Cripping the Classroom: Disability as a Teaching Method in the Humanities

Disability pedagogy is a growing and vibrant topic for educators and for scholars of disability studies. Debates range at the K-12 level from reshaping classes to include students with all types of disabilities, instead of marginalizing them in special education classes (Liasidou 171-174, Ware 108), to debates at all levels over the importance and limits of identity politics and disability embodiment (Linton 152-156). Disability in the classroom, both literally and conceptually, is transforming how we think about the normative goals of education and the requirements of an accessible classroom. These debates are important to understand, and they succeed in pushing disability pedagogy. This essay, however, considers disability as a method for approaching texts and facilitating engagement in the classroom. I will focus on methods of “cripping the classroom” in a humanities and humanistic social sciences college setting when the class is not explicitly oriented around issues of disability. Cripping the classroom entails developing a political understanding of disability as a socially constructed category that focuses attention on questions of accessibility as central normative concerns for interpersonal, intellectual, and social relations. Cripping the classroom can enrich the use of disability pedagogy to spur thinking about disability and about the world. “Disability“ here refers to the complex of embodied difference rendered pathological by discursive and material practices. “Impairment“ marks particular embodied differences, such as being hard of hearing or paralyzed or autistic, but disability refers to the social life of those embodied differences—how people and the world interpret, react to, integrate, and exclude those impairments and the people who have them. Disability as an identity becomes a pressing concern for anyone interested in creating social justice in the humanities classroom because ableism, or the norms and structures of society that work to exclude or diminish the life chances of people with disability, is written into the canons of philosophy, European and American history, political science, and literature. People with disabilities are excluded from the college classroom because of admission requirements that foreclose interacting with students with various intellectual disabilities, or campuses with buildings grandfathered in under the Americans with Disabilities Act that make dorms and classrooms only minimally accessible to people with mobility impairments. Beyond these exclusions, the formative nature of disability oppression in how we think CLAIRE McKINNEY