On Monday, July 22, Rio Salado College celebrated Disability Pride Month by holding an information session called Empowering Abilities: Inclusive Practices and Innovations for Disability Awareness Month. The session’s guest speaker was Dr. Kelly Roberts from Northern Arizona University.
Roberts is the Executive Director of NAU’s Institute for Human Development (IHD) and a tenured professor in Educational Specialties. The IHD is dedicated to facilitating research and programming to foster change that positively impacts people with disabilities. She earned her PhD in Education with a focus on Learning Disabilities, Special Education, and Assistive Technology from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
When asked at the top of the session by moderator Reina Ferrufino, Rio Salado’s Executive Officer of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging, to describe herself in one word, Roberts said “determined.” “If I want to do something and you tell me I can't, I'll figure out a way. My model is if there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Roberts led off the event by discussing the importance of our shared humanity.
“I think that interconnectedness is always something we need to remind each other of. Many times we think we’re very different from each other, but there’s common ground.”
Receiving questions from participants in the chat, Roberts talked about her long history of working in the disability field. She’s been an educator and researcher in the field for more than 40 years.
Roberts explained some of her work by defining the meaning of “assistive technology.”
“In brief it’s anything that can help you overcome a functional limitation,” Roberts said. “So that could be anything from voice recognition software to a shoehorn.”
She said that oftentimes innovations in assistive technology end up becoming incorporated into universal design, so that things like voice recognition that started as assistive technology are now common features in cell phones and other personal electronics.
Roberts wrote her dissertation on voice recognition software, so it’s a subject she was quite comfortable exploring during the session. She talked about how successful the technology was in helping students with learning disabilities communicate and complete their work.
She also discussed the importance of developing culturally responsive individual education plans (IEP) for students that meet them where they are at culturally and geographically. IEPs help teachers create learning plans that can help students transition from high school to college by taking into account their cultural background and what they want to do after school. The example Roberts used was about developing IEPs for Alaskan and Hawaiian natives so that both students and teachers could have a common language to understand the cultural lens they used to identify who they are. She said that we have to take into account how different cultures process information and the way they contextualize certain practices like sex education.
For Roberts, she emphasized the importance of assistive technology as tools for making education more effective.
“We often think of assistive technology and any kind of support for students as watering down the curriculum or lowering the bar,” she said. “But I think oftentimes assistive technology can actually help improve learning.”
She explained how empowering students to learn can be achieved by providing them with alternative ways of understanding.
“That could be through videos, PowerPoints, audio recordings,” she said, underlining how there’s more than just text and lectures in terms of approaches to engage with students. For students with disabilities, these alternate methods can often be much more effective at reaching them and helping them achieve mastery of the material than more conventional methods.
She also discussed how it can be difficult for students with disabilities to enter higher education because they have to self-advocate more. In K-12 there are more resources and planning that’s immediately at hand, but once a student enters college they have to self-advocate for the accommodations they need. This is why, according to Roberts, it’s important that educators be patient and listen to their students when they speak up for what they need.
“I think it’s really important that we have high expectations for people with disabilities,” Roberts said, talking about how the low expectations of educators can also be a hurdle for students with disabilities.
“Oftentimes I’ve seen people say ‘well, they can’t do that.’” It’s important not to impose limitations on others, even if it’s being done in good faith. You don’t know what other people are capable of until they show you what they can do.
Article by Austin Brietta