The edited collection Pedagogy, Disability, and Communication: Applying Disability Studies in the Classroom is part of University of Toledo's Interdisciplinary Disability Studies Series. The essays in this collection offer interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to teaching communication in the classroom with disability studies as the foundation. Ultimately, the collection argues for de-centering able-bodiedness in teaching practices through examinations of ethics, sexuality/gender, health, culture, and technology in connection with disability studies and the communication classroom.
The first approach under consideration with disability studies is an ethics of communication in the classroom and how we make sense of our bodily experiences discursively (Cypher, 8). These arguments emphasize the need for dialogical approaches—interactions that allow for collaboration and multiple points of view (Jenks, 26)—in order to ethically approach, teach, and learn about communicating with differently-abled bodies. In particular, Baldwin and Jeffress' essay "Incorporating disability studies into the communication classroom through a high impact nonverbal communication assignment," offers a pragmatic approach to placing disability studies at the center of communication in the classroom. High Impact Education Practices (HIEP), for instance, incorporate and rely on collaborative and collective methodologies that ask students to critically engage with each other and the real-world. The "nonverbal communication project" that Baldwin and Jeffress outline asks students to observe and catalog nonverbal communication codes in order to "gain an idea of what it might be like to live as a person who is differently normed" (54-55) and then create a report that discusses their findings. The outcomes of this kind of project "raise critical questions about students' own interaction with the people and how they themselves can become more effective communicators" (60). Placing students at the center of this kind of embodied research, they argue, allows them to engage with more ethical research practices.
Another thread in this collection is found through the exploration of intersectional approaches to communication with examinations of sexuality and gender in connection with disability studies in the classroom. These intersectional identity arguments emphasize the crucial roles that embodiment and praxis play in the classroom and call for assignments that are interactional, collaborative, and collective in nature—such as workshops. Here, disability pedagogy and the gender communication classrooms are entangled by utilizing their frameworks for discussing topics such as ability and gender outside of their oppressive hierarchical structures (Grewe, Jr. 85). The combination of these intersectional approaches, they argue, allows teachers and students to engage with "physical bodies, gender performances, and ability" in order to not just "further knowledge, but create a space in which people can openly explore the phenomenon of life" (Grewe, Jr., 94-95). These pedagogical approaches also consider interdisciplinary frameworks such as health and culture, arguing that the first step in applying disability pedagogy is de-centering able-bodiedness in language. In particular, these approaches introduce a "critical disability studies" that "de-centers able-bodied narratives in the health communication classroom" by instead looking at "bodies already living with disease" in order to resist compulsory able-bodied narratives of health (Spieldenner and Anadolis, 109).
The collection also presents intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to communication through lenses of accessibility and technology. The changing landscape of higher education in the 21st century and the growing number of students with disabilities—especially those with learning disabilities—is consistently noted throughout and there are places that specifically call out higher education's slow response to making materials accessible for students. More specifically, Chapters 9 and 11 note the importance and usefulness of universal design for students with hearing, visual, or speech impairments and offers several approaches to incorporating those strategies in the virtual classroom. Throughout the collection, there is a return to arguments for de-centering ableism by using disability pedagogy. Disability pedagogy, it's argued, gets students to collaboratively and collectively engage with a variety of dialogic research strategies in order to transform perspectives of, and interactions with, those who are differently abled. The collection offers a variety of intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching communication in the classroom, which makes it accessible to a wide-range of higher education instructors.
