Congratulations to Prof. Leslie G. Roman, PI and her co-Investigator, Associate Dean and Prof. Karen Ragoonaden, on the successful application for the StEAR grant, 10,000.00 (10K). These funds are under the Vice President of Equity and Inclusion’s office and are emanate from a University-wide adjudication and are centrally-administered to all units across the UBC-Vancouver and UBC-Okanagan campuses.
Wings to Lead & Teach: Disability Justice, Art and Education, first-time pre-service teachers’ cohort K-12 in Canada being launched at UBC (Canada’s Accessibility Act)-Disability Stream and Curricular Innovation.
We will lay the curricular foundation for Canada’s first ever K-12 Teacher Education Cohort in Disability Justice, Art, and Education which launches in UBC’s Teacher Education Program in partnership with Wingspan, a VPRI cluster (ending 12/24) and strategic partners (EDST, etc). We will create accessible curricular and filmic resources using universal design, offer workshops and a Pro-D Day symposium to prepare staff, pre-service students, teachers and faculty for their work with the cohort. Our artful calls for action that decolonize ableism by challenging and transforming disability and Deaf stereotypes in filmic and curricular resources. This work will inform our interim and final reports addressed to the UBC Accessibility Committee, as well as other Units across UBC with recommendations for curricular, public pedagogy, and policy. These will be systemically accountable to the wider disability and educational community, engaging BC and Canada’s Accessibility legislation.
Engaging Canada’s and BC’s Accessibility Acts, we aim to artfully perform inclusion, accessibility , and disability/Deaf pride by introducing Canada’s first B.Ed. K-12 cohort in disability justice in the country and to launch at UBC. We do so by undergirding it by creating accessible curricular filmic resources, workshops and a digital repository that will prepare the cohort and the staff, faculty and students who work with it. This work will guide the disability justice and accessibility plans currently underway,
as mandated by both the BC Accessibility and Canada Accessibility Acts. Our curricular resources and cohort launch will model 21st Century StEAR goals by showing that we “lead” as we teach: We will challenge outdated stereotypes of disability as tragic, criminalized or burdensome. By providing living filmic examples of artists with disabilities as role models in classrooms across the country, and curricular resources that transform and disrupt the everyday common sense of institutional ableism, we will engage with both BC and Canada’s Accessibility Legislation. Inclusive education does mean “all”, dis/abled and non-disabled coming to grips with both the real barriers and the creative imaginations and innovations that disabled artists and people bring to the table of teacher education and preparation to teach our youth of diverse dis/abilities and backgrounds.
