UCP: Relevance of Non-Fiction Reading on Experience

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes about the trouble not only people with disabilities face, but also the troubles that people without disabilities face during social interactions. People have trouble dealing with bodily differences, and while reading about this in class, we also got to see it in ourselves, and in other people during our service learning experiences. Both sides have a hard time dealing with and interpreting what the other is saying. Garland-Thomson writes that when someone “has a visible disability…it almost always dominates and skews the normate’s process of sorting out perceptions and forming a reaction” (12). The person without a disability may feel uncomfortable, nervous, afraid, or an array of other emotions that help make the social interaction awkward for both parties.

What Garland-Thomson goes into explaining is how the interaction is not only difficult already, but the person without a disability does not usually know how to approach or act to the actual disability itself. S/he does not know “how or whether to offer assistance; whether to acknowledge the disability; what words, gestures, or expectations to use or avoid” because s/he does not want to be offensive or unsupportive (12). Most of us felt this towards the clients at UCP at some point or another because a lot of the clients have visible disabilities that we needed to confront as soon as we walked through the door. Do we immediately help Mark with an arts and crafts project since it is difficult for him to pick up and hold things very well on his own? We needed to deal with things like this every time we were at UCP. For the most part, I think we were able to efficiently decide when to help someone, how to handle ourselves, etc.

Another aspect of social interactions between both sides was the fact that many of us were entering an environment of people with disabilities for the first time and, as Garland-Thomson explains, this makes it even more difficult since there may be the assumption that “a disability cancels out other qualities, reducing the complex person to a single attribute” (12). From reading the service-learning journals, it is fairly obvious that most of us, at some point, had trouble getting past the clients’ disabilities because we were so unfamiliar with them. It was the first thing that we noticed, and it feels overwhelming. However, once we got the chance to actually work with the clients and become comfortable not only with their disability, but with them as human beings, we were able to realize that they are much more complex than just a single quality, and experienced emotions and urges that we feel. Garland-Thomson does an excellent job of acknowledging and explaining the problems that society faces while trying to interact, both for people with disabilities and those without. From our experiences, it seems the best way to become comfortable with bodily differences and disability is to actually experience it by placing oneself in that environment and opening up to all kinds of difference, which facilitates the ability to learn and grow.

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