December 5, 2024
The efforts of Oakland University’s Senate Committee on Disability Awareness and Literacy to encourage disability literacy across campus recently took an important step forward as the university’s General Education Committee approved a request to add disability to the listing of social identities and categories that count for the general education integration category of U.S. Diversity courses at OU.
“This (approval) added disability to gender and race as an area of diversity in these courses,” said Jo Reger, professor of sociology and chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at Oakland University. “By doing so, students have a better chance of being exposed to issues around disability and the cutting-edge research and scholarship on disability.
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| Jo Reger |
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| Christina Papadimitriou |
The World Health Organization estimates that there are currently more than 1 billion people around the world living with some form of disability, and that number is increasing.
The Senate Committee on Disability Awareness and Literacy was created in 2023 specifically to address the need for disability as a key aspect of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts on campus and in the surrounding community. It is made up of representatives from across the campus.
Reger and Dr. Christina Papadimitriou, professor of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences and Sociology at OU, serve as co-leaders of the committee, whose stated mission is to “integrate disability visibility into the university curriculum, scholarship, and community as a means of understanding human experience in our contemporary world.”
To implement this rationale, the committee’s main goal will be to raise the profile of disability as a previously underrecognized way of understanding human diversity, to be included with other urgent areas of inquiry and identity in DEI such as race, class, and gender.
“Without critical attention to these issues, we further marginalize a part of the population, and this does not serve the whole OU community,” the committee’s mission statement reads.
In a letter sent to the General Education Committee in March, the Senate Committee on Disability Awareness and Literacy noted that “almost everyone is likely to experience some form of disability — temporary or permanent — at some point in life,” and that “the inclusion of disability with race, gender and ethnicity would capture this importance dynamic of life in the United States and the increasing importance to educate students around the challenges, value systems, and social structures related to disability.”
“We see this as having broad implications in that our students, faculty, and staff are part of a range of communities,” Reger said. “Attention to disability in the classroom translates into attention and understanding in the broader community. It is a goal of this committee to address disability in the OU and surrounding community in a variety of ways. Attention to it in the classroom is just one way we seek to do this.”