SUPERVISION OF PERSONNEL PROBLEMS

Supervision of Personnel Problems Secondary Education

Supervision of Personnel Problems Secondary Education

Problems

Across the United States, disability studies courses continue to multiply in academic departments within institutions that have established disability studies programs and those in which program development is not currently a goal. Course offerings are found in the humanities, the social sciences, medicine, applied health and rehabilitation sciences, psychology, philosophy, architecture, law, policy, and business (English, 2003).

Until recently, disability-related content was the exclusive domain of medicine, education, and the social sciences. Infused by the current wave of disability studies in the humanities, disability is now more likely to be understood as a product of cultural rather than purely biological forces.

Recent course offerings include the following: Disability and Literature; Disability in American History; Cultural Studies/ Body Studies; Extraordinary Bodies; Disability and Culture: Race, Gender, and Sexuality; Women and Disability; Disability in Film; and Crip Cultures & Disability Studies. Judging by the titles alone, this sample evidences a strong bias toward the cultural branch of disability studies, but undoubtably, titles can be deceiving (English, 2006).

Research related to Problem

Academic Courses And Programs

In many universities, the process for new course creation can impede the development of new courses if it threatens existing, state-approved, or professionally sanctioned content. However, courses can be updated with little or no fanfare and pasted into an existing course title. For example, Normality, Abnormality, and Society, offered in the philosophy department at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, is suggestive of the first wave of disability studies when professionals set the parameters for inquiry into disability informed by a prevention/treatment/remediation paradigm. However, despite its retrograde title, the course, taught by Ron A. Amundson, a philosopher of science and a wheelchair user, is described in the course catalog (2002-2003) as a philosophical study of how human diversity interacts with social norms (English, 2007). Topics include health and illness, disability, gender, and sexual orientation. Perspectives from biology and the social sciences are included in a study of how beliefs about normality vary between cultures, change through time, and affect human relations (Davis, 2002).

The course is not included in a special disability program, nor is it part of a cluster of course offerings designed to provide a closer examination of disability informed by a disability studies. Like many of the new disability studies courses that dot the academic landscape, this course stands alone in a traditional academic department.

Where efforts are under way to develop disability studies programs, course offerings are plentiful and more diverse. Community Planning and Public Policy for Disability, offered through the Department of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, explores what society and local communities can do to address the needs of citizens with disabilities specific to policies, programs, and local planning. Although the content is shaped by cultural awareness and more progressive interpretations of disability, the course has as its foci the economics of disability and the politics of producing change, with special attention to transportation, housing, public facilities, independent living, employment, and ...