Christianity, John M. Hull and notions of ability, disability and education

We are delighted to welcome Simon Hayhoe as the guest editor for this Special Issue on Disability, Christianity and Education. Simon is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK and is a distinguished scholar in this field, having undertaken extensive research in arts education of both blind adults and school children and published widely in disability and education. He is also a Research Associate in the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics, where he is researching the epistemology of disability and ability, with special reference to education, inclusion, technology and the arts. Simon has also worked as a research officer at Birkbeck College and the Institute of Education, both in the University of London, and at the University of Toronto (Canada). In his editorial Simon reflects on the significance of the work of Professor John Hull, who is a giant amongst academics working in the theology of disability. John was my main supervisor for my doctoral studies when I was working on developing an evangelical theology of religious education for British schools. He was a remarkable tutor with whom I enjoyed the most stimulating debates. I disagreed with his basic position and critiqued that in my thesis, but was heavily influenced by his ideas and the challenges he presented me with. His book, What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning? first published in 1985, is still, in my opinion, one of the most important books that I have read on Christian learning. However, as Simon too acknowledges, it was John’s personal qualities that had the most impact. I started as his doctoral student not long after he finally lost his sight in 1983 in the middle years of a distinguished academic career. Such a happening would cause many to give up. Not John. Up to the moment of his death in the early hours of 28th July 2015, he was still producing ground-breaking work. It is fitting that this special issue is dedicated to him. --Trevor Coolin

Utilising mobile technologies for students with disabilities

This paper proposes a model of inclusive technical capital, and its use in the evaluation of technology and education designed to include students with disabilities. This paper also examines the role of mainstream mobile technologies and m-learning in the inclusion of students with disabilities. A recent research project on the inclusivity of native settings and apps on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems is reviewed, and a model of evaluation is proposed as a starting point for future evaluations. The paper concludes that mobile technology has advantages over traditional assistive technologies as a tool of inclusive technical capital. However, more needs to be done to develop tablets and smartphones’ native settings and apps to include students with disabilities. It is also found that mobile devices as a whole need to become cheaper in order to make them more socially inclusive

Inclusive capital and human value

Human value seemed to be an effective way of understanding our personal knowledge, activity, and skills, and how these elements shape our personality, memory, and character traits. The observation that human skills and knowledge had value was first understood in the eighteenth century, and became a driving force of the Enlightenment and the British industrial revolution. Karl Marx argued that a consequence of the industrial revolution was that it changed the nature of human labor value psychologically. Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of social and cultural capital values were not just useful to the sociologists and social philosophers that subsequently used it to discuss social divisions by like groups. French people do not need to be resident in their homeland to be members of their imagined institution, members of other nationalities often live easily in France. Cultural institutions can be state of mind or theoretical space, with a physical though not geographical “center” or “centers,” and cultural objects scattered throughout other spaces