The creation of equitable spatial, political, and social arrangements is never easy. Decades of student protests—from the historical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Deaf President Now movement to the current Black Lives Matter movement—have demonstrated the ways racially diverse and dis/abled students have demanded inclusivity. Understanding the potential of inclusive educational settings in higher education requires that we pay serious attention to our increasingly diverse society and consider the importance of place and the spatial arrangements in which we find ourselves embedded. In using the terms space and place, I refer to the complex interaction between the physical structure of a building and the relational consequences that occur because of our lived experiences as we inhabit the dimensions of spatial structures.
I start this essay with personal experience about attending school in the U.S. as an African American student. I share my story in hopes of offering some insight about the potential of constructing inclusive learning environments and to demonstrate the complexity of achieving racial and dis/ability inclusivity in higher education.
Spatiotemporal Realities and Social Justice Histories in Schools
In 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that racial segregation in U.S. schools was unconstitutional. I graduated from high school nearly 40 years after this ruling, yet I am still a product of a school system’s attempt to eliminate racial segregation. I attended school in a Midwestern school district in the 1980s and ’90s that grappled with reasonable approaches to reduce racial segregation in the schools. Although the city was heavily populated with diverse residents, including European immigrants, Asian Americans, Latinx, and African Americans, the problem of racial segregation in the city schools lingered due to the legacy of redlining and multiple attempts at school redistricting.
The school board was aware of these haunting remnants that constructed spatial barriers from the past and, as a result, allowed students to enter their names in a lottery system to receive admission to a school other than their assigned school. By entering the lottery many racially/ethnically diverse students selected to attend junior high and high schools that were populated predominantly by European American students. To be fair, students who were from the majority racial group were also allowed to enter the lottery to attend schools outside of their zoned schooling area. I am unsure, however, if any selected this option.
School buses were not available to transport students to their newly assigned school buildings. The school district announced that providing school buses to advance racial inclusivity would cause an undue financial burden on the school district. Twice a day parents delivered their children to and from school. The question of academic placement also confronted racially/linguistically diverse students even after they entered their newly selected schools. School administrators and teachers often questioned whether racially/ethnically diverse students, and even white students from economically vulnerable households, could manage the academic rigor within the honors classes. School desegregation in this Midwestern city required the diligence of multiple racially/ethnically diverse parents and advocacy on the part of community members. Despite the due diligence of parents and local advocates, obstacles to inclusivity continued to persist.
Even in high school I was acutely aware of the way spatial barriers undermined efforts to ensure the promise of a fair and equitable education for all students. The parallels between racism and ableism became apparent when I noticed that the high school had one classroom for students with cognitive disabilities. The classroom was tucked away at the end of a long-vacated hallway. It occurred to me that the goal of access to integrated educational settings had not been accomplished for myself or for students with dis/abilities. The goal of finding a space and place for historically marginalized students in the American educational system had not yet been achieved.
The approach to inclusivity which privileges access over space and place reinforces what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder refer to in their book The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (University of Michigan Press 2015) as “heteronormative ways of belonging,” in which schools valorize societally constructed ideals of normalcy, intelligence, excellence, and productivity. Higher education has not left behind the assumption that education is for the elite and able-bodied (Banks 2019; Comeaux et al. 2021; Dolmage 2017). Our efforts toward inclusivity often reveal the complex contradictions of our intentions and the realities of our commitment to remaining unchanged.
One-Dimensional Learning
At the beginning of each semester, I visit the assigned classroom where I am scheduled to teach. I examine the room for architectural barriers. I examine the classroom for sensory considerations, such as whether there are windows to make available sufficient natural light and air. I assess the arrangement of the desks in the classroom. I am curious about whether the physical architectural features will allow for collaboration and togetherness among myself and the students. I also scan the class to determine if assistive technology is available.
While our university student body has grown more diverse, it is often the case that structural features of buildings where we teach deepen existing inequities. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ensures that colleges and universities are in compliance with federal legislation, but compliance is not sufficient to ensure the inclusion of dis/abled college students. More so than implementing legally minimum accommodation, conversations concerning equitable learning spaces require intentionally considering all elements of the teaching and learning environment.
The architectural features of our classrooms support myths about how teaching and learning occur. Embedded in our academic calendar is the belief that all learners require 8–15 weeks (or 40 hours) of instructional time to master content in any course subject area. With in-person classes, students are expected to learn while seated in individual desks; students are often facing the front of the class with the instructor deliberately positioned at the front of the class. There is the implicit notion that intelligence and reasoning are cultivated primarily by way of passive listening and notetaking during one- to two-and-a-half-hour lectures. Practices in higher education, then, continue to valorize those who excel academically through traditional methods and to minimize any learning (or physical) differences that deviate from ableist notions of normalcy. Meanwhile, diversity becomes a commodity, with colleges and universities confidently publicizing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives to increase enrollment.
The architectural composition of college classrooms often reinforces beliefs of the “mythic average user”, designing a template for the normal or average classroom, and creating barriers that exclude learners with differing sensory and physical learning needs (Hamraie 2017). The Student Disability Services at Cornell University tipped its hat to disability critical theory when the director stated, “a person with a disability is not disabled unless the environment produces barriers that do not give them access and opportunity.”
Pedagogical Inequities
Accomplishing the goal of inclusivity in higher education for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and students with dis/abilities has not been without resistance. Despite the passage of Brown v. Board of Education and the authorization of the ADA, our approach to racial and dis/ability inclusivity in educational settings often demonstrates a disregard for cognitive diversity. These complex contradictions found within our attempts to broaden access to education draw our attention to the importance of both space and place as relational concepts: enhancing our understanding of inclusivity and diversity.
The challenge is that, while more diverse students are arriving on college campuses, recent measures indicate that after four years of college, the ability of undergraduates to engage in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and writing show no evidence of statistically significant gains for more than half of all college graduates (Dillion 2017; Warner 2018). In the face of dwindling critical thinking and reasoning skills, students’ grades have increased. As Dillion alludes to in his imagined communication from a senior faculty member to a newly hired faculty member, “A Letter to a New Faculty Member: How to Stay Sane in the Academy,” this trend can be characterized as the “unstated contract” between students and faculty members. The “unstated contract” is explained as a silent understanding that faculty members will avoid making students work too hard (read a lot or write a lot of papers), and because of the contract, faculty members can avoid any possible conflict with administration while receiving high teaching evaluations from students. Faculty members’ willingness to underteach a more diverse student body contributes to enduring racial, dis/abled, gendered, and classed-based inequalities.
Pedagogical equity requires faculty members to position diverse learners “closer” to content knowledge through the implementation of instructional strategies designed to destigmatize differences and/or dis/abilities, ultimately eliciting the innovativeness of diverse learners. In his book Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (University of Michigan Press 2017), Jay Timothy Dolmage effectively draws attention to the ways instructional pedagogy may become three-dimensional when faculty members consider the entire learning process. If faculty members focus on planning lessons to increase student engagement; increase active learning; and encourage multiple options for student design, delivery, and expression, we are likely to see growth in the entire student population.
Advocating for equitable pedagogy in colleges and universities means providing faculty members with space for instructional exploration to allow them to experiment with pedagogical strategies. A recent study indicated that faculty members are reluctant to modify their pedagogical approach to teaching and learning (Banks 2019). The findings in this study suggest that the academic outcomes for postsecondary students with learning disabilities is considerably dependent upon the positive perceptions of faculty members in terms of their knowledge of learning disabilities and willingness to personally invest in academically supporting students with learning disabilities. However, surveyed faculty members reported lower mean scores on factors that assessed their willingness to provide major accommodations. The lack of willingness of faculty to examine their pedagogical strategies for dis/abled students has implications for the intellectual gains made for all diverse learners across multiple university types.
Beyond the unequal levels of instruction which currently exist in higher education, university initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion expose differing types of inequities in higher education related to issues of social justice. First, social justice in higher education is not only about increasing the number of diverse collegiates on college campuses. Secondly, building inclusive colleges and universities requires complete transformation of restrictive architectural, instructional, and dispositional barriers that exist in higher education.
The Next Campus Uprising Will Be a Transformation of Pedagogical Space
Campuswide diversity initiatives that seem positioned to be the next wave of the civil rights movement are generally more effective in increasing numerical representations of diverse students on college campus than at wholly uprooting the legacy of exclusion in higher education. As my personal narrative about the clumsy attempts to construct a diverse school setting demonstrate, building diverse educational environments is rarely as revolutionary as the futuristic equalitarian society it proposes to establish. Campuswide diversity initiatives may, however, be better at hiding ableist, racialized, and classed discriminatory experiences that allow faculty members to remain committed to traditional forms of pedagogy that are akin to the “sage on the stage.” Many racially diverse and dis/abled learners willfully acculturate to instructional traditions that minimize their level of engagement, creativity, and freedom of expression—giving the illusion that college is the grand equalizer.
The intersection between race and dis/ability is not new on college campuses. The demand for access to higher education for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and students with dis/abilities has evolved as a result of social, political, and educational movements. However, repositioning students to become collaborative participants in our global society facilitates social transformation and opens new possibilities for the future. The next wave of dis/ability and diversity social justice movements on college campuses will require that we examine all structural forms of ableism and racism that remain as historical legacies. Our next wave of social justice will require transformation of instructional pedagogies and construction of new learning facilities that accommodate all learners while providing a place for people from diverse backgrounds to engage in individual and collaborative learning communities. As our universities experience another social justice uprising, we are positively positioned to get it right this time.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
