Making disability visible in education

Advocating for a new minor: Disability Studies

JENNY HAN / ASST. NEWS EDITOR / THE USD VISTA

It started with the lack of accessibility and support at USD that made Fanisee Bias, an undergraduate senior with a physical disability, ask herself, “how can I make it [USD] better? I want to feel more supported.” Her first step in creating change and community was creating a student organization: Alliance of Disability Advocates (ADA). From there, the conversation evolved into the possibility of creating classes with an emphasis on disability. The new possibilities lead to an even bigger goal: creating a constructive program with disability at the forefront. 

To Bias, this is the origin story of how the idea of a disability studies minor came to be. A small team of students and faculty have been working for the last few years developing this program. Among these people are Bias and Dr. Suzanne Stolz, an Assistant Professor of Education and a wheelchair user. Their goal is to get the course curriculum officially implemented within the next school year. 

“Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field that looks at disability from a cultural, social, political, aesthetic, from all of these different lenses,” Dr. Stolz said. “It is a field that teaches us to question the way that disability has typically been conceptualized in medical terms.” 

To Dr. Stolz, this reframing is important because speaking about disability solely from a medical perspective is harmful.

 “A lot of times when people think about disabilities, they think about disability as a deficit, a lack, a problem, or something that should be cured or fixed and/or they think of people needing special attention, or certain medical services,” Dr. Stolz said. “There’s so much more to disability than thinking about it in that way. Disability can be seen as socially constructed because in different contexts, different bodies and minds fit or don’t fit in different ways.”

Currently, there are several institutions across the U.S. that already have disability studies as a field students can study in. Within California, some notable names include Stanford University, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and University of California San Diego (UCSD). Particularly in UCLA, they offer 51 courses for the minor that range from “Intersections of Art History and Disability Studies: Disability in Modern Art” to “Exploring Intersections of Ability and Sexuality” and “Being Human: Identity in Age of Genomics and Neuroscience.” No private religious universities in California have yet to adopt a disability studies program in their course catalog. 

Bias and Dr. Stolz     both envision this minor being a mix of current USD courses and new classes.

“It might mean that we create a course that is ‘Intro to Disability Studies’ that would help students go ‘What are these different lenses, what is what is disability studies, what are some of the foundations, who are some of the scholars, who have started work in this area’,” Dr. Stolz said. “We’d also be thinking about what kind of capstone project or what kind of higher level courses, I can also imagine that we might have a course on disability culture and explore that as well.”

This is possible because they both believe that the disability lens can be applied to any field.

“When I go to a disability studies conference, I [listen] to people [sharing] their work about literature,” Dr. Stolz  said. “I [listen]  to folks who come from history departments, who come from communications departments, who come from psychology. They come from computer science and engineering.” 

The communication aspect of disability, whether that is American Sign Language, the way that people talk about disability, or the way that people talk to those with disabilities, will also be highlighted in the minor is also important to Bias. 

“There’s usability and language; How do we communicate beyond verbal communication?  Because not everyone speaks not everyone speaks English. Not everyone can hear,” Bias said. “Working in the Communications department, how are we using our language and verbiage and things. Or even like disability and writing; writing about your story with disability or writing about the history of what disability has been.” 

But ultimately, implementing disabilities studies is about much more than just the classes it will offer; it’s also a way of accepting a traditionally marginalized community as part of the university. 

“I think it’s really important that we [learn] about humans. It’s what we do in humanities courses, that’s what we do really. And most of the work that we do, we’re learning about how we interact with humans and that’s what this minor does,” Dr. Stolz said. “It gives us insight into experiences that often are marginalized or voices that are not heard. I think this minor could be really important for disabled students to be able to see themselves in the curriculum, but I also think it could be really valuable for non disabled students who want to learn something that they haven’t had a chance to learn before.” 

In addition, Bias said it’s important for this minor to be implemented because doing so would represent USD’s core values. 

“If we want to actually embody that Changemaker initiative and that perspective, then we really have to be involved and know what’s going on and engage in what’s going on and what’s happening on campus,” Bias said. “They [USD students] have a stake in it because they’re a student here and they’re a representation of the school and they’re paying for it.” 

All in all, this new field aims to shift perspectives and create conversations about disability. It’s a field that aims to foster empathy and acceptance for our fellow peers. 

For more information on this minor, ADA has an Instagram page @adausd19 with resources on their page and on their linktree.