scholarly journals Recognizing Ableism in Educational Initiatives: Reading between the Lines

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-100
Author(s):  
Maria Timberlake

The ubiquity of ableism in education policy requires being increasingly alert to the portrayal of, (including the absence of), disability within educational initiatives. Ableism is a form of oppression, a largely unconscious acceptance of able-bodied norms from the inaccessibility of instructional materials, to assumptions about the body (a healthy body is within one’s control) to the acceptance of segregated settings. In response to the call for this special issue, previous qualitative inquiry into the unintended consequences of three educational reforms were synthesized using critical disability theory.  Seemingly disparate at first glance, all three initiatives, while ostensibly increasing equity, also contained ableism that reinforced stereotypes about student variability and served to further isolate disabled students. One federal (Alternate Assessment), one state (CCSS modules), and one local (project-based learning) policy implementation are included in this theoretical analysis. Reading between the lines means being alert to ableism, and is essential to prevent the historical marginalization of students with disabilities from continuing within contemporary “progress”.

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18
Author(s):  
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff

This state of the field essay examines recent trends in American Cultural History, focusing on music, race and ethnicity, material culture, and the body. Expanding on key themes in articles featured in the special issue of Cultural History, the essay draws linkages to other important literatures. The essay argues for more a more serious consideration of the products within popular culture, less as a reflection of social or economic trends, rather for their own historical significance. While the essay examines some classic texts, more emphasis is on work published within the last decade. Here, interdisciplinary methods are stressed, as are new research perspectives developing by non-western historians.


EDUSAINS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-175
Author(s):  
Gia Juniar Nur Wahidah ◽  
Sjaeful Anwar

Abstract This research aims to produce science teaching materials in junior level with Energy in The Body as the theme using Four Steps Teaching Material Development  (4STMD). The material is presented in an integrated way so that students can  think holistically and contextually. The method used in this study is Research and Development. In this R&D methods is used 4STMD. There are four steps done on the development of teaching materials, the selection step, structuring step, characterization, and didactic reduction. Selection step includes the selection of indicators in accordance with the demands of the curriculum which is then developed with the selection of concepts and values that are integrated with the concept of science. Structuring step includes make macro structures, concept maps, and multiple representations. Characterization's step includes preparation instruments, then  trial to students to identify difficult concepts. The last, didactic reduction was done by neglect and the annotations in the form of sketches.The test results readability aspect instructional materials lead to the conclusion that by determining the main idea, the legibility of teaching materials reached 67%, with moderate readability criteria. Test results of feasibility aspects based on the results of questionnaires to the 11 teachers lead to the conclusion that the overall, level of eligibility teaching materials reached 91% with the eligibility criteria well. Keywords: teaching materials; energy; 4STMD Abstrak Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menghasilkan bahan ajar IPA SMP pada tema Energi dalam Tubuh menggunakan metode Four Steps Teaching Material Development (4STMD). Materi disajikan secara terpadu sehingga memacu siswa untuk berpikir secara holistik dan kontekstual. Metode penelitian yang digunakan pada penelitian ini adalah metode penelitian dan pengembangan. Dalam penelitian dan pengembangan yang ini, digunakan metode Four Steps Teaching Material Development (4STMD). Terdapat empat tahap yang dilakukan pada pengembangan bahan ajar, yakni tahap seleksi, strukturisasi, karakterisasi, dan reduksi didaktik. Tahap seleksi meliputi pemilihan indikator yang sesuai dengan tuntutan kurikulum yang kemudian dikembangkan dengan pemilihan konsep dan nilai yang diintegrasikan dengan konsep IPA. Tahap strukturisasi meliputi pembuatan struktur makro, peta konsep, dan multipel representasi dari materi. Tahap karakterisasi meliputi penyusunan instrumen karakterisasi, kemudian uji coba kepada siswa untuk mengidentifikasi konsep sulit. Tahap terakhir, yaitu reduksi didaktik konsep terhadap konsep sulit. Reduksi didaktik yang dilakukan berupa pengabaian dan penggunaan penjelasan berupa sketsa. Hasil uji aspek keterbacaan bahan ajar menghasilkan kesimpulan bahwa berdasarkan penentuan ide pokok, keterbacaan bahan ajar mencapai 67%, dengan kriteria keterbacaan tinggi. Hasil uji aspek kelayakan berdasarkan hasil angket terhadap 11 orang guru menghasilkan kesimpulan bahwa secara keseluruhan tingkat kelayakan bahan ajar mencapai 91% dengan kriteria kelayakan baik sekali. Kata Kunci: bahan ajar; energi; 4STMD  Permalink/DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15408/es.v8i2.2039  


The concept of exposome has received increasing discussion, including the recent Special Issue of Science –"Chemistry for Tomorrow's Earth,” about the feasibility of using high-resolution mass spectrometry to measure exposome in the body, and tracking the chemicals in the environment and assess their biological effect. We discuss the challenges of measuring and interpreting the exposome and suggest the survey on the life course history, built and ecological environment to characterize the sample of study, and in combination with remote sensing. They should be part of exposomics and provide insights into the study of exposome and health.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110146
Author(s):  
Ping-Chun Hsiung

This Special Issue aims to advance critical qualitative inquiry in China studies and contribute to a vibrant, inclusive global community. It builds upon debates and efforts in the behavioral and social sciences among area specialists in two eras: researchers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora in the 1980s who sought to sinologize behavioral and social sciences, and sociologists in China in the 2000s who are seeking to indigenize these fields. The Issue takes a two-pronged approach toward advancing critical reflection in knowledge production: (a) it aspires to diminish the current influence of Western and positivistic paradigms on behavioral and social sciences research; (b) it seeks to challenge discursive hegemonic influences to create and sustain space for critical qualitative inquiry. The Issue traverses disciplinary boundaries between history and behavioral and social sciences within China Studies. It opens dialogue with the non-area specialists who are the primary audience of the Qualitative Inquiry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hankiz Dolan ◽  
Mu Li ◽  
Deborah Bateson ◽  
Rachel Thompson ◽  
Chun Wah Michael Tam ◽  
...  

Abstract Background In Australia, ethnic Chinese people are one of the largest, youngest and fastest growing overseas-born groups. Yet, little is known about their perceptions of contraceptive methods and their experiences with choosing one. Decisions about contraceptive methods are preference sensitive. Understanding the influencing factors of Chinese migrant women’s contraceptive method choice and practices will help cater to their decision-making needs in a culturally sensitive and responsive way. Methods A qualitative study design underpinned by critical realism approach was used to explore Chinese migrant women’s perceptions and experiences of choosing contraceptive methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 women who self-identified as being ethnically Chinese and had been living in Australia for no more than 10 years. The interview guide was adapted from the Ottawa Decision Support Framework. Majority of the interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese. Transcribed data was analysed using thematic analysis method. Results Four major themes were identified, including: ‘every medicine is part poison: hormonal contraceptives cause harm to the body’; ‘intrauterine device, a device used in the past for married women’; ‘it takes two (or one) to decide, depending on the relationship dynamics and contraception preferences’; and ‘it is not necessary to seek medical advice in choosing contraceptive methods’. Conclusions Our findings suggest that Chinese migrant women’s perceptions and experiences of choosing contraceptive methods are influenced by complex personal, cultural, societal and inter-relational factors. Chinese migrant women were cautious of using hormonal methods due to fears of side-effects, including reduced or absent menstrual bleeding. Women were also reluctant to consider intrauterine devices as options due to associating them with past experiences of other women and themselves and also fears of potential complications. There was a reluctant attitude towards seeking medical advice regarding contraception due to beliefs that needing to use contraception is not an illness requiring treatment. Such findings are likely to be useful in increasing healthcare professionals’ and policy makers’ understanding of Chinese migrant women’s contraceptive method preferences, beliefs and behaviours. They also help to develop culturally and linguistically sensitive strategies, which goes beyond the provision of contraceptive counselling, in assisting Chinese migrant women’s decision-making needs.


2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Michael ◽  
Marsha Rosengarten

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 194084472110126
Author(s):  
Mirka Koro ◽  
Gaile S. Cannella ◽  
M. Francyne Huckaby ◽  
Jennifer R. Wolgemuth

The purpose of this special issue is to generate and expand the locations and perspectives from which justice and equity, in multiple forms, are and can be, orienting concepts for critical qualitative inquiry. Although critical inquiry originates from diverse views, concerns, and conditions, all forms would always and already address matters of privilege/harm, equity/ inequity, and justice/injustice, while at the same time challenging power-oriented dualisms, systematic western notions of progress, and capitalist gains. This introductory article describes the work of special issue authors asking questions like: How might critical qualitative inquiry build from the past while at the same time lead to more just possibilities, leading to something we might recognize as inquiry as/toward/for justice? How can critical scholarship be theorized, designed, and practiced with justice as the orienting focus within (en)tangled times, materials and material injustices?


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Doolittle Wilson

In 1975, Congress enacted a law eventually known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which ensures that children with disabilities receive a free, appropriate, public education. Since then, scholarly and popular debates about the effectiveness of inclusive education have proliferated and typically focus on the ability or inability of students with disabilities to succeed in so-called regular classrooms. These debates reflect widespread assumptions that the regular classroom is rightly the province of nondisabled students and a neutral, value-free space that students with disabilities invade and disrupt via their very presence and their costly needs for adaptation. But as many scholars in the field of Disability Studies in Education (DSE) have argued, these discussions often fail to recognize that the space of the regular classroom, far from neutral, is constructed for a nondisabled, neurotypical, white, male, middle-class "norm" that neither reflects nor accommodates the wide range of diverse learners within it, regardless of whether these learners have been diagnosed with a disability. A DSE perspective sees the educational environment, not students with disabilities, as the "problem" and calls for a Universal Design for Learning approach to education, or the design of instructional materials and activities that allows the learning goals to be achievable by individuals with wide differences in their abilities and backgrounds. Agreeing with this DSE perspective, this article uses an autoethnographic approach to reexamine inclusive education and to consider how university classrooms, pedagogy, and curricular materials can be improved in order to accommodate all students, not just those with disabilities. Ultimately, the article argues that Universal Design for Learning has the potential to radically transform the meaning of inclusive education and the very concept of disability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodolfo Cruz-Vadillo ◽  
Miguel Ángel Casillas-Alvarado

This article aims to approach the school experiences of 13 students with disabilities. It corresponds to a cross, synchronous and non experimental study, whose scope is mainly descriptive. The data collection was carried out through a semi-structured interview and transcribed from audio recordings to make a category analysis. The main results showed that in the case of students who were born with disabilities, the fact that an institution was inclusive turned out essential for them to have adequate transit through the educational system and thus become apt for higher education. The combination disability-inclusion-right to education-higher education is what this paper aimed to weave, trying to follow as thread or anchor, the previous school experiences of students with disabilities. We recognize that an adequate, inclusive, positive experience besides a subjective construction of the body and disability by family members, become important conditions to access schooling. Education is a right, therefore it can not be seen as an act of charity; it should be required as a quality practice.


Author(s):  
Arum Ratnaningsih ◽  
Titi Anjarini

<p><em>The background of this study is the lack of confidence in the use of Indonesian language so that passive students in lecturing activities. The purpose of this study is for humanist learning, active, and fun. Research method of R &amp; D with learning model of Project Based Learning (PBL) and Inquiry approach. Subjects in this study were PGSD students of University of Muhammadiyah Purworejo totaling 130 students divided into 2 classes as experimental class, 2 classes as control class, and 1 class of scale test. Data analysis used in this research is source triangulation, triangulation method, instrument triangulation, and SPSS. The result of this research is the improvement of Indonesian language skills of PGSD students. The experimental class has a higher score than the control class, so it can be concluded that the PBL learning model can significantly improve the PGSD students' skill in Bahasa Indonesia University of Muhammadiyah Purworejo.</em></p>


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