Challenging Discrimination Against the Disabled

From the Thursday, November 22, 2007, Greater Toronto section of the Toronto Star, page A12, an inspiring article about a student with significant physical disabilities and learning disabilities who has become a human rights activist:


WE'RE ALL DIFFERENT AND THAT'S OKAY
Gifted student 'stirs the pot' with diversity message

Daniel Girard
Education Reporter

Connor Steele wants to be an English professor so he can "challenge the boundaries of accepted knowledge."

Consider the first 17 years of his life Act I.

Born with spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy and learning disabilities, Steele has defied conventional wisdom that says it means reduced intellect and a substandard quality of life.

A gifted student, he took top academic honours last spring among Grade 11 students at Bradford District High School - with a 96 per cent average. Along the way he's acted in a school play, been on student council, launched a book club in hopes of boosting literacy test scores and started a homework cafe.

Steele is also active in human rights and environmental causes and launched a letter-writing campaign on behalf of Bradford's gays and lesbians after seeing them discriminated against.

"We're all different and that's okay," Steele said in an interview yesterday before making a presentation to educators in Mississauga.

"But we've all got something to offer, something worthy of respect."

That was the message Steele delivered to an after-school diversity workshop of 150 teachers, staff and administrators from the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board. With a mixture of personal experience and humour, he spoke of how technology has "brought peace" to the long-standing debate over how to integrate people with special needs into the school system.

"Because of technology, I am free to choose whether to go inside or out, whether to study torts or Tolstoy," said Steele, who uses a motorized wheelchair and adaptive technology programs for reading and writing.

Still, he said, widespread discrimination remains for people with disabilities, as it does for any others considered different from the mainstream.

"It's so important for educators to hear a current student's voice," said Chris D'Souza, equity and diversity officer with the board and organizer of the workshop. "If they have an understanding that this uniqueness has to be addressed, then they can make better accommodations within their classroom and adapt their curriculum to reflect it."

D'Souza said that while schools have done better in recent years in understanding their shortcomings, "we've still got a long way to go." Visible-minority and disabled teachers are under-represented in classroooms, he said, and the curriculum needs to be more inclusive, for example, by showcasing more diverse protagonists in literature classes.

Until that happens in schools and across society, Steele vows to be there, "stirring the pot" for those who are oppressed.

"I'd like it better if I didn't have to," he said. "I'd like it more if the world didn't require my posturing."