Diversity & Inclusion for All (DIFA)

Disability as Diversity

Episode Summary

Disability is not necessarily a label for “broken humans.” Disability can be seen as part of the diversity in the human race. Our guests share stories and insights from their experiences as Philosopher, Speech Pathology professor, parishioner, and parent. Their perspectives help us understand some of the issues and history of disabilities in our communities.

Episode Transcription

Disabilities and Inclusion

Penny: Welcome, everyone, to this next episode in the diversity and inclusion for all Project of Calvin University. Today, I'm excited to talk with a couple of colleagues from the university about the issues surrounding disabilities and diversity and inclusion.

Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Covid Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key prospective, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world. 

Kevin: The motto for the disability rights movement in the United States was “Nothing about us without us.” The idea that non-disabled folks are not always in the best position to understand the lived experiences of people with disabilities, And so the history, I think, is a lot more complicated and a lot more recent than we'd like to admit.

Penny: Here today with me is Peggy Goetz. She's a professor in the speech pathology and audiology department. And I'm excited to have her here because she's done some great work in some of her courses, bringing in disability awareness and understanding and concerns with her students who are going off to be speech pathology professionals. Our second guest today is Kevin Timpe. He is a professor at Calvin University and he holds the William H. Jellema chair in Christian Philosophy. And I am really excited to have Kevin here today. He has written our highlighted text for this learning package, Disability and Inclusive Communities. And we'll talk more about that at the end of the podcast. 

So I want to invite our two guests today, Kevin and Peggy, to talk a little bit about why they're passionate about disability concerns, rights and pride, about helping people understand more about disabilities and disability communities. Peggy, why don't you start us off? 

Peggy: I would say that my passion about this has been something that kind of grew slowly as I've been…. I work with students who are going to be speech language pathologists or audiologists. And so one of the one of the things that they often find out about is the deaf culture. And that's when I first kind of started hearing about disability rights, the deaf culture as people, so people who are deaf…But it's particularly people who are very interested in American sign language and proud of being deaf, really. Like when they if they have a child who's deaf, they're very happy. And they have deaf schools. They have deaf university that they go to. And it was kind of a new thing for me when I first heard it. I thought it was that's a little bit odd to think that you would be happy to have a disability or think that this was a good thing or that you're proud of it.

So my students are usually working with people who are kind of at the opposite end of that spectrum. Perhaps they've had something in their life, like a stroke or a brain injury, traumatic brain injury. And now they're having to work with someone who feels like I really used to be someone different. And now I want to go back to who I used to be. Or they're working with a child who is having a lot of trouble. And so those those kinds of positions have been very interesting to me to think about what can my students learn from disability studies.

Penny: Right. And I know that, Kevin, you also talk about disability rights and pride. 

Kevin: My interest in disabilities, actually, both personal and professional. It's both a function of my teaching and a function of my research. Now, of these, like many families, my interest autobiographically in disability happened when we realized that one of our children is multiply disabled. And so for us, this really came to a head when he entered public education. And we realized that our public school back in Idaho was defaulting to practices and procedures that it turns out, were not only not supported by the best educational literature, but were actually violations of state and federal law. And so for us, we began involvement in disability advocacy and disability culture as a way of pushing back against what we thought was the mistreatment of our son. 

About the same time I started doing academic work, looking at the ways that different kinds of disabilities can effect human agency. My previous focus in writing had been on human agency in free will. And so this was a nice development of work that I had been doing. And then since coming to Calvin, it's come… my interest in disability has come to dominate more of my teaching. I've taught a cross-cultural course on disability culture, looking at disability and community issues. And I even address it in my intro to philosophy class. Currently, my intro to philosophy class looks at different accounts of the nature of justice early on in the semester, and then we look at ways that justice actually plays out with respect to particular diversity issues in the latter part of the course, and so we have a section on racism. We have a section on sex and gender, and we also have a section on disability.

And as I started preparing some of the material for some of these courses, I realized just how interwoven disability concerns and disability as a kind of human diversity is connected with some of these earlier diversity issues in American history.

Penny: There are facts, stories, and things that have happened in our country's history related to disabilities, right, that a lot of people are really completely ignorant of. I know I was before I started reading what Kevin has written and talking to people about this issue. And I'm wondering if each of you could maybe highlight some things that have come into your awareness over the years of your work in this area or other facts, history, insights, even stories that have really helped shape how you understand disability, disability rights and concerns.

Peggy: People in disability studies often talk about the medical model of disability, which is when you kind of think: “Here's a disability; the answer to it is to get rid of it.” And the assumption of probably most people that if you have a disability, you obviously want …would want to fix it or cure it or get rid of it. And what people sometimes called the social or the cultural model of disability sometimes will say that there might be reasons you need medical intervention or work on kind of an impairment that you have. But what people want to point out is that there are a lot of things that can be done. So, for example, if you're in a wheelchair and the answer from the medical model is that we're going to make you walk again. Number one, that often doesn't happen. So you're still in a wheelchair and you haven’t been able to walk. Number two, if we only put all our energy in trying to help you walk again, trying to fix you in some way, then we're losing out. And if you instead put a lot of that energy and those resources into making every building accessible, making elevators in every public building, making sidewalks so you can go along the sidewalks in a wheelchair, really easily, get into every building that is going to change many, many more people's lives who are in a wheelchair. And there's all kinds of things like that… We're kind of … politically you want to make changes and you also want to change people's attitudes.

And it kind of goes along with if people if people are thinking the answer is to cure someone or to fix someone, they’re more likely to be uncomfortable when they see disability. Right? There's kind of a feeling of this isn't supposed to be and I feel pity for this person. But if people who have disabilities are able to function in society, then people will start changing their attitudes about disability. And that will that's part of part of the social model as well, kind of changing attitudes. 

Penny: So I like that way of thinking about like one is a medical model. And not to say that we don't need medical intervention sometimes, but to also think about the social aspects of it and what we as a society can really do to embrace and include and make the lives of all the people better. Right? And more integrated into what we do. 

I know that Kevin has done a lot of work to and kind of talking about things in history, kind of how we've dealt with disabilities in the past. If you had to choose a couple that you think this would really help people understand where we've come from. What might you say, Kevin? 

Kevin: A lot of times when we teach history will have, you know, sort of the standard way of doing US history, which pays attention to our predominantly European roots. We are getting slowly, culturally better at thinking about the contributions of people of color, of native populations, of women to that history. But we're not so good about thinking about the way in which disabled folks have both contributed to the development of US history and also been left out of that story. And so we often, for instance, think about how bad Germany's eugenics policies were in the 1930s and the way that that contributed to their response to Jews and other minority populations. But we often don't realize is basically with the Third Reich did was take the kind of leading science from the United States from the 1910s, 1920s, and just run with it in the direction that it was already being taken in the United States.

And so there's a long history of eugenics within the United States. Our colleague Kristen Dumez pointed out a book called Preaching Eugenics, which talked about how churches in the early part of the 20th century would actually run national sermon competitions for the best pro-eugenics sermon about how our Christian duty is to try and have the best

kinds of offspring that we can or that track certain kinds of disability concerns. The history of how disability interacts with race also gets really complicated here. Disability concerns were actually one of the reasons given against the freeing of slaves in U.S. history. You have the president of the American Medical Association at one point arguing in that association's journal that freeing the slaves would be bad for them because Africans are disposed towards certain kinds of disabilities that would be triggered by freedom that they are not constitutionally fit for.

And so, right, the intersection of racism and ableism in our history is pretty robust. So that's, I think, an important part of who we are as a country and where we've come from. I don't think that we've left all of this behind, because I think that some concerns, even with respect to recent immigration policy in the United States, tracks certain kinds of things. We don't want immigrants coming into the country that are going to be more of a drain on social services than they're going to contribute in tax dollars. But as soon as we start having that kind of conversation, then ways in which certain disabled folks need certain programs or policies that might benefit them, start to feed back in. And so the history, I think, is is a lot more complicated and a lot more recent than we'd like to admit. 

I don't know if you've heard of the recent Netflix documentary Crip Camp. It's a wonderful look at the way in which the disability rights movement started in the United States, how the disability rights movement was explicitly structured on the kind of civil rights movements from the from the sixties that were going on in the United States with respect to race and the formation of a growing disability culture or cultures here in the United States. So as Peggy mentioned about deaf culture is an instance of that, but Crip Camp highlights various other kinds of ways that disability culture sort of started in the United States and how that has interacted with other kinds of social justice movements in the US.

Peggy: One of the one of our famous people in our history, Alexander Graham Bell, started a school for the deaf. And his view was that deaf people needed to be able to speak and be able to read lips. And so be able to kind of just be as close to what he thought of as typical people as possible, as hearing people as possible. And before his deaf school came along, there were a lot more schools in the United States, I don't have the numbers with me right now, but a lot more schools where people were being taught sign language, American sign language. And he came along and really tried to stop that. And he wouldn't let the students speak sign language. And it was only for, you know, he thought he was doing the right thing. He thought he was helping these students be able to integrate into the hearing community. But for many people who are deaf, that's really difficult. Like they are not able to learn to lip read and to speak well. They usually learn better if they have their own ASL, American sign language, as their first language, and then English is kind of a second language on top of that, because it's so natural for them to be able to learn to speak through sign language. So, there was kind of a whole generation of deaf people who really were denied, kind of, of their right to a basic education. And that continued for a long time until people started learning to really respect American sign language.

And so, you know, that can kind of happen, that people are thinking they're helping someone. But in the end, it can have a bad result sometimes.

Penny: It feels like there have been many moments in history where a population or people with power who did not have disabilities were making all the decisions and not necessarily even consulting with the persons with disabilities about what they wanted. What can we do to kind of counteract that or how can we .. coming out of that history, what and how should we be doing the work of integration and inclusion and, you know, helping everyone in our society to thrive? How can we do that well? How can we advocate well and what things maybe should we try to avoid or what should we not be doing that we are doing right now that we tend to do? I'm wondering if you have any great insights and advice for us.

Kevin: I think the history there that, you know, is exactly the reason why the motto for the disability rights movement in the United States was “Nothing about us without us.” --the idea that non-disabled folks are not always in the best position to understand the lived experiences of people with disabilities. And if we think that we do have that understanding, we can often go wrong in exactly the kind of way that Peggy mentioned with Alexander Graham Bell. And so I think one of the things that we need to to do to counteract how easy it is to go wrong is to make sure that we are not just thinking about disability, but we're thinking about disability in line with the actual lived experiences of people with disabilities. 

So I remember that when as a parent, our son was initially diagnosed with autism that the communities that we were connected with were the kind of therapy communities that Peggy has already mentioned --medical professionals. And these are the communities that are very likely to have a certain kind of medicalized understanding of what autism is like. And what nobody at the time thought to tell us…. And looking back, I'm just amazed that it took us a while to recognize, if we wanted to understand how to better parent our child with autism, we should talk to people who are autistic. And that I'd have a better understanding of what our son was both going through and what he needed if I talked to other autistic adults. And that reflects this idea of” nothing about us without us,” that oftentimes the people that are best positioned to give us good insight with respect to disability are disabled folks. But those are the ones that culturally we have tended to minimize. We don't seek their input. We have made it hard for them to contribute to our communities in various kinds of ways. And so we've set it up in a way that the people who are best positioned to help us with some of those are the ones that we are structurally less likely to take seriously and to seek as interlocutors and teachers. 

Peggy: My students and I talk about this quite a bit. We read an article where there is someone who has cerebral palsy and he talks about as an adult how he used to go to physical therapy, speech pathology, and he never really quite knew what it was for. And he kind of realizes later on he felt it only really harmed him, even though the therapists were all doing the best they could. They were really trying to help him, but he ended up feeling that, you know, for one thing, he kind of always felt that his speech was lacking, like there was a problem. He was trying to speak like a typical person and he was not able to speak like a typical person. But people can understand him. And so at the end of this interview, where he kind of really pushes back against therapists who think they know what's maybe best for someone and only from good intentions, he says you need to listen more. It's very much what we've just been talking about, that you need to listen to the stories of people with disability. Listen to a lot of different people's stories, because there's lots of different feelings from people who have disabilities. There's many different kinds of disability. And he also says to try to use, wherever you have in your life some kind of situation where you feel …you have this feeling that people aren't listening to you or people aren't understanding how your life is, is to try to really use that and those feelings to think of …to have that same feeling for people who have disabilities. 

Penny: I think it helps me too to try to keep reminding myself that although the broader society could see someone, how someone is wired or how they're how they embody their body, right, that we can see it as a disability, but that's not always how they see it. And that the example that Peggy gave on deaf culture is definitely one of those. And we can't even assume that all persons with hearing impairments or who are deaf think the same way. Some people might see it as very much a disability and others might see it as something that they're proud of, is just it's their culture. 

I remember hearing an interview, and I'm sorry that I can't remember who it was, but hearing interview with someone who had been in a wheelchair his whole life and someone asked a question kind of like, oh, won’t it be great when you get to heaven and you'll be like able-bodied in quotes and able to walk and. I don't remember who it was, but I remember the response was sort of this this pause. And then he said, actually, I'm not I'm not sure if I'll my body will be different when I get to heaven. I might still be in a wheelchair because that's who I am. But that's that makes me who I am. And then I think he says something, and it was just kind of like this funny quote where he said, but who knows, maybe my wheelchair will fly. 

Peggy: Oh, that's good. 

Penny: Yeah. So I think one of the things that's helped me or one of the things that I've really tried to …I'm trying I'm still trying …to reshape how I think about things is to not assume that everyone with quote unquote the same disability thinks the same way about it, but also to to kind of try to recognize not everyone even sees it as a disability like the general public might.

I'm wondering if you can help us with some concrete steps like so if this is true, like not everyone who's deaf views it as a disability. How do we navigate that? How do we be respectful? How do we not stick our foot in our mouth too often? What are some concrete steps we can take to be a more inclusive society or community or church group or dorm floor or whatever it is? How can we how can we do that? Well, do you have any tips or advice or strategies for us?

Kevin: So, for instance, there are lots of disabled folks that prefer identity-first language. They think that we don't need to say something like “a person with a disability” or “a person with autism” because their lived experience shapes who they are and how they think of themselves they prefer identity-first language. They prefer to be called “autistic or a disabled person.” And so if I know that, say one friend prefers identity-first language and another friend, perhaps even with the same disability prefers person-first language, then I need to keep that in mind and use the preferred language when I'm referring to each of those are interacting with each of this person just because I take their friendship and their value seriously. 

Penny: If I could just review that a minute. So identity-first language would be to say “an autistic person” versus person-first language would be “a person with autism.”

Kevin: Correct. 

Penny: And some people prefer one and some people prefer the other. 

Kevin: Yes. In general, in the United States, the disabled community tends to prefer identity-first language. It's part of the kind of cultural pride issues that we have been talking about. There are certain disciplines and fields that strongly push person-first language. So, sometimes when I have students in my class that are education majors, they're taught in their education classes to always use person-first language. We talk about “students with disabilities.” But if you look at what the actual disabled community prefers, in general, it tends to be identity-first. Autistic individuals in the United States tend to prefer to be called “autistic” rather than “a person with autism,” because they don't think that their autism is something that can be separated from their personhood or who they are.

Penny: And the takeaway there for me is really to ask and then to be respectful of what those people … of how they wish to be referred to, right? 

Kevin: Mm hmm. I mean, recently, our youngest daughter, who you've called by sort of a nickname for most of her life, we've been calling her Maggie. And her actual first name is Magdalene. She came home from school one day. She just said, I prefer to be called Magdalene. Well, OK, we've got eight years of calling you “Maggie,” but if that's what you prefer, then it seems to me that the obvious right thing to do is to try to call you what you prefer. And so it's an act of valuing her own independence and her own input for us to to work to change our patterns of of action. And it took us a while. But I think this is just valuing who she is and her own self-understanding and her own input to our relationship. It seems that with respect to other language issues, like if somebody prefers to be called “autistic” versus “a person with autism,” we should do the same thing.

Even though because of my listening to the disabled community, I typically write in my scholarly work in identity-first language, if I know a particular friend who has a disability prefers person-first language, then I think the friendly thing, the caring thing to do, is to use their preferences when I'm talking with her about them.

Penny: That is a great kind of small step that I think almost all of us could take to try to be a little more inclusive and respectful. Are there other either stories of success or failure that would help us understand and become more aware of important insights or strategies and tips that you would offer us and our listeners? 

Peggy: Just this last semester, when I had my students journal on kind of issues of …we watched a bunch of films with people with various kind of disabilities and were reading and that so many of them wrote that they were afraid of offending someone. Like it was kind of overwhelming how many of them-- that was what their journal was about. So I… While I think it's very important to find out what someone wants to be called with person, first language or identity first language, also, not to be afraid to, you know, just get to know someone and talk to them. You know, as long as you are genuine and trying to respect someone, I think you don't have to …you don't want to avoid kind of the whole conversation because you feel that you're going to offend someone and people feel differently about disabilities. 

So, for example, for me, I've just been interested in stuttering lately and issues of fluency. And I realized that because most of the time I contact people who stutter in our clinic when it's someone who is stuttering, they don't want to stutter. And I've become kind of sensitized to it. So I started listening to a stuttering podcast and the hosts of the podcast, all stutter. And there also speech language pathologists. And it's helped me realize, like, I can get I can get kind of used to this, that there are some people who say it's perfectly fine that I stutter, I don't really want to change the way I talk. And so it's just kind of, you know, getting to know people with different disabilities, getting to find out about it can help you, I think, be more comfortable so you can ask those questions, so you can be sincere and genuine, you know, in in trying to get to know them and find out what they would like. 

Penny: That's a great example of you listening to a podcast, right, where the people on the podcast stuttering is part of how they communicate. And in a way, when we do that, it becomes normal and we become as as we do that, we become better able to understand. Right? 

Peggy: Mm hmm. 

Penny: I think this happens, too, with language accents. Right? Sometimes when you first hear a accent that sounds foreign to you, it can be hard to understand. But then the more you listen to it or you get to know them as a person and have lots of conversations, then at some point you don't notice that anymore. You can just totally understand them. In a way, I feel like that's for me, that's a little bit like, oh, if if we had more relationships, if we had more connection, discussions with people with different kinds of disabilities, it would become more normalized. And I would be better able to just engage and understand and be aware in respectful ways. Any last stories or insights or challenges that you would like to share with our listeners? 

Peggy: So my research has been with stroke survivors who have aphasia. And I, in the process of this kind of trying to figure out how church communities can be more welcoming or not, I've realized that church communities are very good in the crisis stage, kind of when someone just has a stroke. People bring meals and they're very engaged, but they're not so good in the long term. Like then when someone has …. So aphasia is when you're not able to speak or understand language or use language in some way. And then people's … people who have aphasia, their friendships, even in church, often drop off.

So I started going to a church group that was a number of people who all had some kind of neurological problem. Usually a brain injury, stroke, or maybe a tumor. And so when they would talk, it was like the conversations were just slower. It took longer perhaps for them to say something, to find words very often. This group of people met in a church every Wednesday morning from 9 to 10, and then they went out to a breakfast afterwards. And so they had like two hours of just sitting there where the only only agenda was that they would go around the room and share a prayer request and kind of talk a little bit about their lives. And I went and I remember experiencing like it was just kind of slowed down, but it was a very lovely time of where people were just talking, you know, having coffee and donuts. And the church itself didn't realize what a great ministry there was, there was 12 to 15 people usually who came who were able to speak at their own speed. And it was also like a wonderful time for me. 

There's a disability activist named Judith Snow who actually recently died. But she talks about how people will pay a lot of money to go to a spa where they kind of sit and relax and get more grounded. But people often report that they have that same experience when they're with someone who has disabilities or they're with a group who has disabilities and they're kind of slowed down. You're living more in the moment. You're grounded. So she's kind of pointing out that we… people with disabilities also have lots of gifts to give other people. And that feeling of being… learning to feel grounded… like I realize that time with those men having donuts for two hours every Wednesday morning was just a great time for me of being able to, you know, listen to people, just feel like there was not a rush, like we were able to talk and have a good time together. 

The church had no idea that this ministry was going on, and at some point they came to the leader and said, our budget is short. We don't think we'll have enough money to pay for your coffee and donuts anymore. So when he told me that they ended up being able to collect the money and still pay for it. But I remember feeling like, no one realizes this is such a great ministry here in this church. And it's not that, you know, not that much money. It doesn't look like much is going on. But it's really a wonderful time for people. 

Penny: I love that story because it really points out the gifts and the insights that persons with disabilities or disabled persons can really share and give to the broader community. And we just haven't haven't tuned in to those in the past as much as we might have. Did you have another story you wanted to share, Peggy? 

Peggy: There's the Society for Disability Studies. It's kind of an academic activist, but it's a conference for people interested in disability studies. And every year, one of the famous things about it is that they have a dance, which is not typical at academic conferences. They have a dance. But so the kind of last day there's this dance and PE and everyone goes and dances and and there is a lot of people with disabilities, people in wheelchairs, all different kinds of disabilities. So, many people are you know, when they would go to a to a typical dance place, they might feel a little bit uncomfortable dancing. But here at the Disability Studies Dance, everyone is kind of dancing however they can and in whatever way they can, feeling very free to dance. And again, it was this thing where I felt …. I felt like this is the way we should all be dancing, like we should all feel just kind of celebratory. You do what you can. You don't worry, you know, how your body looks. You don't worry that your, you know, your hair is not quite perfect or something. And it was really for me also a very freeing experience to say like, oh, this is… this is kind of the right attitude to have towards our bodies and towards, you know, how we dance together, how we celebrate.

Penny: That's wonderful. I can just picture that diversity of bodies celebrating movement and joy and expression however they could, and then, yeah, then I don't have to worry that I don't have the waltz step down. 

Peggy: Right. Right. 

Penny: Kevin, what about you? Do you have some last stories or insights or challenges for our listeners? 

Kevin: I think one of the challenges of this is even though we have to begin with the interpersonal right, the the willingness to listen to folks to take their experiences seriously, like other kinds of patterns of exclusion in our culture, there's also structural features that make it hard. So, I love some of what Peggy was just sharing in both of their stories. But notice that you can only have either that church group if folks with the relevant disabilities are able to get into and access the church. You could only have that kind of dance party if it's held in a facility in which there's access for people with mobility impairments or various kinds of things. And so while all the interpersonal and individual is important, we also have to pay attention to the larger structural issues, the social policies.

Education gets tricky because special education, education for disabled students, the legal term special education, is often more expensive. And the legal protections don't come with any sort of way of funding what is required of school districts. 

The ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990 and prohibits discrimination in terms of access to public buildings on the basis of disability is now 30 some years old. But almost every time I go to a new place here in Grand Rapids, I'll see that their parking lot doesn't comply, or their entrance isn't up to what's required by law.

And so while the interpersonal is important, we also have to pay attention to the way that the various kinds of social policies and social structures might make it harder for individuals to access those communities to be taken into as equal members of those communities. And we could end up excluding them even if we have good interpersonal intentions. 

Penny: Thank you for that. I heard in there kind of this challenge to be aware of some of the structural hurdles and the advocacy that we could do on behalf of those with disabilities in our community.

Kevin: I think like with other complicated social issues, one of the things we need to recognize is that we're probably going to mess it up. As Peggy has already suggested, having good intentions, right, doesn't free us from making mistakes.

I've talked to people who were institutionalized by their parents and sent to really problematic institutions like Willowbrook on Staten Island, which was just the site of abuse for decades for thousands of disabled folks. And they were sent there because their parents thought that was best for them at the time. 

And we look back now, and it's easy for us to see how other people's good intentions have gone very wrong. But we have a harder time seeing that in our own lives. And so if we recognize that we're going to mess up and then resist the urge when we do mess up to retreat to “but I had good intentions.” Those intentions aren't guaranteed to protect us against marginalizing folks, actively causing harm. And so the best thing that we can do is when people tell us that we've made an able-ist assumption about them or used terminology about them that they think is derogatory to take it seriously and to resist the impulse to engage in self-justification. And then to take it seriously and dwell on it and learn from it and try to do better going forward. We can't undo the mistakes that we have done in the past, but we can take active steps to try and correct it in the future. But we can't do that unless we not just listen but take seriously the kind of feedback that we get and, again, recognize that we might have different folks telling us things that don't align. We don't expect all women to have the same experience. We don't expect all people of color to have the same experience. And so we should be willing to allow disabled folks to have different kinds of experiences and to think about their own bodies and different kinds of ways.

And then to have to sort of target what we say in the language that we use and the kinds of interactions we have to the people that we're engaging with, because it reflects that we value them as as individuals.

Peggy: All kinds of groups have a lot of diversity within them. But in terms of disability, it can be very difficult to think …So, my work is kind of about how do churches include people with disabilities. And I was at a conference once where most of the focus was on including people with various developmental disabilities. And so the whole conference it was … had kind of been talking about how we'll do church services, where there's a lot of maybe dancing and kind of parading and including people who can kind of not have to be quiet the whole time, be able to kind of participate in all different kind of physical ways. And I had just been talking to a lot of stroke survivors who were talking about the difficulties they had going to their churches. And I kind of realized all the things that people were talking about were going to be really hard for stroke survivors because they have a very hard time in noisy environments, environments where they have to change quickly and go from one activity to another. So, it just made me realize that it in terms of thinking about …you have to listen to a lot of different people, I guess, and think about how different people have so many different disabilities. And it means it's all of them are kind of interesting to find out about what can be done in terms of welcoming people and including people with disabilities. But it's not …there's there's definitely not going to be one answer. It's going to be something that we have to keep working at. 

Kevin: I think it's a really good indication that this podcast, which is about diversity and inclusion, takes seriously the way in which disability is is part of that. In so many of the larger cultural discussions about diversity, it's often, and again, I think unintentionally restricted to diversity with respect to race or perspective, sex or sexuality or gender, and to recognize that disability is part of human diversity as well, and to realize that our communities are better off not just when there's racial diversity and sex diversity, but with respect to the disability diversity, too. And that letting people feel valued, recognizing that their inclusion matters, is an important first step in working towards that goal. 

Penny: I want to thank you both for being part of this podcast today and sharing some of your insights and stories with us. And whether we're just sort of beginning this journey of diversity and inclusion or even specifically on the topic of disabilities, or we've been on this for a long time. I have hope, I have hope for a future where persons with disabilities are better integrated into our societies and that there is a way that we society can really recognize how much we have to gain and learn from the diversity of abilities that are part of the human race. 

Our highlighted text for the topic of disabilities is the book Disabilities and Inclusive Communities by Kevin Timpe. This slim volume invites readers to learn how to build communities that fully include people with disabilities. After an overview of how persons with disabilities have been historically excluded and in many ways continue to be excluded through our structures, policies, and personal choices, Timpe then offers suggestions for how to move toward making our communities more inclusive.

This book is part of the Calvin Shorts Series, a series for global Christians who want to understand our world better. Each book examines a single topic and suggests ways to think and act faithfully. These books are great for discussion in small groups, book clubs, and the classroom.

Disabilities and Inclusive Communities is available through online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and also through the Calvin campus store. 

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All views and opinions expressed in our episodes are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of Calvin University or the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship.