Nicole Matthews

Teaching the ‘invisible’ disabled students in the classroom: disclosure, inclusion and the social model of disability

Drawing on the insights of critical disability studies, this article addresses anxieties frequently articulated by academic staff around the implementation of the United Kingdoms Disability Discrimination Act: how to accommodate the needs of students with ‘hidden’ impairments. Following the social model of disability, it argues that universities should avoid the use of medical labels in identifying the learning needs of disabled students, and should make efforts to institute as part of everyday practice a diversity of inclusive teaching strategies. Finally it discusses an induction activity which sought to encourage students to disclose additional learning needs to university staff while opening up a discussion around difference, diversity with the student cohort as a whole.

Digital Life-Story Narratives as Data for Policy Makers and Practitioners: Thinking Through Methodologies for Large-Scale Multimedia Qualitative Datasets

Digital life stories have been solicited, archived, and Web-cast by organizations and individuals as a way of amplifying marginalized voices in the public domain. Despite the now large collections of digital stories that are available, researchers and policy makers have rarely discussed these stories as qualitative data and powerful evidence for decision making. We analyze the political, ethical and methodological tensions that have limited the use of digital life-story archives to date. In conclusion, we begin to set out future directions for analyzing and applying on-line archives of digital life stories research, drawing on debates within existing research that uses large-scale qualitative datasets.

Contesting representations of disabled children in picture-books: Visibility, the body and the social model of disability

This article will contribute to recent debates in disability studies over the place of the body within the social model of disability, currently a key theoretical tradition within British disability studies. It draws on interviews, focus groups, creative audience research and observation of a community arts project which took place in north-west England between 2005 and 2007. A central aim of the project, which was managed by a large disability charity, was to make disabled children more visible in childrens books. However, the project was committed to the social model of disability which sets aside questions of embodiment to focus on the political, social and economic environments that disable people with impairments. As a consequence, the bodies of disabled children played an unsettling role within the project. Participant observation identified disagreements between project management, disabled people, adults and children over how childrens bodies should be discussed, imaged and narrated. These tensions were negotiated in part through the choice of pictures and stories included on the projects website. The article suggests that ‘disability-critique’ can take place within disability charities, with the social model coexisting with other discourses around disability and childhood. I argue that this combination of discourses ultimately undermined the projects aims to demonstrate the commercial and creative value of inclusive childrens books and thus enable disabled children to see themselves represented adequately in mainstream childrens media.

1000 Voices: Reflective online multimodal narrative inquiry as a research methodology for disability research:

This article outlines the research approach used in the international 1000 Voices Project. The 1000 Voices project is an interdisciplinary research and public awareness project that uses a customised online multimodal storytelling platform to explore the lives of people with disability internationally. Through the project, researchers and partners have encouraged diverse participants to select the modes of storytelling (e.g. images, text, videos and combinations thereof) that suit them best and to self-define what both ‘disability’ and ‘life story’ mean to them. The online reflective component of the approach encourages participants to organically and reflectively develop story events and revisions over time in ways that suit them and their emerging lives. This article provides a detailed summary of the projects theoretical and methodological development alongside suggestions for future development in social work and qualitative research.

The Role of Volunteering in Transitions from Higher Education to Work

Why should we be interested in the place of volunteering in transitions from higher education to work? As Ulrich Teichler commented in a report compiled for the International Labour Office, in the 1990s and beyond ‘transition from higher education to employment has become more complex and protracted’ (1999, p. 5). There is a widespread perception of under-employment, over-qualification yet inadequacy in basic skills required by business, leading to a mismatch between graduates’ skills and employment opportunities. Recent research from the European CHEERS1 study has suggested that in fact such transitions are smoother than they are often perceived to be (Teichler, 2007, p. 21), with rates of graduate unemployment continuing to be lower than those of non-graduates. In fact, this research suggests that many graduates view their career prospects more negatively than a research-informed perspective would suggest. Despite this evidence, anxieties about graduates’ transition into work, we will suggest, have become an important driver of volunteering within the curriculum and after graduation. This is not, however, to discount the importance of volunteering or service learning within higher education as a form of experiential education, as a means of developing university-community partnerships for knowledge transfer and social action, or indeed as an enjoyable activity in its own right (Strand et al., 2003; Hall and Hall, 2007).

Conflicting Perceptions and Complex Change: Promoting Web-Supported Learning in an Arts and Social Sciences Faculty.

This article discusses the processes and outcomes of an attempt to encourage academic staff to use a web‐supported learning package in a UK post‐1992 university. The researcher adopts an ‘insider’ approach to research, drawing on participant observation, an analysis of policy documents and a small number of semi‐structured interviews. The view of organisations as forming unitary ‘cultures’ that can be easily transformed, evident in some literatures on managing change, is critiqued. Instead, the existence of diverse cultures within universities is acknowledged, and conflict between groups is viewed as a useful method of problem solving. While no dramatic increase in the numbers of staff using the new technology was observed in the first year of implementation, the research suggests this is viewed not as a failure but indicative of the incremental and complex process of change within higher education institutions.

Crafting and Retelling Everyday Lives—: Disabled People’s Contribution to Bioethical Concerns

This commentary draws out themes from the narrative symposium on “living with the label “disability”” from the perspective of auto/biography and critical disability studies in the humanities. It notes the disconnect between the experiences discussed in the stories and the preoccupations of bioethicists. Referencing Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s recent work, it suggests that life stories by people usually described as “disabled” offer narrative, epistemic and ethical resources for bioethics. The commentary suggests that the symposium offers valuable conceptual tools and critiques of taken-for-granted terms like “dependency”. It notes that these narrators do not un–problematically embrace the term “disability”, but emphasize the need to redefine, strategically deploy or reject this term. Some accounts are explicitly critical of medical practitioners while others redefine health and wellbeing, emphasizing the need for reciprocity and respect for the knowledge of people with disability, including knowledge from their experience of “the variant body” (Leach Scully, 2008).

Anxiety and Niceness: Drawing Disability Studies into the Art and Design Curriculum through a Live Brief.

This article considers the way that affect shaped the unfolding of a curriculum initative which aimed to expose undergraduate art and design students to the insights of critical disability studies. This initiative, funded by the Big Lottery and managed by disability charity Scope, asked students in art, design and multimedia programmes in four UK higher education institutions to engage with a live brief: to develop inclusive illustrated childrens books and digital media. By focusing on the affective dimensions to this project and especially what Sianne Ngai refers to as the ‘minor emotions’ – not fear or passion or hatred, but, for example, anxiety – this article traces the way such feelings and associated ‘taste concepts’ influenced the engagements, disengagements and judgements of students, staff and the projects management.

Climates of Communication: Collegiality, Affect, Spaces and Attitudes in Peer Review

This chapter explores communication between university teachers in the context of peer review. Narrative data from in-depth one-on-one interviews and open questionnaires were used by the authors to examine specific experiences that teachers in the study identified as impacting on the quality of peer-to-peer interactions. The findings indicate that collegiality, affect, attitude and spaces are central to the ways in which the teachers communicated with each other to create constructive opportunities for learning. The outcomes from the research are helpful to anyone considering the use of peer review as an approach to enhancing learning and teaching in the University sector.

The Afterlife of Capture Wales: Digital Stories and Their Listening Publics

Lewis and Matthews consider the BBC’s digital storytelling project Capture Wales. The focus shifts from the telling of Capture Wales’ stories to what happened next: the ways these stories were circulated and broadcast. The authors discuss the circulation of this large collection of stories: within the workshop story circle; in storytellers’ communities; on BBC radio, television and online and explore the ethical and editorial challenges that emerged from the movement of the Capture Wales stories through these public spaces. Lewis and Matthews begin to consider what this history of stories moving through different spaces and occasions of listening tells us about the challenges of sharing contemporary digital stories and making them matter.