The mission of Creative Practice Studio is to shift and expand the ways we think about art, art education, and creativity. CPS, as a platform, is also invested in raising awareness about disability and inclusion.
There is a link with the good vs bad mentality that accompanies the term disability.
To explain, let’s try this analogy. When I tell people I am an artist, there is an inherent assumption that I draw well, which couldn’t be further from the truth, I draw stick figures!
I’m sure if I practiced and learned techniques that I would improve, but by that same logic, if I don’t naturally draw well then I am not an artist.
Actually, for many years, I didn’t go to art school because I thought I couldn’t draw. Hence, I was clearly not an artist, nor a good one at that.
“Natural ability” is heavily set with so many cultural expectations that we almost have to consider the problems of what we “perceive as natural.”
This is a complex thought, but human conceptions of what is “natural” are socially constructed as much as they are based in science. Humans and nature construct one another.
Natural science (as it relates to organic matter) is not solely biological. We see this with gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality. These are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts.
This does not mean that natural science is not real, but rather some of science is socially constructed (meaning not without the influence of culture) and can be used for political means.
For example, we see this in ongoing debates about climate change and matters of the body. Again this doesn’t mean science is not real, it just means that humans also construct what “natural” means socially, not only scientifically.
There is no concept of “natural” without human interpretation, and sometimes, malicious ideas can be supported by bad science. There is no better example than eugenics, which was, in its time, considered a natural science.
If we consider history, much of what was once perceived as unnatural or natural has shifted in meaning, along with language and collective knowledge.
Ok, a little abstract, yet important to establish.
Let’s get back to our simpler drawing analogy to explain more.
The Right Kind of Natural
Assumptions and Ableism
Assumptions like, “If I can’t draw well, I am not an artist or creative,” as common and ridiculous as they may sound when we speak them out loud, are internalized.
These assumptions about good vs bad “natural ability” are similar to internalized biases about disability and ways of being. We have culturally conditioned ideas about how to be as much as we do about good vs bad art. There is an intersection here that I think is meaningful.
Culturally conditioned ideas about natural ability and ways of being tend to center “a right kind of natural” or being (good vs bad model.) These are used to determine the right type of body or a right way for a body to work, gesture, make sound, perform, or even love.
To this point, for many years homosexuality was pathologized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM.) To pathologize means to see something as diseased, something that doesn’t follow a “perceived natural” order.
Unfortunately, we still see this as an ongoing discourse and battle involving those who identify as transgender, queer, or having non-binary gender.
When we think of disability in this way, the standards of good vs. bad frequently fall short of inclusiveness and are often ableist.
Ableism is not the hatred of disabled people. Instead it’s a lack of sensitivity to the needs of disabled or neurodivergent people, and it is based on the assumption that typical abilities are superior.
For example, we didn’t have laws requiring wheelchair access in public spaces as a requirement until 1992, the same year I graduated high school. It seems unthinkable to me today, yet I don’t remember thinking about it then—and I was an aide in the special education classroom all four years of high school.
Another example of ableism is how many people value hearing as good and not hearing as something to overcome. But there are many in the deaf community who don’t identify themselves as disabled. They may decline to get cochlear implants to hear, even though we have the technology.
We can’t always know what life means in another person’s bodily and/or mental experience.
Empathy
Unlimited ways of being
Empathy, located in the heart of our brain, makes laughter, weeping, and yawning contagious. It is such a beautiful part of ourselves.
Yet while there are unlimited ways of being, there is a limit to how much we can feel for another through our innate empathy.
The most well-intentioned “empathy” is about how we would feel, and it is fundamental to how empathy works. Empathy functions in the brain as a modality of survival and thriving. To do so, it’s essential to feel for another’s experience. Yet, empathy has its limits, because we don’t always know what it feels like to be in another person’s body or mind, even though we inhabit a body and mind of our own.
A perfect example is the difference between how it feels to be a different sex. There are different chromosomal makeups and hormones that define this, not to mention the social and cultural expectations or standards of gender performance. Culturally, we are becoming more sensitive to this, as well as with intersections with race and ethnicity.
The Human Genome Project was an international research project that sought to map out everything related to human DNA. t It confirmed that race is a social concept/construct and not a biological fact. Indeed, all human beings are 99.9 percent identical in their genetic makeup.
But the reality is that being in different types of bodies has social implications in relationship to power and agency.
The more centered we are culturally, the harder it is to understand the margins, except through intersections of identity. While across the spectrum of empathy we do feel for another’s experience, it is also really important not to assume there is one, universal, bodily/neurological experience to map back to as standard.
Intersectionality
As the Map to Neurodiversity
We can, however, map intersections of experience. Intersectionality is a framework for understanding the complex way that many aspects of people’s identities overlap, including their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and ability. The term was coined in 1989 by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, LLM, J.D.
Intersectionality holds that a person’s various identities do not live in separate vacuums. Rather, people exist at the intersections of their identities.
Experiences in our body, sensory, emotional, and social makeups are felt as similarly as they are felt differently and culturally.
Neurodiversity, autism, and neurodivergent ways of being have really demonstrated this over time, and it’s a bit more complicated and more wonderfully creative than a good-or-bad dichotomy.
For example, in the last decade we have seen autistic people narrate their experiences more publicly and inform “experts” in the field and members of the general public who are non-autistic.
This trend is part of the neurodiversity movement that has become more mainstream over the last 10 years.
Neurodiversity refers to variation in the human brain regarding sociability, learning, attention, mood, and other mental functions in a non-pathological sense. It is a term used for when someone’s brain processes, learns, and/or behaves differently from what is considered “typical.” Coined in 1998 by sociologist Judy Singer, she helped popularize the concept along with journalist Harvey Blume.
The neurodiversity movement has shifted the public discourse surrounding autism and neurodivergence, inviting people to question the value systems of good vs bad, as well as pathology models.
Good-vs-bad models are not an accurate measure of sociability, learning, attention, mood, and other mental functions, much in the same way my drawing ability does not determine if I am creative or artistic.
Nothing About Us Without Us
Disability is Not One Narrative
There is a really well-researched, accessible, and warm book by Andrew Solomon titled Far From Tree. It chronicles parents’ stories of their exceptional children and introduces disability through multiple narratives. I think this book can benefit readers, even just by reading the introduction of his book. I will share a link at the end of the blog.
There are as many stories about disability as there are people. One of the things we tend to assume as a culture is that disability has a dominant narrative, when it’s really composed of many stories.
“Nothing about us without us” is a popular slogan that has been used among disability advocates since the 1990s.
Here is one of my own stories:
For many years, I worked with an autistic child who memorized all of his favorite books. He had speech delays and did not really talk using neuro-typical normalized sentence structures.
He would adapt the books he’d memorized to communicate and swap out phrases from the books analogously to produce conversational meaning.
On my birthday one year, we were walking, and I said, “Clay, it’s my birthday today.” He stopped and turned to me, cupping my check and said, “I will tuck you in,” a phrase of endearment from a favorite bedtime story.
It still chokes me up a bit. It was both poetic and so creative and remains one of my favorite expressions of love and mirroring from a child, as well as a deeply memorable moment of awe for human creativity.
How we do things with our body and our minds are a part of our creative being that is really important to value. Instead of being ashamed or passing judgement about the things we do differently or less typically or to standard, I think it’s important to develop practices for valuing these differences.
Full inclusion:
As Shared Experience
Disability is a term, just like creativity or art, that we have a very superficial understanding of culturally. Most of us don’t consider that we enter the world disabled and leave the world disabled (through aging,) unless by sudden death.
To explain, we are disabled in a sense that when we come into the world as babies we need assistance to survive. As we all age, we will need some form of care and assistance, much in the same way we did as babies, so much so that the notion of being independent is not so black and white.
Disability is a spectrum that requires some form of assistance or accommodation to maintain equity or mobility, like a wheelchair or extra-support learning, or reading glasses. We don’t always acknowledge culturally, familially, socially, and politically that we are interdependent.
Interdependence means the dependence of two or more people or things on each other.
This can apply to things like phones or computers as well as friends, family, and coworkers. It can also apply to relational everyday transactions of service, such as checking out at a store, exchanging with a bank teller or DMV agent. Furthermore, roads, schools, public transport, food, and supply chain. The earth!
Over the last few years, during fire season’s rolling black outs, we became intimately aware of our dependence on power, or worse, when our phones run out of juice. It’s disabling!
Our independence is really dependent on a lot of interdependence.
Perhaps we all became familiar with disability over the pandemic and evermore aware of our interdependence. We have all been affected and have all had to make accommodations.
Disability is actually the most normal part of life. We all interact with disability more frequently than we are aware of.
A universal human truth is that we all have lived the experience of being disabled. It is inevitable that we will encounter temporary disability through illness or injury, pregnancy and postpartum, anxiety, depression, the list could go on.
Yet the notion of disability, like art and creativity, involves a heavy set of cultural expectations. These are often laced with good vs bad values, often produce shame, are frequently limiting, and tend to separate us.
Kids, especially neurodivergent learners, have historically been separated from more neurotypical learners.
Disability is not only the person in a wheelchair or the parent raising a child with learning disabilities or differences. Disability is an experience everyone can relate to on some level.
It’s a good reminder that disability is really a normal feature of life, and we never know when something is going to change how we live our lives in our bodies.
We Learn Better Together
Full Inclusion as the Key to Valuing Differences
Encounters with disability are the most commonly shared human experience alongside our innate creativity. They are as unique as they are shared in every capacity.
However, more often than not, disability is situated as “other” or abnormal.
I am dsylexic and I am neurodivergent. I have degrees in disability studies and art education and have worked in special education for nearly two decades. I’ve learned from these experiences, we haven’t really practiced many models of education that wholly address full inclusion.
Full inclusion is better understood as a mindset and framework for educating students with and without learning disabilities.
The idea that “we learn better together” is not a new concept. In fact, it is a notion that has been the area of focus for academic and peer-reviewed studies over the last 30 years.
At CPS, I am proud I not only offer 1:1 sessions for kids who feel they want more personal attention, but include ALL spectrums of learners in group settings. (It often helps if these students bring an aide to assist.)
CPS is exceptional in that we are a full-inclusion art studio and the first of our kind.
Full inclusion models of education are such a valuable way to learn to value inclusion, as well as difference, in ourselves and others.
We will continue to highlight this subject on our blog. We consider disability a part of everyone’s story to varying degrees. Perhaps we can shift the paradigm to talk about every experience without judgement and with more curiosity.
We believe it is important to allow everyone to have space to define themselves and narrate their own stories, to develop their own creative capacity and practice ways to explore it.
Recommended links for Keywords:
Disability & Ableism:
Far From the Tree:
Since the publishing of the book, the companion website site to the book, also now, includes short video features, of which each of the parents and children chronicled in the book, introduce their narrative.as well as a newer release book for introducing disability studies to young adults.
Empathy:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/run_out_of_empathy
Full inclusion
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661427/full
Intersectionality
Natural:
https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/37188/social-construct.pdf
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/darwin/nameof/index.html
Neurodiversity:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635690/full
https://www.amazon.com/Neurotribes-Legacy-Autism-Future-Neurodiversity/dp/0399185615