At our final FIG meeting of the Spring, ten participants joined us on Webex, including Sue Carpenter again calling in from the U.K.! Jason and Kensaku from Melissa Riggio also joined us to chat.

We began with our “Movie Chat,” where we discussed both “Summer in the Forest” and “Crip Camp” (on Netflix). This was an excellent discussion, and makes us think we should do more of this in the future. We learned from both the residential commune model depicted in rural France and Palestine, which was revolutionary in the 60s when it was created as a humane alternative to institutionalization of people with disabilities. The creator of this model (which has been replicated in many countries around the world) was a religious former military officer who had a humane alternative vision. Sue insightfully compared this to the “Steiner model” of education, which would be useful for us all to learn more about.

We also had a spirited discussion of “Crip Camp,” which depicts a camp in upstate New York where the future leaders of the disability rights movement (teens at the time) met each other and bonded, being seen by each other as real human beings for the first time, rather than “that crippled kid” which is how many viewed them back in their home schools and communities. This was a really inspiring film, because it showed actual footage of the 1977 building occupations in San Francisco around the fight to enact Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. We saw testimony from Ed Roberts, Judith Heumann, and other well known leaders of the disability rights movement. We also saw how community support from the Black Panthers in providing meals for the protesters was key to their being able to last as long as they did without leaving the building until they won their demands! This connection between the civil rights, Black Power, and Disability Rights movements (along with today’s Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements) was a very powerful one that we said should be shared among our faculty and students.

The film also showed footage from the 1990 “Capitol Crawl” in which people in wheelchairs left their chairs to crawl up the U.S. Capitol steps in Washington, DC! This created enormous pressure on the government to act to protect the civil rights of people with disabilities, and resulted in the passage of ADA in 1990. We discussed how viewing this film should be an assignment in our classes related to disabilities, because it changes students thinking from seeing people with disabilities as passive and helpless “victims” for whom protective laws were passed, to seeing the truth – that people with disabilities have been and are powerful fighters and activists who have organized to demand and win their civil rights in the face of discriminatory and oppressive forces.

In the second part of our meeting, Lisa presented a wonderful PowerPoint that illustrated key points from the NC-NET document that outlines 8 “soft skills” that have been identified by employers as key to the job success of people with (and without) disabilities. Lisa illustrated the importance of communication skills in work settings, and demonstrated a classroom activity that can help to build these skills, as well as sharing her own rubrics focusing on communication skills during oral presentations. Jeremy followed this with a brief presentation on teamwork skills, another key soft skill, that faculty at KCC are working on building through a variety of collaborative projects and student groupwork. One takeaway from this is the need to directly focus on building skills for respectful communication, group accountability, and cooperative spirit before merely assigning students to groups for presentations and projects. Professor Lea Fridman had also shared valuable materials on teamwork with KCC staff, and we discussed reaching out to create a network of “expert” staff and faculty who have insights into these 8 soft skills and activity build these skills in their classes.

Because KCC classes are so varied and rich in promoting these soft skills, we feel that future CUNY Unlimited Students would benefit from being able to take a variety of classes to build these key job skills. While we learned that, due to delays related to the pandemic and national DOE processing of CUNY Unlimited’s application, CUNY Unlimited will be start in Fall 2020 as planned, we are hopeful that the program will roll out soon and in our FIG we want to prepare the ground for these students to have an inclusive and educationally beneficial experience when they arrive on our campus. We are hopeful to have Melissa Riggio students in our classes in the Fall (since we unfortunately did not have them this Spring semester) given that KCC has had more time to prepare for remote learning with these students. This will of course be a key area of work for our FIG looking forward into next school year.

We also wanted to share an updated Melissa Riggio Video with Presidents of both the College of Staten Island and Hostos Community College talking about their experiences with the program, the first link below. Another inspiring Melissa Riggio video that students seem to enjoy is linked below. It is great because we see the mentors and students with Intellectual Disability interacting, which shows the power of the “social model” of disability under which we are working. Feel free to share this with students to let them know the opportunities KCC is helping to create with Melissa Riggio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiITPA9iSWg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgGf8ag0DTA&t=4sI

Finally, we are very proud of the 6 Melissa Riggio students that nevertheless are graduating this Spring, as Jason shared with us!

Thanks for a great school year everyone. We will see you again in the Fall!

~Jeremy Sawyer

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