When raising awareness on disability during trainings or meetings, and trying to offer adolescents to experience situations through a disability inclusion lens, there is often one exercise to be found: The one that encourages participants to pretend one of their arms or legs is paralysed, or they are blindfolded or cover their ears to simulate visual or hearing impairments. They are then asked to participate in an activity so that they can briefly experience “what it feels like” to be a person with disabilities. Of course, this doesn’t work: The “experience” focuses on the impairment, and what a person cannot do. The feeling of helplessness can even make it worse and increases the worry of ever becoming physically disabled. It doesn’t reflect at all the lived experience that comes not only from a degree of loss of functionality but from various barriers, not least attitudinal barriers, on a daily basis.
But there are other ways to engage with participants in experiencing some of these barriers themselves. One possibility is an activity that was developed for Save the Children’s Toolkit on Raising Awareness on Disability Rights in the Community.
So, how do you go about it:
- Prepare a small presentation which includes a paragraph on a chosen topic. This could be information on hygiene, or a new statement by the government, or information on some form of support – it must be real support though, so as not to confuse people and raise false expectations – or something else that has some relevance to the participants.
- Write out the information again or use a picture of, for example, how to wash hands or anything else that would be information of value. Print it out in normal A4 paper.
- Make another visual on a much larger Flipchart Poster that shows a very complicated statistical diagram or chart on your chosen subject.
- Prepare another short paragraph of text on your chosen message in a very scientific, difficult language which is unlikely to be understood completely by participants, e.g. includes some medical jargon or just difficult and long sentences.
* The image above is for illustrative purposes only and do not represent the actual exercise described in this article.
Tell the participants: “We are now going to share with you some important information on hygiene measures” (or any other topic that you have prepared). It may be best, if this is done by another colleague, who could be presented as an expert or specific advisor on (e.g.) hygiene.
As the presenter of the information, you will:
- Speak to only a small group in a low voice so you can only be heard by a few people in the first row, and explain or read out the information on the paper.
When people complain, ignore them.
- Present the visual information on the A4 paper and hold it up so that only the people right in front of you could read or see it properly. Pretend you are very annoyed by complaints or requests to show it around. Don’t pass it around.
- Now, read in a loud voice the difficult text in jargon and show the large poster with the complicated statistical diagram without explaining it.
- Thank everybody for their attention and step aside.
Wait a minute or so and observe and listen to the reactions. Then ask participants the following questions:
- How did you experience receiving the information we just shared?
- How did you feel when you thought you were given important information and you couldn’t properly see, or hear, or understand the information?
- Whose “fault” was it that you didn’t hear, see or understand the information? What were your expectations?
- Ask the people who sat in front and were probably able to hear and see the first round of presentation: How did you feel when you realised you were able to hear and see and everyone else didn’t?
You can follow up with the following questions
Now think about persons/children with disabilities? Do you think they face similar challenges when they go to school, want to participate in cultural or political activities, and want to receive important information?
Reflect with the participants on what disability and accessibility means and how accessible communication pays off for many (and not only persons with disabilities).
For more information on this exercise, contact andrae.karen@gmail.com