Postmodern synergistic knowledge creation: extending the boundaries of disability studies

Postmodern synergistic knowledge creation: extending the boundaries of disability studies

    What this article aims to do with the two empirical studies, Deleuzo-Guattarian and Bourdieu, is provide a comparison to the traditional medical studies of those with profound and multiple learning difficulties. Disability research and focus on a person with disabilities inabilities, has become the focus where as individual identity has been lost. That being said, I feel that I agree with the studies that took place and I advocate what results the studies produced.
    Based on results from the first study, those with disabilities stretch their curiousness and capabilities when treated in social situations as if indeed there is nothing wrong with them. I think that the positive implications behind this first study suggest that we as educators move from defining a person within the confines of their disability and instead treat them as any other person. The challenge it seems that we sill face is how those students affect the other students in the class. The article states that eventually those students that were shy with the one disabled student eventually became more accepting. If we want our disabled students to be treated as though there is no disability, it may be of the most importance to model that behavior and even explicitly teach it before it is possibly eventually developed.
    Keeping the first part of the article in mind, we can go on to the second section that moves from observation of a boy in a mainstream setting to interviews of older individuals struggling with MS and there outlook on their situation. Bourdieu’s theory as outlined in this second section is defined through “capital”. I like this notion because it provides a way to break down what gains a person has through social capital (interactions), cultural capital (personal skills), economic capital (money), and physical capital (body). The second part of the article is looking at peoples’ capitals and what they do with them.
    What the second part of the article concludes is that much of a disability is based on what a person does with their capital. Environment often times cannot be changed, but there are those with disabilities that sit back and let the disabilities define them and then there are others that push the limitation of their disabilities and try to live as they would if they had no impairments.
    My question then is how do we as educators use our classrooms to the benefit of our students with disabilities? How do we alter our class environments and the opinions of other students to be accepting to those with disabilities? How do we convince those students with disabilities that just because their abilities in one area suffer, they are not subjected to a life within the confines of that disability?