“WHEN THEY SEE US”: A VISION FOR VISIBILITY AND VOICE IN OUR SCHOOLS
BY MATTHEW SAVAGE In early November 2021, after a long period of deteriorating health, I walked for the last time. Since then, I have relied entirely on a wheelchair, specialist crutches, a patient physio, the kindness of others, and an extraordinary wife, in order for me to mobilise either within or beyond our Hebridean bungalow. I have a complex neurological disorder which has disrupted many of the brain signals so many of us take for granted, and whilst I may gradually regain (and, in a repeating cycle, re-lose) my mobility in the future, it is also possible that I will not walk again. I share this not to seek attention or sympathy - never have I accepted either of these comfortably - but rather to frame some of the lessons of #deijb that I have learned in recent years. When I first shared my news with family and friends, several willed me, with nothing but positive intent, to “stay positive”, and I could not work out why I found nothing curative or of comfort in these words. And then I watched a 2014 TEDxSydney talk by the late, great Stella Young, Australian comic and disability activist, and how she responded to the sentiment embodied by many an “inspirational” meme about disability, and I realised why.
“...that quote, “The only disability in life is a bad attitude,” the reason that that’s bullshit is because it’s just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. Smiling at a television screen isn’t going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It’s just not going to happen.” In my first six months of navigating an ableist world through a newly disabled lens, I quickly experienced what edtech pioneer, Professor Mohamed Jemni, observed: “The disability is not the problem. The accessibility is the problem.” In his work on how edtech could render education accessible to the 80% of deaf people for whom it is out of reach, he talked about “breaking the silence”, and it strikes me that there is both silence and invisibility for most of the characteristics supposedly protected by the UK’s Equality Act (2010) and its international counterparts. Whatever our intersecting identities, too many of us are working and learning, silent and invisible, in a normative world. Young argued that society needs to listen to and use the stories of disabled people not to inspire able-bodied people and make them feel better about themselves, but to uplift disabled people and give