Disability, Neurological Diversity, and Inclusive Play: An Examination of the Social and Political Aspects of the Relationship between Disability and Games

This article explores existing connections between disability studies and game studies, and suggests how the two fields might greater inform each other. While existing research explores the use of games to reduce pain and achieve rehabilitative goals, new research on games from a disability studies perspective can also consider the persuasive messages that games advance about disability, and how these messages affect questions of identity, inclusion, and acceptance. By arranging the relationship between disability and games into four topics – therapeutic and educational tools, game simulations, accessible features and controls, and narrative inclusion and identification – this article explores, attempts to address, represent, and simulate autism in digital games. It focuses on Auti-Sim (2013), a simulation exercise, and To the Moon (2011), an adventure role-playing game. Drawing on the writings of autistic activists and existing scholarship on disability simulations, the author considers how these games may influence the player’s understanding of autism at social and political levels, and how these artifacts engage with the overarching goals of disability inclusion and autism acceptance

The Culture of American Homeownership and the Savings and Loan Crisis: How a Political-Economic Strategy Can Lead to Financial Catastrophe

Sarah P. Gibbons, College \u2709, History The Savings and Loan Crisis: A Morality Play of Modern American Finance Owning your own home is often considered as big a part of American life as voting or apple pie. But who or what created this culture of home ownership, and has it always been beneficial to America\u27s economy and citizens as a whole? I will explore the encouragement of home ownership by the U.S. government and how it has lead to economic catastrophe for America in the form of the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s. I will trace the government-sown culture of home ownership beginning with the New Deal, explore historical motives and reasoning for this mission, and explain in an historical context how this culture lead to, and worsened, the Savings and Loan Crisis

Disablement, Diversity, Deviation: Disability in an Age of Environmental Risk

This dissertation brings disability studies and postcolonial studies into dialogue with discourse surrounding risk in the environmental humanities. The central question that it investigates is how critics can reframe and reinterpret existing threat registers to accept and celebrate disability and embodied difference without passively accepting the social policies that produce disabling conditions. It examines the literary and rhetorical strategies of contemporary cultural works that one, promote a disability politics that aims for greater recognition of how our environmental surroundings affect human health and ability, but also two, put forward a disability politics that objects to devaluing disabled bodies by stigmatizing them as unnatural. Some of the major works under discussion in this dissertation include Marie Clements’s Burning Vision (2003), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), Gerardine Wurzburg’s Wretches & Jabberers (2010) and Corinne Duyvis’s On the Edge of Gone (2016). The first section of this dissertation focuses on disability, illness, industry, and environmental health to consider how critics can discuss disability and environmental health in conjunction without returning to a medical model in which the term ‘disability’ often designates how closely bodies visibly conform or deviate from definitions of the normal body. It shows how inadequate medical care, heavily polluted environments, and negative social attitudes might be understood as barriers to access that create disability. The second section of this dissertation focuses on disability, neurological difference, and ‘ecological othering’ as it considers how autistic artists and writers offer an alternative to the belief that their communicative practices are unnatural. This section argues that metaphors linking ecological devastation to changes in human neurology promote fear, and suggests that exploring the parallels between understandings of neurological diversity and understandings of biological diversity would allow for a more nuanced means of pursuing efforts to link disability rights and environmental justice. An important aspect of this project involves a critique of the impetus to celebrate the promise of technology for solving social issues, as it brings critiques of the technological fix approach to environmentalism into conversation with critiques of the medical cure as a techno-fix for disability. With the introduction of concept of critical ecologies of embodiment, a concept that unites these two critiques, this dissertation offers insight into how disability studies scholars and environmental justice scholars might further collaborate

Components of, and Approaches to, Effective Feedback

Feedback is the subject of much research and discussion in Higher Education. Nationally the focus has intensified due to reports of low levels of student satisfaction with the feedback process e.g. the Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE). The focus of this report is an examination of effective feedback in undergraduate education. The importance of effective feedback (particularly for those beginning their third level education) is reflected in a project funded by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, called the Y1Feedback project. This is aimed at increasing the quality of the third level experience and has gained a national and international profile. The provision of feedback to students is particularly worthwhile, and it has been demonstrated that the “provision of timely and useful feedback has significant potential to support and improve student learning (Hounsell, 2003, Hattie & Timperley 2007, Sadler 2010, Carless et al. 2011, Merry et al. 2013)” (Y1Feedback, 2016 p.6). The challenges with third level feedback have been well documented and fall into two broad categories, those which prevent students from engaging meaningfully with feedback (Nash & Winstone, 2017) and those which prevent educators from delivering effective feedback. These include student numbers, workload, confidence in technology, timing, format, regularity, and access to feedback (Y1Feedback, 2016). Feedback is often offered to students in a linear manner from educator to student, resulting in students having limited responsibility in the process. Many students do not know how to engage with the feedback process. Introducing the approach of dialogic feedback means that teachers are no longer the sole source of feedback, and peer and self-critical feedback should build skills towards self-regulation of learning (Y1Feedback, 2016, p.18). Students may not pay attention to feedback comments because they cannot make sense of them (Duncan, 2007), and Spiller (2009) emphasises that students often do not understand the feedback process. This report will outline the key components of an effective feedback process and mechanisms which can be considered in implementing effective feedback. The intention is to offer a simplified, student-centred approach to assist educators when designing or revising feedback practices

IAPT and Long Term Medical Conditions: what can we offer?

Background: The proposal of a 4-year plan to integrate treatment of people with long term medical conditions (LTCs) into the IAPT service (Department of Health, 2011) seeks for research to understand the effectiveness of IAPT interventions for this patient group. Aim: The aim of this service development pilot work was to develop an intervention that is effective for people with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). It was hypothesized that the standard IAPT intervention would not be effective, but that it can be adapted so that it is effective both in terms of mood and self-management of T2DM. Method: Clients (n = 95) who experienced mild to moderate depression and/or anxiety and had a diagnosis of T2DM opted to attend. The intervention was adapted over a series of cohorts from a standard Step 2 intervention. A team of Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners (PWPs), a Clinical Health Psychologist and a General Practitioner worked in collaboration, using outcomes measures and feedback from service users and facilitators. Results: The standard IAPT Step 2 intervention met with challenges when specifically targeting this client group. Using paired t-tests, the modified Step 2 intervention demonstrated significant improvements from pre- to postintervention measures both in terms of psychological (n = 17) and physical (n = 9) outcomes. Conclusion: It is concluded that it may be possible to modify a generic Step 2 IAPT intervention to demonstrate improvements both in terms of psychological wellbeing and self-management of T2DM. The main adaptations were related to more targeted recruitment and linking of diabetes specifically into the CBT model.</jats:p