S11 E4 Look Both Ways: Exploring Disability with Brooke Ellison
TTim VillegasSep 22, 2023 at 8:57 pm1h 6min
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00:03Tim Villegas
Hi friends. I'm Tim Vegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you are listening to think inclusive, our podcast that brings you conversations about inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. Wow, wow, wow. If you are listening to this episode on the day that it publishes, my wife and I are celebrating 20 years of marriage today, on September 28 2003. We were married in front of our friends and family at discounsel Gardens in LA Kenyatta, Flint Ridge, California. So thanks so much for sharing this moment with me and to my beautiful bride, Brianna. Love you so much darling. Here is to the next 20 Okay, enough mushy stuff. We have another fantastic guest with us today. Brooke Ellison is a disability rights advocate, author and professor at Stony Brook University. She became quadriplegic at the age of 11. After being hit by a car, and brick has gone on to do some fascinating things. She graduated from Harvard University and even ran for the New York State Senate. Brooke is passionate about promoting inclusivity and changing societal perceptions of disability. For this episode, Brooke discusses her book look both ways and shares her personal journey of living with quadriplegia and how it shaped her understanding of disability. She discusses the importance of shifting the narrative around disability from one of pity and shame to one of strength and empowerment. Brooke emphasizes the need for inclusive policies that consider disability as a cross cutting issue in all aspects of public policy. She also highlights the significance of universal design and the benefits of inclusion for all individuals. Thank you so much to our incredible sponsor for this week's episode, changing perspectives, an international nonprofit that partners with schools and districts to create inclusive and equitable learning communities for all students. They offer customizable teacher trainings, family workshops, and curriculum resources. They've already helped over 300,000 students, 12,000 teachers, and 500 schools, visit their website at changing perspectives now.org To learn more, and schedule a free meeting, we've got a great conversation for you today that will help all of us to think inclusive, stick around till the very end for the mystery question. And for free time I address some comments from social media about getting into the nuts and bolts of how we implement inclusive education. We'll be back after a quick break.
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03:21Tim Villegas
Brooke Ellison, welcome to the thinking cluesive podcast.
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03:24Brooke Ellison
Oh, thank you so much, Jim. It's a pleasure to be here.
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03:28Tim Villegas
Brooke, your book. Look both ways is fantastic. Thank you so much for writing it and for sharing your life and story. There's so many things I learned about you. Like you ran for the New York State Senate that you graduated from Harvard. But why don't we just start with? Why did you want to tell your story? And what do you feel it's relevant?
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03:54Brooke Ellison
First, Tim, thank you so much for welcoming me to your show. And for your thoughts on my book, as I'm sure you could tell, that both ways is a deeply personal and important work for me. I view it as one of the most important things that I've done. And yeah, I've done a lot of interesting things in my life, but yet I was deeply committed to reading this book. So as I read about actually, it looked both ways. And I've mentioned it in many times in the past. Yeah, I first wrote a book. I just graduated from college just out of out of Harvard in 2000. My graduation generated quite a bit of attention and interest and so I wrote a book thereafter. And so at that point, it was I was 10 years after my accident, I 10 years post accident and even though I was I lived Titan years was part Just procedure at that time, like I, I had still I didn't really fully understand what it meant to be disabled, right, I lived with disability for 10 years I had accommodated my life to living with a disability, but I didn't really understand what it meant to be disabled. And by I think there's a distinction between being disabled and living with a disability. But for all those years after I wrote that book, I knew that I wanted to write another book, I knew that there was a part of myself that I wanted to share, I just didn't really know what it was gonna look like. And so it was actually, as you mentioned, my 40th birthday, and I became pretty sick, I was battling some, an infection that was persistent, and not really you're not going away, it was a pressure ulcer that if you're not familiar with what they are, they can be quite catastrophic to people who use wheelchairs. And I said to myself, if I don't write this book, now, I might not ever have the opportunity to write it again, like I didn't want to be frivolous about my life or not understand the kind of severity that I could experience. So that summer after my 40th birthday, which, as you mentioned, was like such a fantastic day. I Voxer, myself in my bedroom, and I said, Yeah, Brooke, think about the things that you actually want to share with people, what are what are the most important parts of who you are, and things you've learned and things you may need to ever have the self confidence to talk about before. So that's what I did that tire summer, I just kind of closed myself off, and it just poured my heart out into my laptop, you're talking about things that I just never thought that I had the capacity to talk about before, whether that is instances of love, and what that means to be some of the hardships and feelings of Yeah, questioning of myself that I've experienced because of how people have perceived me or how I think people perceive me, for being the disabled member of my family and what that meant, and then how I needed to shift those thoughts to the virtues that have come at my life, the kinds of understandings I've come to, because of the disabilities I live with. And that was quite powerful. That was really meaningful for me. And that's really where the title of the book came from. Right. So you look both ways is, you know, obviously, the acknowledgement you had were taught to cross the street, right, I was hit by a car, it's kind of the the, the instructions or the guide books. So it's about being hit by a car and look both ways. But at the same time, it's really, how do we need to understand our lives and looking at our lives in terms of instances of difficulty in instances of struggle, but also the lessons that we learn from that. And you're to touch on the second part of your question. The beginning of LiquidSpace. And I'm very deliberate about acknowledging that, you know, when I set out to write look both ways, I wasn't trying to write a book about disability, right, like, that was not my goal. But in so doing, you know, in putting words to paper, I came to understand very clearly that disability is just one representation of the many different kinds of challenges that we all experience, right? It's a very obvious one. But getting through life with disability is a very, requires the very same skill set that I think we all need to draw upon when we're dealing with any challenges in our lives, right? Learning to understand our lives differently. No less valuably, but differently. And that was really kind of, I think, the center piece of the both ways. And I think what unites many of us, irrespective of what our experiences might be.
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09:19Tim Villegas
There's a lot to unpack there, but I wanted to focus on you said you weren't sure how to be a disabled person. Like in your early 20s, right, so like, I guess, I guess, I guess thinking back, I'm not sure if we really know how to be people in your early 20s. But I wonder because of your experience of becoming disabled, even if it was at 10 years old, of seeing life through a couple of different ways. You If that has informed you on how to think about disability, because this, this book really resonates with me, because I have three children, but my youngest is 10. And she is very interested in my work. Not that my kids don't. It's not like they don't care, you know, but but Imogen, like, asked me questions all the time. Daddy, who are you interviewing today? You know, what are you writing? What are you doing? And I mentioned, like, Oh, I'm interviewing Brooke Ellison. She wrote a book and, you know, and she was hit by a car at 10. And she became disabled and, and stuff like that. And so, she asked a lot of questions. And she asked a lot of questions about, well, are you disabled? Like, what's the difference between if you become disabled later? And if you're born with a disability? And is is like, is that different? You know, and is it? You know, and she's learning about inherited traits, and, you know, stuffing, like in school? So is that an inherited trait or not an inherited trait? And so I'm explaining this to her. But I think the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions right around disability and, and how to think about it. And so as a person that became disabled later in life, even if it wasn't 10, how was that informed you with? How to talk about it? And how you think about yourself?
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