This past December, Disability Without Poverty hosted their 2025 research symposium, Learning from Today to Make Tomorrow Better. This online event featured presentations from people with lived experience, service providers, and academic and community researchers. Each panelist brought unique insight into living with a disability and experiencing poverty.
We’ve covered three panels already, on navigating the ODSP, the possibilities of entrepreneurship, and experiences of poverty for 2SLGBTQ+ disabled Canadians. The fourth panel we’re discussing is Education and Disabled People: A Tool to End Poverty, with panelists Diane Driedger and Nancy Hansen supplying their knowledge.
This presentation focused on the history of disabled people and education. Panelists argued that disabled people have historically been able to march towards equality only after they gained access to tools, including those offered by post-secondary education. One panelist explained that “all of the pioneer leaders of our movement went to university in the late 1970s.” Despite these institutions being inaccessible, folks like Jim Derksen and Allan Simpson obtained post-secondary degrees and became leaders in disability rights movements at the community level. Diane and Nancy argued that post-secondary education is the key to helping people think critically and to know what systems are doing: “If we don’t know what’s going on, we have no chance of effecting policy or affecting social attitudes.” Though education systems may be oppressive, they can also provide tools for liberation.
Panelists reviewed disability and legal access to education as protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This protection under the Charter resulted from advocacy and briefs to the Parliamentary committees. Activists argued that disability and accessibility measures would not bankrupt the government, as implied, but were necessary initiatives. When the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) went into effect in 2008, disabled peoples finally obtained rights protecting their education.
Despite these legal protections, additional barriers to access remain outside of the realm of legality. First, education is expensive, and although disability-specific student supports exist, they are often underfunded and lack resources. Nancy shared her experience growing up disabled and in a segregated school system. Up until the 1970s, disabled student could not attend “regular” school and instead received “special education” that favoured physical therapy over academics. Eventually, disabled children were able to join their non-disabled classmates, but it remains that education systems “don’t anticipate” disabled bodies being there and are averse to more meaningful inclusion.
The panelists discussed with participants how this kind of aversive ableism emerges in post-secondary institutions when people who “think they’re progressive” believe they know what’s best for those with disabilities. Friction occurs when disabled people alert these folks to how they are contributing to barriers and are met with hostility and defensiveness instead of cooperation. These ideas are evident in the lack of disabled faculty at universities, despite public discussions of wanting diverse staff and researchers. Diane and Nancy believe that there are assumptions at play about how “disruptive” disabled faculty can be, leading to rejection and marginalization.
This panel demonstrated how education can be a tool for disabled people in poverty, but it isn’t always accessible due to individual circumstances and structural oppression. Panelists explored aversive ableism in the education system and provided interesting avenues for gaining skills from the system.
For more information about breaking barriers and events like this Symposium, visit the Disability Without Poverty website.
