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vimeo.com/.../436580300

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    So, my name is
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    Michelle Nario Redmond.
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    I am a social psychologist
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    and I teach at (Hiram?) College.
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    in the psychology
    and biomedical humanities program,
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    and I just wrote a book on ableism,
    the causes and consequences
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    of disability prejudice.
    My first memory,
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    and I'll just back up and say 1990,
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    when the ADA passed
    I was in graduate school,
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    in Kansas, and disability prejudice,
    the ADA or anything
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    related to disability issues
    was completely off my radar,
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    and I worked at a place
    where one of the pioneers
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    of disability studies worked,
    Beatrice Wright,
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    and I had yet to have a class with her.
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    It really wasn't until 1995,
    which was five years later,
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    when my daughter was born,
    Sierra was (anabifoda??),
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    which is when I became aware
    of disability and found the work
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    of Carol Gill and (Simi Litton?)
    and began to educate myself
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    on disability studies and its scope,
    and the first memory I have of
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    confronting inaccessible spaces
    was a few years later, when we enrolled
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    my daughter Sierra in a preschool,
    at a Catholic preschool,
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    right down the road; and it just didn't
    even dawn on me that we would have to
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    work so hard for her to be accommodated
    as a preschooler,
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    and it was really a (function?) of
    the fact that the building was older,
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    there were steps, and they really didn't
    know, nor did they need to legally know,
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    about reasonable accommodations
    and civil rights of their students,
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    because they were a private facility and
    weren't subject to the ADA's rules.
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    So it became clear to me that we needed
    to find a new preschool, and luckily
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    we found another private place -
    it wasn't a public school -
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    but it was a music school settlement
    and they had resources
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    and they were already operating
    under a sort of set of presumptions
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    about the value of diversity
    and diverse perspectives,
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    and we didn't really have to ask for much,
    because they bent over backwards
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    to include my daughter
    in a typical classroom, with her peers,
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    her preschool peers, music classes,
    there were so many eclectic--
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    movement classes, and they even
    purchased equipment
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    for their exercise room and movement room
    that would be useful to her among others,
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    and she has since grown up to become this teacher
    and has applied to work there
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    as a preschool teacher, so I think
    it would be really amazing
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    if she came full circle, but I guess
    to answer the broader question
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    about being frustrated and aware of
    inaccessibility and lack of inclusion,
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    we were in a district that, when she then
    was about to move to preschool,
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    I knew that she probably wouldn't be
    able to go to a private school,
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    not only because of the financial cost
    but also because they would not have to
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    think about best practices
    and the law when it came to
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    accommodating their
    students with disabilities,
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    and so I knew we would be
    looking at the public school,
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    and the public school in our neigbourhood
    was not accessible.
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    We went to visit it,
    the playground had a little house
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    that she wouldn't have been
    able to get into,
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    and it was really disheartening
    and so it came at a time
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    when we were already
    looking for other opportunities,
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    and my husband got an opportunity
    to move us as a family
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    to the West Coast
    in Portland of Oregon,
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    so the way I-- so the way we had to
    navigate her early educational experiences
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    was to only look at spaces and schools
    that were in districts that were new,
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    so that had buildings
    and had training in terms of
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    accommodating their diverse students
    and their disabled students,
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    because just having the brief experiences
    that I did with the preschool
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    and IEP meetings that were going to
    require me to fight at every juncture
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    for her basic rights
    to show what she knows
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    and participate and recognise herself
    as a valuable contributor
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    to the school community,
    we're not going to be forthcoming
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    without a fight,
    and so we narrowed our search
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    to a district,
    and thank God we had an opportunity
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    and the resources to do this,
    that was
Title:
vimeo.com/.../436580300
Video Language:
English
Team:
ABILITY Magazine
Duration:
28:40

English subtitles

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