Exploring Adolescents’ Understandings of Disability in a Blended Environment of Interactions

Nayia Stylianidou,Katerina Mavrou

doi:10.3390/educsci11110681

Abstract

Understanding how disability is socially constructed is important for establishing inclusive schools, since the ways in which educators and non-disabled nondisabled students understand disability affect their actions towards disabled students. As social interaction today is very often an interplay between online and offline communication activities, this study aimed to explore how young adolescents in Cyprus construct the concept of disability in a blended environment of interactions. A qualitative research approach was adopted involving focus groups with 18 adolescents, online and face to face semi-structured semistructured individual interviews, participant observation on a Facebook group set up for the purposes of the study, and the first author’s reflective diary. A combination of thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis and analytic elements from the field of visual semiotics were used for data analysis. Data analysis indicated that adolescents understand disability mostly through medical and charity models. Based on the data, these understandings arise from the construction of disabled people’s multimodal ‘invisibility/absence’, in both online and offline contexts of adolescents’ everyday reality. Suggestions for further research in disability constructions in blended environments, and implications for the field of inclusive education concerning teachers and pre-service teachers’ educational practice are discussed.

Highlights

Moscovici, the founder of social representations theory stated: ‘a social representation is not a quiet thing’ [1] in an attempt to emphasise that the way a specific concept is constructed communicates specific ideological messages
This paper focuses on the first axis of the data, since before presenting and discussing the other two axes, is important to gain an insight into what kind of understandings emerged in the blended environment of the study
This understanding of disability involved perceiving disabled people as facing deficits and being unable to cope with everyday life due to their disability; a perception communicated through medicalisation of disability by placing emphasis on the deficit [66]

Summary

Introduction

The founder of social representations theory stated: ‘a social representation is not a quiet thing’ [1] in an attempt to emphasise that the way a specific concept is constructed communicates specific ideological messages. An example in relation to social beliefs is the history of living phenomenes in France (Tremain, 2005; cited in [3]). The label ‘popular’ was replaced by the label ‘apotropaic and despicable’, due to the social norms that defined the concept of normal. As a consequence, the latter label led to the fear of ‘normal’ people for the former artists who were considered as ‘abnormal’. The latter label led to the fear of ‘normal’ people for the former artists who were considered as ‘abnormal’ This fear resulted in the marginalization of living phenomenes, as the former artists were ‘not ‘fit’

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion