a disability in a typical year.
The experiences of people with disabilities are varied, but typically share some sense of being excluded. Wheelchair access to buildings might be one very clear example of a way this exclusion manifests.
Institutional Responses
Despite it being very common and a legally-protected characteristic, disability sometimes seems to surprise institutions. Most universities, for example, address disability in an ad hoc way by responding to specific cases. It might be that this student is given a scribe for exams and that student is supported through the purchase of specific software.
It is difficult to develop ‘one size’ policies which cover the diverse range of needs that disabled students have, and yet students are legally entitled to ‘reasonable adjustments’ under the 2010 Equality Act.
The fragmented provision (often some interaction between a central Disability Services and the teaching-assessment structures of an academic department) and opaque power dynamics of academic structures often make self-advocacy an important but exhausting part of being a disabled student.
The Social Model of Disability
The radical idea at the heart of the social model of disability is to locate disability as a characteristic of society rather than a characteristic of an individual: it is society which disables people who have impairments.
For example, we might think about how someone using a wheelchair can’t climb stairs to the seminar room by emphasising how stairs are stopping this person getting to the first floor. We might think about a student missing a lecture for a dialysis appointment by emphasising that lectures are scheduled as unrecorded ‘one-off’ events. If society were structured differently (e.g. lifts in buildings, lecture recordings), all students could engage fully with their education.
Universal Design
This appreciation of structures disabling people is becoming very normal in architecture, where it is sometimes presented as ‘universal design’. Considering how a diverse population might engage with a building has led to structural inclusion of disabled people. Ramp access to buildings is now common in new buildings, for example. These structural approaches normally turn out to be cheaper than ad hoc actions like retrofitting lifts.
The Case for Universal Design for Learning
While Universal Design has direct (and very serious) implications for estate management in Universities (especially Universities with buildings old enough to radically pre-date equalities legislation), there are wider themes which we might apply to the teaching and learning in HE.
The issue is particularly acute on the issue of assessment, because so much of the trust (from students, staff, employers) in assessment outcomes is based upon the intuition that such outcomes are somehow fair.
Recent OfS guidance is very clear that the EA2010 duty is radically anticipatory:
All providers have obligations under the Equality Act that relate to the assessment of students. These obligations include a duty (under section 91 and Schedule 13 of the Equality Act) to make reasonable adjustments for disabled students. This duty is anticipatory – it requires consideration of and action on barriers that impede all disabled people before an individual disabled student seeks access to a course at the provider. The duty applies to disabled students generally, irrespective of whether the provider knows an individual is disabled or whether it currently has any disabled students.
In the context of assessment policies and practices, this means that providers should anticipate and remove barriers to assessment, regardless of whether they know that there are disabled students in their cohort. We have seen examples of this during the review, for example where a provider offers students a choice of assessment methods to demonstrate that their learning outcomes have been achieved.
Like building ramps rather than retrofitting lifts, inclusive assessment design can address the structures which disable students rather than thinking of disability as a rare event requiring occasional bureaucratic intervention. Inclusive assessments reduce administrative burden (all those forms!) like ramps reduce costs. More importantly, they can give all students (even the ones who don’t declare disabilities) a chance to be more fairly assessed on their abilities.
Equality, equity, justice, liberation
I have found several cartoons useful to my appreciation of ways to respond to disability in my assessment design. (I’ve struggled to find sources for them, though! I would be glad to credit their authors if I’m made aware of who to credit.)
The Baseball Game
Three figures, all of different height, are watching a baseball game over a fence.
Panel 1 (“Reality”): the tall figure stands on several crates, the mid-sized figure stands on one crate, the short figure stands in a hole and cannot see the game.
Panel 2 (“Equality”): each figure stands on one crate; the short figure still can’t see over the fence.
Panel 3 (“Equity”): the tall figure stands on the ground, the mid-sized figure stands on one crate, the short figure stands on two crates. All figures can see the game.
Panel 4 (“Liberation”): there is no fence. All the figures can see the game without obstruction.
The comic is a representation of how the barrier (the fence) is not experienced by the three figures in the same way: being short is important when there are fences. The equality/equity distinction is useful, too: giving everyone the same thing might not solve the issue (though liberation - removing the barrier itself - serves everyone well).
The Apple Tree
Panel 1 (“Inequality“). Two figures stand under an apple tree on opposite sides of the trunk. An apple falls towards one of them but not the other.
Panel 2 (“Equality?”). The two figures have identical ladders. The shape of the tree means that one figure can pluck the apples, but the other cannot reach high enough.
Panel 3 (“Equity“). The two figures have ladders of different height, allowing both figures to pick fruit from the tree.
Panel 4 (“Justice”). The tree is pushed (using joists) to make it straight. Both figures use ladders from the second panel to pick fruit from the tree.
I like the apple tree because there is an activity in it: unlike the baseball game, the figures are doing something. I think the first image represents the situation of luck quite well, too: sometimes the odds are already in someone’s favour (there are more apples on the left of the tree) when something ‘lucky’ happens.
I think it is most powerful for the annoyingly-subtle distinction between the words ‘equality’ and ‘equity’: giving everyone the same ladder is different to helping everyone to pick the same number of apples.
The Exam
A figure sits outdoors at a desk saying “For a fair selection everyone has to take the same exam: please climb that tree“. In front of him is a line-up of various animals (a bird, a monkey, a penguin, an elephant, a goldfish in a bowl, a seal, and a dog). Behind the animals is a tree.
This cartoon is perhaps the closest to an explicit assessment context. The diverse line-up of animals (my favourite is the fish) are presented with the same task, but they are not equipped to address the task in the same way. Perhaps a monkey can climb a tree, but a seal?
It’s an extreme and ridiculous case, but there are echoes of much more moderate settings here. Who can do a 3h unseen exam? Who is able to skip lunch to get the lab practical done on time? Who is able to meet a strict deadline for a high-stakes coursework submission? Who can travel to do a piece of fieldwork or an industrial placement?
It is also instructive to think about what might happen if you ran this exam in a University accountable to the Equality Act. What would a fish say on its paperwork? How would that paperwork be read and judged? Is this assessment format a matter of (unchallengeable) academic judgement?
Conclusions and Reflections
I used to enjoy running up the concrete wheelchair ramps of the library when I was a child. It wasn’t something I needed to get into the library, but it was something I really liked. When I broke my ankle, I used ramps to enter lab buildings. Inclusive design has benefits - both trivial and profound - beyond the people it’s built for.
Some of the benefits in HE are coldly economic, especially with the increasing pressure on administrative staff. Filing those forms takes up (lots of) student time, but it takes up (lots of) staff time to read and process them, too.
COVID has perhaps presented the case for inclusive assessment with an unusual urgency over the last few years. It’s unreasonable to design assessments around rare events like global pandemics, but if your assessment already recognised that not everyone could sit a 3h exam in a sports hall then the pandemic might have been less disruptive.
In my reading, three major strategies are readily aligned with a Universal Design approach:
Removing irrelevant barriers (e.g. time limits in exams which are intended to test critical thinking rather than handwriting speed). The judgement of ‘irrelevance’ is an academic one, but is often enriched by a discussion with students; I have never had a boring conversation with a student about assessment formats - I have been surprised at how running out of time is often a bigger barrier to demonstrating learning than content is.
A ‘bites at the apple’ structure which allows students to submit their best work from a pool of things they’ve done. I found Morrell’s work using this iterative approach particularly interesting because student submissions can be both for feedback and assessment.
A diverse range of assessment strategies is something I have seen Phil Race propose. Perhaps you do badly in exams, but the wheel will spin and next time you’ll be assessed by presentation or a coursework essay. This needs a bit of thought (is it an equality-centred solution or an equity-centred one?), but seems versatile enough to be adapted into something very powerful. Portfolio assessment - something particularly well-established in rigorous HE nursing education - might occupy this space as well.
It’s important to emphasise in closing that it can be really exhausting being a disabled student. Aside from the impairment itself, there is a massive procedural and emotional task in raising problems which - despite the law - have not been solved already. Administrative restructures and staff turnover can mean that these arguments have to be repeated often. Squeezed funding for disability support can make it hard to develop a working relationship with expert staff, and academics might not be trained/resourced to adapt their teaching and assessments.
Assessments are hard for students who don’t need to do any of this extra work. For the 10% (ten per cent!) of students declaring a disability it is so important that academics start to think about how our approaches can disable our students.