Power and Privilege in DS Provision

1. Power and Privilege in DS Provision Tanja Beck McGill University AHEAD 2014 – Sacramento, CA

2. Introductions Tanja Beck Working in DS professional since 4 years Core responsibilities: promote the inclusion of diverse learners, 50% working with students, 50% working with Faculty, UDL, disability and anti-oppression training and workshops As an Access Adviser in the Office for Students with Disabilities, I benefit from the marginalization and oppression of disabled people Workshop participants Who are you? Where do you work? What are your expectations for today?

3. Goals • To raise awareness of our own social location and privileges • To integrate this knowledge into our daily practices • To challenge the perpetuation of oppressive systems on a personal and institutional level

4. Roadmap for today • Historical Perspectives of Disability • Prevalent frameworks • Ableism, Privilege and Power • Power and Privilege in DS Provision • Becoming agents of social change

5. Historical perspectives

6. Manifestations of disability stereotypes in media Enforcing stereotypes Enforcing labelling

8. How do stereotypes work? • We use values, characteristics and features of dominant group as the supposedly neutral standard against which everyone is measured (University system, asking for documentation) – normalizing standards of society • Language to distinguish dominant from subordinate groups which leads to • Stereotyping (the student with ADHD or even students with disabilities) assigns a group identity to students with disabilities although disability is a complex experience, different in individual experience but also experienced differently depending on environment

9. The medical model

10. Reframing DisabilityThe social model of disability

11. Distinction between the two frameworks

12. Why social group membership? • Traditional research on inequalities and forms of discrimination such as ableism, racism, sexism focused on the oppressed groups • The concept of privilege is relatively new, emerged 15 to 20 years ago for the first time • Privilege is a result of our social location, the belonging to or being excluded from one of the dominant social groups that exist within society • Vice versa, Oppression is also a result of our social location • We are never purely oppressed or privileged, our social group location varies • Social group locations also interact with each other, they work together to privilege or oppress • What are social groups? And what is social group membership?

13. Social Group Membership • Belonging to a social groups shapes our reality • Dominant and subordinate groups • Dominant group determines structure of society and assigns roles and values to members from subordinate groups • Categories such as class, gender, race and ability establish and maintain a social order • Dominant group is seen as the norm • The dominant group is everywhere: TV, ads, newspapers

14. Reflective Exercise: Social Group membership • Diversity wheel exercise

15. Privilege • Are a result of our social location • An invisible backpack of unearned assets, an knapsack of special provisions, passports, tools etc. • One group has something of value that is denied to others because of the social groups they belong to • We are unaware of our privileges, this makes them so dangerous, easy to perpetuate this system • Examples are white privilege, male privilege, able bodied privilege

16. Reflective exercise privilege

17. Power • The ability to coerce another’s behavior • Members of dominant social groups hold power • Power accrues to those who are closest to “the norm” (able bodied, hetero sexual, white etc.) • Professional power = authority, power that is associated with our professional roles as “specialists”, comes from organizational/institutional power structures

18. Ableism as form of Privilege and Disability Oppression • System of discrimination, oppression and exclusion of people with disabilities • A set of discriminatory ideas and practices that construct the world in such a way that it favors the able-bodied and marginalizes the disabled • “ideas, practices, institutions and social relations that presume able bodiedness, and by so doing, construct persons with disabilities as marginalised … and largely invisible ‘others’” (Chouinard) • System organized around privilege are: • Dominated by privileged groups • Identified with privileged groups • Centered on privileged • Functions on individual, institutional and cultural level

19. Power and Privilege in our professional roles • How does ableism manifest itself in our daily practices on an individual, institutional and cultural level? • How might power and privilege affect advising situations? • How might it show in our relationships with students? • Can you identify systems of privilege on an institutional level? • Brainstorm!

20. How to initiate change? • Recognize that disability oppression exists • Be aware and acknowledge your personal biases, stereotypes and privilege • Reflect on your own practices, privilege, biases on a regular basis, question yourself • Act: identify and remove barriers in your daily routines and processes, remove medical model practices and replace them by inclusive, social model practices

21. Recognizing Ableist Practices

23. Thank you!