Including All Citizens Pathway is addressing the systems wide discrimination that many students with disabilities experience throughout the education system. IACP offers a wide, institutional support structure so that all students, including students with intellectual/developmental disabilities, are included and can succeed. The entire process from admissions, course selection, course instruction, graduation is designed to address systemic discrimination while supporting learners and faculty.
The inclusive and accessible pedagogical model that is the foundation for IACP is Critical Disability Pedagogy. Critical Disability Pedagogy opens the doors of education by making existing academic courses environments where all students can participate and succeed. The pedagogy is about transforming teaching, not modifying, or adapting the curriculum or essential knowledge and skill sets that are required learning outcomes. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and Critical Disability Pedagogy are applied to instructional teaching strategies such as lectures, presentations, and assessment tools.
Critical disability pedagogy ensures that any support students’ need becomes part of the overall course pedagogy. All supports are available to all students. There are no “special students” here and formal accommodations are not mandatory. All students benefit from having access to supports and as instructors utilizing critical disability pedagogy, we want to make sure students have that support. Access and inclusion are factored into the design and delivery of course content and assessment.
On this website, we will be adding examples of Critical Disability Pedagogy in action. There are several reports included here as further examples of what the pedagogy looks like for instructors and the wider institution. We are also working on a series of short films that instructors can use in their courses to enhance knowledge including issues pertaining to Indigenous solidarity, ableism, and disability justice. All of our resources are created in order to be useful and to be shared.
Critical Disability Pedagogy © 2024 by Dr Fiona Whittington-Walsh is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/