I think this was a really important presentation for us to see. Disabled students are overlooked in education so much. It’s nice to get some insight into all the steps and difficulties that can occur for disabled students and their families in getting essential technology. I’ll be keeping BCEdAccess in mind in case I need assistance from them for students in the future. I think a discussion on ableism was really useful as well. Often adults accommodating for disabled students can make them feel extreme singled out or talked down out. People can often take on an overly friendly and simplified tone with people who don’t need those things to understand another person. This just causes the person’s attempt at being inclusive to demonstrate the stereotypical image of a disabled person that exists in their mind. Interactions like this can also decrease the likelihood that students will come to teachers for help with their disabilities.

I’m glad that we talked about technology being potentially detrimental as well. I find Zoom classes to be incredibly difficult to learn from and really painful to sit through. This is also a huge issue with deaf and hard of hearing people. Often hearing aids can still be quite lacking for people and put them in a difficult and traumatizing position where understanding others is difficult and frustrating. I have a deaf friend that really hates “feel-good” videos about babies and young children hearing through hearing aid devices for the first time. People can assume that hearing aids bring people to a full-hearing level when that really misses the large range of hearing disability manifestations. People could struggle with differentiating different sounds for their entire lives and struggle with expressing themselves verbally. This can affect reading abilities as well due to our reliance on teaching written word through oral sounds and speaking. A key problem with these approaches is that they often totally alienate hard of hearing and deaf people. Students are alienated from hearing peers and often don’t have a larger deaf and hard of hearing community to talk with. Hard of hearing people being forced to learn spoken language as opposed to sign language can hurt the ways they can communicate with other people with similar experiences to them and the world at large. It also gives less incentive to educators to learn sign languages, something that must be done carefully as well. ASL has been heavily damaged in the past due to people learning it from hearing people who relate it to spoken language. This relation doesn’t exist for deaf and hard of hearing people so the framework for using the language can totally change