A Case for including Disability Policy Issues in Public Policy Curricula

Abstract

Many graduate schools of public policy are considering how to expand their curriculum to be more inclusive of diverse elements in society. Some of the themes are familiar: how to learn from the experiences of different countries, how to bring in the perspective of women and people of different races and nationalities. Yet rarely does the debate include people with disabilities, despite the fact that there-are far more people with disabilities (as many as 43 million people, according to various estimates), with far more diverse needs, than there are other minorities. One way to teach public policy students what they need to know about the disability constituency is to include materials on disability issues in the curriculum. The point is twofold: that disability is a mainstream public policy topic that can be used to illustrate a wide array of public policy themes; and that disability issues are important enough to be studied in their own right.

Unequal treatment or uneven consequence

“…Indeed, there is a call for a new language of disability that replaces "the minority group model with language that speaks of disability as a form of human variation and that calls for a universal design and universalizing of disability" (Asch, 2001, p. 399). This re-examination of the sociopolitical model of disability may facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship among scholars working in related fields, such as technology and accommodations (Walls, Hendricks, Dowler, Hirsh, Orslene, & Fullmer, 2002), disability studies (Asch, 2001), law and public policy (Stein & Stein, 2007;Watson, 1992), disability employment policy and labor relations (Bruyère, 2000;Bruyère, Johnson, & Reiter, 2010) and rehabilitation counseling (Tarvydas & Maki, 2012).…”