Abstract
The authors - a faculty member from the humanities, a chief diversity officer and a student leader - offer a "lessons-learned" essay in which they describe providing an LGBTQ+ ally education workshop to a group of adults with developmental disabilities. We describe the the obstacles and the payoffs of collaboration across academic units and roles and a commitment not merely to adapt curriculum with accessiblity in mind but to radically reimagine it, and, in the process, more fully coming to embrace the idea of universal design.
Highlights
There is a dearth of resources designed to present sex education and/or LGBTQ+ ally education to an audience of developmentally disabled adults
Accomplishing our goal of offering a Safe Zone workshop to the LIVES program required us all to step outside our areas of expertise
Many of the tools and strategies we selected in order to adapt the workshop to a new audience laid bare our assumption that our usual Safe Zone participant is neurotypical and demonstrated that even neurotypical folks can benefit from pedagogies that slow down, break things up into smaller pieces, and require more frequent, focused engagement
Summary
There is a dearth of resources designed to present sex education and/or LGBTQ+ ally education to an audience of developmentally disabled adults. Accomplishing our goal of offering a Safe Zone workshop to the LIVES program required us all to step outside our areas of expertise.
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