Intersectionality, Disability, and Power in Teaching Practice
As an AL teaching machine knitting to first-year textile students, many encountering both machine and the institution for the first time, I am aware of how disability intersects with language, learning style, class, and institutional pressure. The structure of the unit, with its tight timeline and output-driven expectations, is inherently ableist. It privileges speed, technical mastery, and confident self-direction, often inaccessible to disabled students or those whose identities place them outside dominant norms of communication and cognition.
The unit’s emphasis on playful experimentation contrasts with rigid assessments, disadvantaging those who need more time or clarity. Challenges include sensory overload, cognitive fatigue, language barriers, and physical access to machines. For many, especially those new to academic systems, the pace feels more excluding than supportive.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989) reminds us that multiple aspects of identity- disability, race, class, gender- converge to shape experiences of oppression in complex ways. These layered inequalities are visible in teaching environments that expect uniformity of pace and outcome.
As Alison Kafer (2013) writes, “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the timelines of normative expectations, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” Yet the rigid structure of university units leaves little room for this bending of time. My own position, as a working-class woman from the Midlands, first in my family to access higher education, means I recognise the emotional labour and navigation required of students who, like me, arrive without inherited fluency in institutional languages or creative confidence.
Crip theory encourages a reimagining of educational spaces by challenging dominant temporalities and expectations of ‘normal’ progression. McRuer (2006) notes that “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely functions as a non-identity, as the natural order of things.” In teaching environments assuming a singular way of knowing or creating, this invisibility is entrenched. I see this in the assumption that students can move seamlessly from learning to experimentation to resolved work, despite the complexity of the tools, processes, and learning styles involved.
Public figures like Ade Adepitan remind us that even within conversations about access and achievement, exceptionalism is often celebrated over systemic change. Similarly, Artist Christine Sun Kim’s “Friends and Strangers” highlights the complexities of communication access and the desire for both connection and autonomy as a disabled person navigating dominant norms.
Yet my own precarious employment leaves me with limited authority to shift these structural barriers. I often find myself mediating between the institution’s demands and students’ realities, doing the quiet work of care, flexibility, and listening where official accommodations don’t reach. As Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009) argues, ableism creates an idealised standard of the body and mind, and in a creative university context, success is often tied to ideals of innovation, confidence, and productivity, not all of which are equally accessible.
My teaching seeks to build space where crip time, slowness, repetition, and alternative creative paths can emerge. Yet, this work is always under pressure due to the fast pace and limited resources we’re all asked to work within. Developing a deeper understanding of disability in my teaching context means recognising that true access isn’t only about adjustments or accommodations, but about challenging the very definitions of success, progress, and creativity. Centring disabled students’ needs and voices and addressing the structural precarity of those teaching them.
References
Adepitan, A. and Webborn, N. (2020). Nick Webborn interviews Ade Adepitan. ParalympicsGB Legends [Online]. Youtube. 27 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnRjdol_j0c
Campbell, F.K., 2009. “Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness”. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crenshaw, K., 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”. University of Chicago Legal Forum.
Kafer, A., 2013. “Feminist, Queer, Crip”. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
McRuer, R., 2006. “Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability”. New York: New York University Press.
Sun, C. (2024). Christine Sun Kim in ‘Friends & Strangers’ – Season 11 | Art21. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/2NpRaEDlLsI
This was a thoughtful reflection about the contradictions of teaching machine knitting, which highlighted the tensions between promoting ‘playful experimentation’, ‘rigid assessments’ and time. Underpinning the blog post was a discussion about disability, and how the school and specifically, the unit’s outline was ableist – this certainly speaks to the increasingly neoliberalisation of the institutional, which emphasises faster outputs, both of skill and student body. You did a great job at highlighting the reading of theory, Crenshaw initially, to express that not everyone’s experiences are uniform, and because of these varied identities, inequalities emerge in the environment which need to be accommodated properly to ensure that there is a parity in expectation. I appreciated how you drew upon crip theory and named your own positionality and experiences as shaping your practice. You also candidly highlighted how your own precarious employment left you with little leverage to negotiate these larger institutional policies, focusing on delivering the tasks already assigned. This is certainly how power is reinforced in the hands of the few.
The teaching aims you list seem important, and I wondered how you might employ slowness or crip time in the work itself. Perhaps adding some explicit details or examples might help to illustrate the techniques that could trouble capitalist timescales.
Thank you for this generous and thoughtful feedback. I really appreciate how clearly you’ve drawn out the central tensions in my piece, between play and assessment, access and exclusion, institutional pace and personal capacity. Your reflections on neoliberal pressures and the privileging of speed really resonate.
Although I lack structural authority to redesign units, I try to embed aspects of crip time into my teaching through small, intentional acts: reframing assessment expectations to centre process over perfection; building in micro-pauses for reflection or quiet drawing; and encouraging students to choose how they work, solo, collaboratively, or in quiet corners. I also try to affirm that resting, repeating, or stepping back are valid parts of creative development and encourage students to redefine what ‘complete’ means in ways that resist capitalist expectations of speed and polish.” These subtle shifts begin to challenge dominant ideas of progress and make space for different ways of learning and creating.
Thanks again Christin, your feedback’s helped me think about how to strengthen both my practice and the way I communicate.
Romany I really enjoyed reding your reflection! I can relate to similar challenges on my Embroidery BA especially those of the expectations on students to learn a lot quickly in a short space of time. That, in itself, is contradictory to building confidence, how can we expect our students to reach the point of handling machinery not only with specialist skill but innovation when your demonstration times and units are restricted and when working with mass groups of students with many different learning styles.
It sounds like you consider your students priorities when working with them and I love your idea of creative an environment where alternative creative paths can emerge, I’m imagining a unit where students can almost elect a direction that suits their learning style and has different assessment requirements depending on chosen pathway, or even students writing their own aims and brief of what they want to achieve out of a certain skill/machinery. I know this is a little more complex for 1st years and something that gets written in on my course as the students enter 3rd year, but I think changes to the overall brief/units are what’s needed as a starting point for change. (something you are not in control of within your role which makes seeing these challenges and not being able to fully eradicate them extremely hard!)
Looking forward to discussing more in person
Thanks Ellie, I really resonate with what you said about the contrast between skill-building and innovation, especially within such constrained timeframes. It’s so true that confidence and creativity take time, and when that time is compressed, it can be difficult for students to feel grounded, let alone experimental. I love your idea of more flexible pathways, even small shifts toward students shaping their own goals or approaches could open up space for different learning styles and definitions of success. As you say, it’s challenging when we’re not in a position to change the structure, but naming these issues is such an important first step. Looking forward to continuing this in class.
Romany, this was a great reflective post. It was really interesting to discover the limitations on your teaching practice, that are placed on you by the strict time constraints of the curriculum, and how through the lens of disability, they reveal ableist bias.
It must be a real challenge to practically teach a group of students when individuals learn at different paces and structures. I wonder if you have considered a tangible way to push against the ‘structural barriers’ that we occupy as teachers?
Thanks Danny, the time constraints can definitely feel like a barrier, especially when trying to be responsive to different learning needs. I’ve been thinking more about how small shifts, like offering flexible timeframes for certain tasks or embedding more peer-led sessions, might help soften some of those structures, even within the limitations. It’s an ongoing process, but one I’m committed to exploring.