Students collaborate on disability arts production with Art-Windsor Essex gallery
Students collaborated with Art-Windsor Essex Galltery in a unique workplace-integrated learning course about disabilty arts. Photo by Lisa East.
When social work student Victoria Phung enrolled in the first-ever Disability Arts and Cultural Production (DST 503) course, art was, in her mind, “a trivial, insignificant area of disability justice”. As the course unfolded, her sentiments rapidly evolved.
“I realized I was incredibly wrong in this assumption. Art has the power of challenging our deeply held assumptions. Art can be and is transformative.”
During the 2022-23 academic year, Phung and her classmates seized this exciting workplace-integrated learning opportunity. The course gave students a unique context to “learn by doing” in a real-world communications project for the Art-Windsor Essex gallery.
“What we teach in class has to be connected with everyday realities of disabled people. Artwork created by disabled people has a lot to offer.” — Eliza Chandler, professor
Mission accomplished: accessibility, innovation, engagement
The gallery had a new exhibit, Grey Matter: Your Brain on Art (external link) . They’d already been following Ontario’s Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), but were interested in how disability studies-informed practices could further expand the gallery’s reach and deepen its impact.
Professor Eliza Chandler — herself an art curator before becoming a professor at TMU — designed the course to underscore disability arts as an extension of struggles for disability rights and social justice.
“A gallery can have some universal accessibility guidelines, but even those don’t always meet the demands. The ultimate goal is to move beyond just including diverse populations to actually centralizing them.”
After learning about disability-centered frameworks, the students teamed up with artists, gallery staff, field experts and scholars. Together, they created accessible, innovative means to promote the exhibit and enrich the audience experience for diverse populations — such as an exhibit guide using plain-language to lead youth through the pieces, an open-access digital resource Pressbook and a public panel discussion with the artists.
But the students’ impact extended even further beyond the course’s requirement. In the process of producing American Sign Language (ASL) videos to advertise the exhibit, one team unearthed sizable, hidden gaps in accessibility. Although the ASL ads invited the Deaf population, the exhibit itself lacked full accessibility, such as on-demand ASL-interpreted guided tours. As a result, the students revealed the discrepancy to the gallery and assembled a proposal to hire a Deaf consultant on how to better serve the Deaf community.
“The project was exciting! I never anticipated acquiring the skills, knowledge and training that I did in four months. Collaborating with so many different professionals was priceless.” — Amanda McBain, student
Practical skills to meet workplace realities
Navigating workplace challenges was also an integral part of the learning process. To complete the project, students had to constantly draw on crucial skills — project management, effective communication, giving and receiving feedback, critical reflection, balancing independence with teamwork and more.
Students also had to grapple with the reality that big ideas sometimes face serious constraints, such as limited budgets or higher-level expectations set by stakeholders and funders.
Chandler reflects: “These challenges come up in the workplace all the time. The course was process-based learning — a relatively new learning style. So, even more important than grades and outcomes was that students put in the effort, got training to take risks, and ultimately worked through challenging processes.”
By the end of the course, student feedback was tremendous. As student Ekko Elumir summed it up: “I’m young and don’t have much life experience, so the course was an amazing experience. I learned so much about disability studies, life, the world in general, and just being an actual adult.”
DST 503 was funded during the 2022-23 academic year by a Cooperative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada grant.
Interested in exploring disability studies? Aside from the full undergraduate program, consider pursuing a minor in disability studies. Courses are also available as open electives. View the full disability studies course list.
