I once proposed to a staff person the idea of launching a support group on campus for students with disabilities, to provide a place for them to talk about experiences, share coping strategies, etc. The idea never went anywhere; and she suggested that students didn’t often feel comfortable talking about their disabilities and even seemed to prefer to avoid them.
Since that discussion, I have spent several semesters serving as a teaching assistant in university classes–mostly Greek classes. I have encountered several students with “hidden” disabilities: disabilities that would not be known about unless the students disclosed them. Many of these students confided in me about their difficulties in class. Some had not registered with the learning center on campus and had no idea they could be receiving assistance. Some did not realize the learning center was the provider of services for students with disabilities–they had been looking for the word “disability” in the office name. This lack of knowledge had, in some cases, cost them a year of accommodations.
My discussions with these students often become matters of pastoral care. Teaching takes a back seat when I discover that a student’s learning is more deeply affected by fear or memories of wounds created by the stigma associated with disability than it is affected by disability-related barriers. When a student perceives herself to be stupid because she takes more time to understand something or because her learning style is different, she is prevented from recognizing the image of God that resides in her and accepting the truth that God loves her deeply just the way she is. She confines herself to traditional means of learning instead of freeing herself to learn in the way that God has created her to learn; and all of the accommodations that we can make in the classroom cannot reach her as long as she is imprisoned in this wounded state. Sadly, this occurs because of years of experiences in which she has learned that this is what society expects of her. It is a process with which I am personally familiar, a process from which I have struggled to break free. That process was not easy.
If I could communicate one thing, it would be this. Those of us with the power to liberate others from those old wounded places must do so, knowing that liberation is not an easy task to engage in. Those of us who want to be free must step out of those wounded places, knowing that it is painful to trust and to ask for what we need. Together we make new things happen.
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