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BY KATE MAGRAM
The topic of circus and accessibility has been addressed
regularly at AYCO national festivals and ACE Educational
Conferences (EdCons), and is increasingly becoming a
topic of greater interest to more circus educators. In
our community, I have observed many educators who
are already doing this work comfortably and proactively
(i.e. working with students with disabilities/differences 1 ),
others who have not yet begun to address accessibility in
their programs or are just beginning to do so, and many
folks who fall somewhere in between. How can we safely
get more of our educators to move towards making their
programs more accessible?
- -
Erin Ball at Skeleton
Park Arts Fest 2018.
Photo by Stroesser
Photography.
was
but
KATE MAGRAM has a clinical doctorate in physical therapy,
specializing in pediatrics. She is an instructor and the
Administrative Manager for Circus Up, Boston’s social circus
organization. She is particularly passionate about accessibility and
circus, social circus, and other issues of social justice. She has
both personal and professional reasons for being committed to
improving accessibility to circus arts for all. She has taught circus
arts to kids and adults for over 15 years, and theatre to kids for
over 25 years.
inclusive
classes,
EDCON 2018: ACCESSIBILITY
One out of five adults 2 in the U.S. and 6.7 million youth
— 13% of all public school students 3 — lives with a
disability. This is a sizeable portion of our population.
It’s important to be aware that a) there are invisible as
well as visible disabilities, b) we may not see/be aware
of anyone’s full story, and c) there may also be people
who are not currently accessing our programs, but who
would greatly enjoy and benefit from them. When we
addressed the topic of accessibility at the 2016 San
Francisco EdCon, it was clear that there was a great
deal of interest among circus educators about how
we can make our circus programs more accessible to
all, and there were many questions about how to do
so effectively, safely, and in the most informed way
possible. It was unclear where to go next, and how to
continue having these conversations in a way that would
be productive and accessible to even more members of
our community.
With that interest and challenge in mind, I gave
a workshop at the 2018 EdCon titled “Circus and
Accessibility: Moving Forward Together.” My goals for this
workshop were to a) review the aspects of the Americans
with Disabilities Act (ADA) that most directly relate to
our work as circus educators, b) invite participants
to consider our ethical/moral obligation to make our
programs as accessible as possible,
Language is imperfect, especially when discussing identity and
using terms that may not be preferred by all. Even though I use the
term “disability” in this article, there are people who do not use that
term to refer to themselves. For the purpose of my workshop and
this article, I use the definition and language of the ADA to define
“disability,” as that is what provides legal protection: “To be protected
by the ADA, one must have a disability, which is defined by the ADA as
a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more
major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an
impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an
impairment. The ADA does not specifically name all of the impairments
that are covered.” (https://www.ada.gov/ada_intro.htm)
1
2
3
Centers for Disease Control, 2015
National Center for Education Statistics, 2016
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