Rebooting inclusive education? New technologies and disabled people

This paper provides a speculative, conceptual and literature-based review of the relationship between disability and new technologies with a specific focus on inclusive education for disabled people. The first section critically explores disability and new technologies in a time of Industry 4.0. We lay out some concerns that we have, especially in relation to disabled people’s peripheral positionality, when it comes to these new developments. The second section focuses on the area of inclusive education. Inclusion and education are oftentimes in conflict with one another. We tease out these conflicts and argue that we cannot decouple the promise of new technologies from the challenges of inclusive education, because, in spite of the potential for technological mediation to broaden access to education, there remains deep-rooted problems with exclusion. The third section of our paper explores affirmative possibilities in relation to the interactions between disability and new technologies. We draw on the theoretical fields of Science and Technology Studies; Critical Disability Studies; Assistive and Inclusive Technologies; Collaborative Robotics, Maker and DIY Cultures and identify a number of key considerations that relate directly to the revaluing of inclusive education. We conclude our paper by identifying what we view as pressing and immediate concerns for inclusive educators when considering the merging of disability and technology, accessibility and learning design

Writing Toward Readers\u27 Better Health: A Case Study Examining the Development of Online Health Information

Each year, more people search the Internet for health information. Through a case study conducted at a prominent health information company, I will show that technical communicators are well suited to contribute to the development of online health information. Like other technical communicators, online health information developers must make rhetorical choices based on audience needs, function within specific social contexts, and work through challenges of writing, editing, and project management

The kids are alright: they have been included for years

In this chapter, I examine the roles and limitations to the incitement of voice in qualitative interviews in disabled children’s childhood studies. I argue that voice and experience are mediated concepts—both by life circumstances and the power relations between the researcher and participants present in interviews. To demonstrate my argument, I work through my experiences of interviewing a group of 23 young people with disabilities who attended secondary schools in Spain. Of the group, only roughly a third responded to any extent to questions I put to them. I suggest that interviews that might appear on the surface to be unrewarding might speak volumes in their silences. I conclude by reconceptualising the interview, in which I advance alternative ideas to the providence of voice in qualitative research