Some advice on the usefulness of disability in teaching

There are very few teachers with disabilities in French higher education. Statistically, you can count them on the fingers of one hand per discipline. This is a problem, both for students and for institutions, and it has to be said why.

What the presence of a disabled teacher changes for students

First, for students with disabilities. Seeing a teacher who lives with a visible device, an assumed fatigue, an adapted rhythm, is to see oneself represented in a place where one almost never is: in front of the blackboard. It spares them from having to explain every day, to interlocutors who do not know, what the mere fact of being there costs. It spares them, more deeply, from wondering whether they have « the right » to have made it this far.

For the other students, the effect is less visible but real: knowledge takes on, by default, the body that the person teaching it gives it. If that body is only one kind of body, knowledge implicitly inherits that norm. When a disabled teacher teaches, knowledge circulates differently; it becomes obvious that it has no obligatory form.

What it changes for the institution

A disabled teacher places accessibility at the centre, no longer at the margin. The institution can no longer settle for the individual, one-off arrangement: the ramp added piecemeal, the room reassigned at the last minute. The adaptations useful to a disabled teacher always benefit others: students with disabilities, but also parents with strollers, injured colleagues, tired older teachers. This is the curb cut effect applied to pedagogy.

And there is a signalling effect: the institution that recruits and keeps disabled teachers tells its students with disabilities that they too have a possible future where they are studying.

A few pieces of advice, in no particular order

To institutions:

• recruit teachers with disabilities without condescension and without pity;
• treat adaptations as a collective investment, not as an individual extra cost;
• do not require a disabled teacher to explain, at every meeting or every enrolment, what they live with;
• give students with disabilities the option to ask that a disabled teacher be their referent, where there is one.

To colleagues:

• neither overprotect nor overload;
• do not project onto a disabled teacher an expert knowledge of all disabilities: disability is not a guild;
• accept that rhythms vary, without turning it into an advantage or a disadvantage;
• relay the voice of a colleague who points out an inaccessibility, rather than leaving them alone to do so.

To students (even if you probably already know all this):

• do not stress: an exam is just one measure among many, and it says nothing about your intelligence;
• ask your questions, especially the ones you think are silly: they are almost always the ones the others do not dare to ask;
• do not be afraid to mess up: messing up is how you learn;
• ask for the adaptations you need without having to justify yourself;
• say so when a teacher makes you uncomfortable, to them if they can take it, to someone else if not.

And come on, did you really think any of this changed anything about the teaching itself?

A word on what works

What I describe does not come from a theoretical projection onto a hostile system. I teach today at 3iL Ingénieurs, on the Rodez campus, in an institution that has never treated my disability as a problem to be arranged, but as a normal variable of collective functioning. The openness is real, and the motivation to do well, manifest: I was trusted from the moment I arrived, I was listened to without being asked to justify myself, adaptations were made where needed, without making it a subject or a file. I am consulted on the whole craft, not only on accessibility matters. This is rare, this is precious, and it is proof that what I describe above demands neither revolution nor budget: essentially a frame of mind, and a little practical good will.

I have known, elsewhere, the opposite, and the symptoms are quickly recognisable. Accessibility there becomes an administrative file that must be reopened every academic year. Adaptation presents itself as a favour granted, for which a certain gratitude is expected. The disabled teacher is filed away in their particular case, consulted only on what directly concerns them, as if their disability absorbed the rest of their competence. The difference between the two kinds of institutions does not lie in the generosity of the budget: it lies in the way one looks, from day one, at what a colleague is.

The closing

I did not write the above by looking at my own practice; I wrote it remembering what I endured as a student, and what I strive not to reproduce. May I never, ever, ever become one of those thick-headed teachers who, faced with a request for adaptation, would answer with pursed lips: « Oh, for you, that'll do… »