Integration of culture in teaching about disability

Disability is both a part of culture and influenced by culture. For that reason, an understanding of disability is enhanced when learning and teaching about disability addresses personal identity in the context of social roles and relations, including religious, economic, and political (Benedict, 1934; Devlieger, Miranda-Galarza, Brown, & Strickfaden, 2016; Ingstad & Whyte, 1995). Disability is a social category as well as an identity defined from and with social others and in social systems (Mpofu, 2016; Mpofu, Chronister, Johnson, & Denham, 2012). Integration of culture in teaching about disability enables students to gain an understanding of disability as a social construct often used for categorizing those with atypicality in human attributes, and particularly those associated with physical and mental functioning. Teaching about disability through a cultural lens also encourages students to gain an understanding of disability within the context of biopsychosocial diversity in the ways in which people function in major life domains, not just a quality of individual persons themselves. Students are therefore challenged with the premise that culture not only defines disability but also impacts how it is perceived (e.g., destiny, curse, punishment, misfortune, servitude) and the social responses some may have to the experience of disability by others