Can Workplaces, Classrooms, and Pedagogies Be Disabling?
Full Title
Author(s)
Centering Voices
Year of Publication
Media Type
Media Access
Licensed access is through Sage. Though Sage has good examples of digitally accessible content, this article is currently not published in a digitally accessible way. The abstract page uses an image file rather than a navigatable text file. The downloadable full article is readable with text-to-speech technology but reading is interrupted by copyright and formatting on every page. Free/OPEN access is not available.
Reading Rooms
Usefulness to Educators
Premise
This special issue of Business and Professional Communication Quarterly hightls scholarship that:
…either advances a theoretical point of view or presents empirical findings culled from lived teaching experiences in the classroom or, in the case of Konrad, in the workplace, each author also shows us how institutions, policies, knowledge systems, technologies, and pedagogies not only impinge on the impaired body in projecting certain attitudes toward disability, but they also shape the overall outlook of the body politic in academia.
p.9
Purpose
- embed disability discourse in a major journal for Technical and Business Communications
- make space for scholarly works on theoretical and practical approaches to “imagining disability and accessibility in business and professional communication.” (p. 6)
- call attention to the work of disabled scholars in the field
- “I hope that our business and professional communication community—which extends to a significant number of countries around the globe—will find this presence tangible, recognize it as their own, and make it more visible in the association’s work worldwide by being inclusive of both their disabled colleagues and their research in the future organizational and scholarly deliberations of ABC, in their own writing and research, and in their classrooms, pedagogies, and curricula.” (p. 6)
Research Methods
- editorial literature review
Conceptual or Theoretical Frameworks
- critical social model of disability
- Disability Studies
Reference with Published Abstract (when available)
Points of Connection
Take note of the way Oswal attends to the language of disability in the section “Guest Editor’s Note on Disability-Related Terminology Employed in This Special Issue”
Points of Contention
Oswal’s call to communicators and educators to engage critically with disability is powerful. It needs to be taken up by educators beyond Technical and Business Communications. He has, as any good communicator would do, focused his writing on his audience, possibly to a fault. His influence on other authors in his field is evident but I would like to see his scholarship, specifically locating accessibility in the classroom via critical pedagogy, taken up more broadly by Education authors because many outside his field would struggle to find relevance in the business-speak.
This issue calls upon business and professional communication faculty to employ their management and leadership skills through inclusive curricula to foreground, to demystify, and to integrate accessibility in corporate cultures and bring about organizational change through accessibility-centered business and professional communication training to students while keeping up with the worldwide demographic, legal, and social developments surrounding disability.
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