Building spaces for collaborative resistance

“As a research field, disability studies claims to transform understandings fundamental to many other disciplines; in conversation with Philippa Mullins , Miro Griffiths explores how that translates into transformed pedagogies. This interview for a special issue in Postgraduate Pedagogies titled Conversations on teaching in the contemporary university: Perspectives from within and across disciplines explores questions of resistance and reimagining in the classroom, building value around fluid and multiple learning and assessment approaches, and enhancing a sense of interdependence and community The excerpt below features two passages from the interview – why Philippa chose to interview Miro, and questions for reflection This post is part of a special issue, Conversations on teaching in the contemporary university Unlike Miro, who holds an MA and PhD in disability studies, I have had no formal training in the field. Miro has been teaching disability studies for over a decade, while I do not teach on a disability studies programme. Rather, having written a thesis on disability organising in Russia, I tread a difficult line as I try to introduce disability studies into social science courses on, for example, justice and identity, without making the material tokenistic or overly simplistic. I didn’t complete any courses in disability studies as there weren’t any where I did my postgraduate studies. Many universities still deny disability studies a place. Nonetheless, disability studies is now growing as a taught discipline. In the wake of this growth, questions concerning disciplinary identity, purpose, and audience – already long present within disability studies as a research discipline – turn towards the teaching of the field. Who are we talking to? What for? And who are ‘we’? Where disability studies as a research discipline claims to transform fundamental understandings at the core of many other disciplines, (how) does that shift and transform pedagogies in the classroom? These questions are important not just for those formally teaching within disability studies. While certain courses may not allow the in-depth consideration of the theories and methodologies of disability studies, the re-consideration of teaching approaches which disability studies engenders is relevant for all. In this way, we may all be teaching with disability studies – even when we are not teaching disability studies. Refection questions In the spirit of disability studies’ persistent questioning, we’ve replaced the Lightning Round section with some questions. This also aligns with how disability studies problematises the demand for rapid, single responses. Instead, some questions to keep open: • Are we creating the necessary conditions for alternative possibilities to be welcomed? • What would it be like to have choice and control for learners to determine their own pathways through exploring the information? • How can we be creative in thinking through different ways of participation for everyone? • How do we build an environment where people feel they can choose different options and all those options are equally valued? • How can we keep returning to the meaning of the learning for all participants? How can we support learning turned towards change beyond the university? Open questions can be frustrating. Perhaps they can sometimes seem to be a way of evading an answer altogether. However, we hope that in this conversation we have shown how they might become invitations for reflection which does indeed lead to concrete changes in practice. Moreover, in a world of unitary ‘correct answers’, teaching and learning both all too often become performances of institutionalisation. A single correct answer often stops thought short. A value of open questions – and of disability studies – are their insistence on contextualised and persistent investigation and transformation. This conversation is, then, an invitation to responsive pedagogies which accept challenge, value difference, and build interdependent community. Read the interview in full in Postgraduate Pedagogies who have kindly permitted us to re-publish this excerpt. This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions. The post Building spaces for collaborative resistance first appeared on LSE Higher Education .

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