Marcia Rioux

A Time for the Universal Right to Education: Back to Basics.

The participation of children with disabilities in regular schools is too often the prerogative of education boards, who decide whether a child can learn within existing educational environments, rather than pressuring for systemic change and organization in school curricula that would grant the right of education to all children. This article looks at education as a right, as found in international agreements including the UN Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and education as a development tool, and discusses the limits and potential in each of these frameworks. An alternative model is proposed as an approach to universal pedagogy, which incorporates the idea of a flexible curriculum and the development of literacy skills, accessible and applicable to students with different backgrounds, learning styles, and abilities. Qualitative data from a large study in a number of nations monitoring the rights of people with disabilities are presented to illustrate the arguments and provide the perspective of people with disabilities themselves about their experiences in schools.

Virtual Community Building and the Information Society: Current and Future Directions

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the life cycle model needed to develop information systems for groups of people with fluid requirements. For this purpose, we developed a modified spiral model and applied it to the analysis, design and implementation of a virtual community for a group of researchers and organizations that collaborated in a research project and had changing system requirements. The virtual knowledge community was dedicated to support mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced by the Disability Rights Promotion International Canada (DRPI-Canada) project.

Disability rights and change in a global perspective

The 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) brought in a new era of disability rights, and as a human rights instrument Article 30 of the Convention addresses rights in sport and physical activity. Rights include those in disability-specific sport and mainstream sport, games, recreation, leisure, tourist sites and activities. The Convention also addresses other aspects of sport including coaching, training, management, barrier-free facilities and physical education. This article argues that the shift from a disability and charity-based approach to a rights-based approach fundamentally changes the playing field, the players, the spectators and the society. It also argues that the UN Convention provides a framework by which policies and programmes can be measured, and the public recognition of different bodies and abilities to support inclusive societies in the global context.

Disability Research in the Global South: Working from a Local Approach

This chapter will look at ways of building into the research itself notions of rights and the power to sustain the work outside the context of the northern researchers who are likely to be the grant holders. We note the obstacles and barriers currently preventing the full enjoyment of rights by people with disabilities in the global South, by exploring how increasing participation and decision-making power in monitoring rights can lead to more sustained social change.

Employment, Poverty, Disability and Gender: A Rights Approach for Women with Disabilities in India, Nepal and Bangladesh

Introduction: This chapter presents a literature and document review to help fill a gap in knowledge, understanding and awareness of the socio-economic needs and interests of women with disabilities.

Enabling Virtual Knowledge Networks for Human Rights Monitoring for People with Disabilities

Holistic disability rights monitoring is an imperative approach to permit translation of rights on paper into rights in reality for people with disabilities. However, evidence-based knowledge produced through such a holistic monitoring approach has to be accessible to a broad range of stakeholders, e.g., groups such as: researchers, representatives of disability community, people with disabilities, media, policy makers, and the general public. Besides, the collected evidence should contribute to building capacity within disability community around human rights questions. This article explains the design process of a Virtual Knowledge Network (VKN) as an operational tool to support mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced by the Disability Rights Promotion International Canada (DRPI-Canada) project. This VKN is embedded in the more general framework of DRPI, grounded in a human rights approach to disability that acknowledges the importance of creating knowledgeable communities in order to make the disability rights monitoring efforts sustainable.