Film by Christine Sun Kim
What I really enjoyed about watching this video was how CK found her own meaningful practice and practitioner identity, rather enhanced by her disability. She mentioned her work within a performance context, which related to our course core concept – always considering the audience.
This specific video example reminded me of a project I did with my students in Hong Kong around 2013-2014, which wasn’t specifically related to disabilities but to what CK mentioned in the video ‘a loose transition of sound to another form’. We took inspiration from Wellas Hair Trend Vision 2013 – The Sound of Colour. Where my students created hair and make-up looks transforming sounds into something physical.
You can watch Wellas Trend vision 2013 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaccMiQ76S0
I am now quite inspired to do a project based around this again, taking into consideration a more diverse approach around disabilities and social responsibilities. Maybe as an immersive workshop drawing or sculpting, creating by sound or in CKs example, using the motion of sound as the inspiration. Food for thought…
UAL Disability Service Webpages
I believe this is a great website and honestly believe we have a great support network within the UAL. However, I don’t always believe this translate into the everyday running of a course, working with individual student needs.
For example, we have a great disability team supporting our programme and course. Where I think there might be a lack in the support is when a student struggle with their disability in more severe, invisible disabilities or, maybe unusual disabilities falling outside the more common disabilities.
I have had many conversations with our teaching staff (academic and technical) who feel they are not trained or confident knowing how to support some students and therefore reaching out to the disability team who is always great in communication and quick in responding to the student needs and in most cases the student receives the support they need and there are ongoing conversations with the course team and disability team to insure the support is there.
However, I have experienced a repetitive pattern, where the staff are sending the student to the disability team as they feel there is nothing more they can do after already offered extra support and then, the disability team are sending the student back to the course teaching team for the extra support as the difficulties the student experience might be more related to the practical course elements or the unit handbook and assessments which the disability team might not be involved enough or have the course specialist knowledge to support the students need. This creates a huge stress on the student as they feel they are just being pushed back and forth between the two, but never receiving the support they actually need. Therefore, I feel there is a gap in the disability support system with UAL, our school and programme.
My question and concerns are, to what level do the university supporting disabled students (and staff) and how is this communicated? Do the student know how much support they can get before ethe enrol? What happens when the student need support beyond the standard support offered? This is a grey area and I haven’t found answers to this yet. I understand the UAL does not have a fit to study policy, so when do we as a university admit that we can’t support a student? Is this acceptable (I don’t think so)? Is this after the student have failed continuously 3 years in a row and won’t be allowed to re-take any units and the University has charged the students for 3 years of study? Is this a morally, right?
Is it fair to ask the teaching staff who is possibly not trained, experienced or confident enough and usually pushed with their own time and need to offer the extra support and tutorials outside their working hours? For example, we have had a student who always want to go through the class content 30 min before (when the tutor is setting up and preparing for the lesson), and to stay 30min after the class to again, go through their individual development. This specific example is from a class of 30-60 students, so how do the tutor keep parity in always allowing this one student to receive the extra support (which the student need), but saying that, there are other students in that group that also need extra support so how can this one tutor support this additional time for all students. This practice only backfires with over-worked and stressed staff. Therefore, again I think there need to be a better support in individual cases and on the every day experience for the students.
One example of good practice here was when I worked in Hong Kong we had a hearing impaired student. She got support from the university by having a disability mentor always attending the lessons taking the notes for her and / or translating in sign language.
#DisabilityTooWhite article/interview with Vilissa Thompson
The topic closely relates to the general lack of representation of diverse bodies in the performance industry and within the casting process of performers. This is something we discuss with our students early on due to the nature of our specialism (hair, makeup and prosthetics for performance) working closely with performers creating characters that might have physical differences, being non-fictional ‘real’ characters to fantasy monsters and villains. We have previously used examples in our sessions debating films where actors have been casted for a disabled role, not being disable themselves, and how this has created an unfair position for disabled actors. This debate is really important, especially for our prosthetics student who might be asked to create prosthetics make-up enhancing or hiding a disability and the moral questions around it.
The interesting debate this article brings up for me, is not just about the too white / disabled discrimination – maybe more about the ‘double discrimination combination’ (not sure how to word it…) can also relate to other minority groups.
‘Deaf Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons from Touring Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee’ by Khairani Barokka (accessible via Moodle).
This reading highlights the difficulties of invisible disabilities and the lack of sensitivity towards it. In her performance, I liked how she represented her pain and made it visible to the audience by using blue paint “throughout the show, I pour and rub in blue ‘divine coffee’ paint all over the right side of my body and chest. I wanted to make an ‘invisible disability’ visible, through refusing to stand up to perform, and through the paint’s visualisation of my pain”
The artice highlights the need for a greater sensitivity towards invisible disability which I feel is needed within the university as I already mentioned above in previous section about UAL disability website, to support the students (and staff) who falls outside the standard disability support.
Something I didn’t know and learnt from the article is “…disabled people being, however, the largest minority in the world”. This small but impactful sentence gave me a greater understanding of the scale, and how many students we might have on our programmes that suffer in silence or struggle to achieve due to their disabilities where the support system both within the UAL and externally is failing.
Read the Terms of Reference Journal from Shades of Noir (SoN) around Disability and choose an article to reflect on.
I am running out of time as found this task taking way longer than expected. So rather than again, reading another article to reflect on (as getting a bit tedious… even though I enjoy the topics it is too repetitive doing it 5 times in the same blog). I thought I’d briefly reflect on some practical objectives and strategies we are already working on within our programme and what might need improvement, listed in the attached images above:
- Student attainment differentials: This is part of our ACMR (Academic Course Monitoring Report) for BAME and international students. However, as far as I know, there is no monitoring on disabled students attainment.
- Student experience differentials: I don’t know how this is monitored?
- Whitewash curriculums: We are working towards a non-Eurocentric content and have used global texts and references embedded in our projects such as My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a novel by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, Monkey, a Chinese novel published during the Ming dynasty by Wu Ch’eng-en (Author), Arthur Waley (Translator) and Of Love and Other Demons, by Columbian writer Garcia Marques.
We have also for our 2nd years collaboration unit used influences from the Studio Ghibli collection for their performance outcome bringing in Japanese culture and history. - Inclusive pedagogy: This is a too big area to briefly discuss, but to give one example, we have worked on to make a more inclusive environment by preparing students working on a broad range of performers including gender, age, ethnicity, skin conditions and disabilities.
- History/history erasure: This is discussed in the Cultural and Historical delivery by the CHS team.
- Staff recruitment: Last two years we have recruited two new staff members supported by the ADF (Academic Development Fund) within the minority groups – disability and / or BAME.
- Staff progression: Need improvement
- Staff development: Need improvement
- Staff experience: Need improvement