Promoting social awareness and understanding about disability issues is what one class hopes to do at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus. Yesterday, the disability studies team-development class set up a booth in the Campus Center courtyard to promote National Disability Awareness Month.

Students Juliana Romero, Kevin Dierks, Lily Matsubara, Kiriko Takahashi and Rich Kelley have formed "Team Access," a class project to get more people to understand what it means to live life with a disability. The team is sponsored by the Center for Disability Studies on campus.

Postcards distributed around campus by the team invite people to "Think about how you disable others." It states, "The barriers people with disabilities face begin with attitudes that are often rooted in misinformation and misunderstandings about what it's like to live with a disability."

At their booth, the students provided information sources on campus, such as the Center on Disability Studies, the KOKUA program and courses in which students could learn about disabilities. They also featured a CD with songs about disability issues and a book written by the Team Access faculty coordinator and instructor, Steve Brown.

"We're trying to get as much information out as possible, here on campus as well as out of the island," Matsubara said.

Takahashi added, "It's great if it's just one or two people who can be more mindful." Disability is not always something a person is born with, she said. It can be something acquired later in life. She stated that nine out of 10 people will have a disability at some point in their life.

Historical and social disability models

There are two models of ideas of what a disability is. Dierks said there is the historic model - the idea that it is something a person is born with. But, after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, the idea has moved toward a social model, that disability is "socially caused and created," he said. The act prohibits discrimination based on disability.

"The concept of disability is that society hasn't made room for you as it's expanded," Dierks stated. He said that although people come in different sizes, shapes and packages, a disability is only created when somebody else builds something that is inaccessible.

"Any time humans have been involved in paving or building, then there was an opportunity to consciously include people or not," he added.

To reverse this, Team Access is trying to create awareness for those kinds of people who just did not consciously create room, Dierks said. Pre-social work undergraduate Janelle Taua said of the booth, "It's definitely very informative." She said she was interested in stopping by because her mother has bipolar disorder. She also said, "I'm willing to take courses and to strive to get a certificate in the disability and diversity program."

Positive messages

Distributing postcards with sayings the team had come up with is one part of their project. There are 12 cards, each with a different saying, such as, "Ignorance is not a disability. Don't block ramps and sidewalks!" and "Learning disabilities don't mean that you're slow. You're just learning differently." On the back of them, there are myths associated with disabilities and the facts regarding them. There is also a comment box for people to write what disability means to them.

"People think people with disabilities live different lives, that they don't work or they can't have families," Takahashi said. "They can do everything that we can do except that maybe there are environmental barriers or social barriers that's actually preventing them to fully enjoy their lives."

In addition to the postcards, the project also includes a blog written by team member Kelley, who is in a wheelchair. The blog will identify and show pictures of areas on campus that are accessible and inaccessible. "We don't want people to feel bad about it," Takahashi said. "We want to simply highlight what accessibility can do and what inaccessibility will do."

She added that there are probably a lot of buildings that are inaccessible and that though the university tries to work on it as they are identified, it does not happen very quickly.

"The UHM campus is an accessibility disaster," Kelley stated. He said that there is only one path from Dole Street to the dorms and that the options for getting around from there are dangerous or long. One path, he said, leads into automobile traffic, another down an unmarked curb and the third option is onto a path obstructed by pipes in the pavement.

Romero has several classes at Wist Hall with classmates in wheelchairs. "Several times they can't come in and park because places are taken," she said. "People (are) being just not sensitive to the issues."

The team also created a social contract, which they invited students to sign. Dierks said, "We want to spur people to some kind of action, so we are putting together some kind of social contract with some really nice things people could do to make a difference."

Some things the contract includes so that people could make the world around them more accessible to others are reading the Americans with Disabilities Act, greeting a person in a wheelchair, listening to a person with a speech disability and not judging or making assumptions about people.

Takahashi said, "The goal of the project is that we have a project that's not just completed as the class is completed," she said. "It has to be kind of sustainable and have some kind of impact."

The team plans to make a tool kit to continue this promotion of social awareness, which they will distribute to other campuses. It will include slogans, information and their social contract so that other people can do a similar activity, she said.

Visit the Center for Disabilities Web site at www.cds.hawaii.edu.