The value of asking - my learning from working with people with disabilities

Rachel Burnham writes: A couple of weeks ago the #LDInsight twitterchat explored how we work with people with disabilities on learning.  Many of the participants identified that this was not something that they had experienced very often within their professional careers.   My experience is rather different and looking back I realise that I have fairly regularly worked with colleagues and clients with disabilities.   These have included people with visual and hearing impairments, people with mobility problems and people with dyslexia, which takes many forms.  Actually, the disability comes from the environment, a failure to adapt the learning programme and our attitudes, rather than the condition itself. 

I thought it might be useful to share two key learning points from my experience.  I make no claims to expertise and I am definitely still learning about how to more effectively make learning accessible to all.

My first learning point, came from very early in my time in training – it definitely was training then!   I think it was only about the third or fourth programme that I had been involved in delivering and I’ve never forgotten it. We were working with an external client on a two day programme.   To our surprise one of the participants in the programme was blind and we hadn’t known that until we turned up.  I remember feeling so embarrassed that we hadn’t known in advance and also feeling that we had been dropped in it by the client.   When we reflected afterwards, myself and my co-trainer, realised that actually we had never asked about whether any of the participants had any particular needs.  We had just assumed that they wouldn’t.

So we changed our practice and from then on always asked as part of the commissioning and identification of learning needs. 

I think it is worth building this kind of prompt into our processes and practices – so I ask this when I am talking with stakeholders or I might build it into an application form or discussion with individual learners.   I think this sits alongside asking about dietary requirements and in an ideal world shouldn’t really be any more difficult to ask and answer than that.  I know that not everyone wants to share this information – I think by including it in, we start to build an environment in which it is OK to be open and explicit about our individual needs.   

I know I am influenced in this by my personal experiences of disability – for example since I became diabetic, dietary requirements and specific needs go hand in hand.  As a child measles damaged my hearing, which in turn affected my schooling for a short while, until I was able to have some treatment.  I am comfortable with being open about this – but then I work for myself.  And I know that there are many disabilities that are perceived far more negatively than diabetes.

So my first piece of learning is  to ask the question.

My second piece of learning is that when it comes to making adaptations to enable an individual with a disability to participate in a learning experience, it is always worth speaking with that person and asking for their advice.  Don’t make assumptions or work from generalisations.   Many disabilities impact on people very differently.  In my experience, it is always worth talking to the individual directly - they are an expert on their needs and have usually discovered what works for them best.

I was once tasked with organising an induction/initial training programme for an individual joining one of our regional teams, in an office at some distance from where I was based.  Normally, their manager would have had this responsibility, but they had just moved onto to a new role outside of the organisation themselves.   The challenge was that we had severe budget restrictions at the time, so I had no money to travel in person to the location and this was so long ago that there was no online way of communicating in our organisation (hard to imagine now!) and so I needed to mostly work with her over the phone.  And she was deaf.  So, I contacted her before she formally started and asked her advice.  She was able to suggest the type of modified phone that would best suit her, where to order in from and how to get funding to do this!  I asked her what else would help her induction and she made a number of other practical suggestions including on office layout, as she used lip-reading and so it was important that she could easily see her work colleagues when they were speaking together.  I was so glad I asked her advice!!

So, my second piece of learning is to ask the individual concerned for their advice.   In fact, I find I increasingly ask the question of all the people I work with ‘What can I do to make this learning experience work better for you?’

Most L&D professionals I come into contact with are keen for learning to be accessible for all.  I suspect as a profession that we have not done as much as we could to make this a reality.  Time for a change.

Rachel Burnham

1/9/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance. 

The Nature of Prejudice - Revisiting Allport's Scale

Rachel Burnham writes: With the reporting this week of a 5 fold-increase in the recording of race hate crimes since the announcement of the results of the EU referendum, I have been reminded of the work of Gordon Allport.

Gordon Allport wrote in 1954 a book titled ‘The Nature of Prejudice’ which explored how prejudice and discrimination operates in societies and in particular the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany in the years leading up to the 2^nd World War.  It has been used since to analyse many situations across the world such as segregation in America, Apartheid in South Africa, the treatment of Gypsy and Traveller communities in Europe and genocide in Rwanda.  It has also been used to think about prejudice and discrimination in organisations, not just on the basis of race.  He distilled his thinking on this into a model, which I think is worth revisiting in the light of recent developments in the UK. 

Thinking around discrimination and the nature of prejudice has of course developed since then and in particular work on unconscious bias has added considerably to these issues.  Nevertheless, I think it is worth looking again at Allport’s Scale. 

Allport’s Scale identifies five broad forms in which prejudice manifests and these are:

·       Antilocution or ‘speaking against’ – this includes sterotyping, ‘jokes’ and negative media portrayals of groups.  Allport identifies that the language and the way we speak to and of each other influences the way we treat each other.   When there is ‘speaking against’ that is wide spread and goes unchallenged, then it is more likely that the other manifestations of prejudice will be found.  Unchallenged ‘speaking against’ will be seen as permission by some people that discrimination is acceptable and some people will act on this and move right up Allport’s Scale.

·       Avoidance – Individuals in the ‘in-group’ will distance themselves from people perceived to be in the ‘out-group’.  This can be individually or can be institutionalised.   Where there are already divides in a society (eg due to patterns of housing, school admission policies, access to work) this tends to allow confirmation of sterotypes and the negative portrayals from Antilocution.   Where people  don’t work, socialise or have meaningful contact prejudice can flourish.

·       Discrimination – Individuals and groups are denied access to opportunities and services.  

·       Physical Attack – Individuals and property are subjected to attack. 

·       Extermination – Allport referred here to the systematic killing of a group, but it can also include the murder of individuals and also where individuals are driven by their experiences of prejudice & discrimination to suicide. It can also include situations where people are driven out from an organisation or from a community (or country?).

Allport offers a description of how prejudice affects a society.  I think its importance is in the recognition it gives to the impact of both ‘speaking against’ and ‘avoidance’.  It suggests that tackling these two areas are crucial in challenging what is happening in the UK today.

This is not new.  We know this.  But it is easy to let things drift.  It is easy to be distracted by things that seem more urgent. It was easy to be complacent about progress towards a fairer society, particularly if discrimination is not part of your day to day experience.   But not right now – now it feels urgent and at the heart of what matters.

Rachel Burnham

3/7/16

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance. 

So Many Stories

Rachel Burnham writes: Bruising, humiliating, exhausting, baffling and soul-destroying are just some of the phrases I’ve heard used to describe people’s recent experiences of applying for jobs.   I’ve heard so many stories, so many personal experiences of recruitment and selection over the last few months particularly.  And few of them good.  Many of them poor, some of them painful.  And I am sure you’ve heard similar.

There are the sheer numbers of applications that people make and the amount of work that goes into each one – so often to get no response at all, even after being invited in for an interview. Or the slow response – in some cases the     so     very     slow     response.  The organisations that only seem to want to employ someone who has done that exact same job previously.  The questions at interview that are so precise and require you to ‘Tell me about a time when you had to address a member of staff’s repeated lateness on Tuesdays.’  (And they really only seem to be interested in examples that relate to Tuesdays!)  The organisations that start recruiting, then change their mind and then change it back again.  The intrusive questions about personal relationships.   The discriminatory questions about plans for children.  The selection tasks unrelated to the job and with the capacity to discriminate.  And on.  And on.

I’ve been hearing tales of young people being overlooked.  Of older people being overlooked.  And the not so very old too – ie the person speaking is the same age as me! (Whatever happened to ‘you’re as old as you feel’).  People whose experience is a little different – self-employed or gained in a different country or just a little out of the ordinary.   People with a period of sickness; people with a disability who’ve worked & studied all their lives.   Could be anyone of us.

And most of these tales come from people working in HR or L&D.  So they know how the system works.  They kinda understand where the recruiter is coming from.  They may have been faced with similar situations of lots of applications themselves & the challenges this brings.  And still it confuses and still it hurts and still it frustrates. 

It is always right to treat people with courtesy.  It surely is possible to recruit and select and even turn people down, yet leave them feeling valued & appreciated.

So why aren’t we listening?

Why aren’t we doing differently?

Rachel Burnham

11/2/15

Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D professionals become even more effective.  I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of learning on performance.

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