When I started thinking about who to write about for this assignment, I wanted to be intentional about thinking beyond learning as its own distinctive field. I ended up choosing Judy Heumann, a disability rights activist who is widely regarded as the “mother” of the Disability Rights Movement (Heumann, n.d.). While this may seem like an unusual choice for an educational technology assignment, I think that when we think about learning and technology, it is not just about the technology used in the classroom, but also the technology, structures, and environments that allow people to access learning in the first place.

Early in her life, Heumann experienced exclusion from education firsthand. She was denied access to public education and later faced barriers to becoming a teacher due to being a wheelchair user. After fighting for the right to teach, she continued her work advocating for greater access and inclusion for disabled people. These experiences became an important foundation for her lifelong work challenging the barriers that prevent people from fully participating in education and society.

What I find particularly important about Heumann’s work is how it expands the way we can think about accessibility in educational technology. Today, accessibility is often associated with tools such as screen readers, captions, and alternative forms of interaction. These technologies are important, but Heumann’s work reminds us to think more broadly about whether the learning environment itself creates barriers. Her perspective continues to inform conversations about education and ableism, including Anti-Ableism in Education with Elijah Armstrong and Anna Landre on The Heumann Perspective. Her advocacy also extended beyond education, as demonstrated through the online course Advocating for Work.

Weller (2020) comments on some of the technologies that are missed in 25 Years of Ed Tech and identifies accessibility as one of the overarching themes underlying the field. Heumann’s work helps expand this theme by showing that accessibility is not simply about adding assistive technologies. It is also about designing learning environments where access is possible from the beginning. This connects closely with Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which emphasizes designing learning around learner variability (Brand et al., 2012).

Heumann’s work therefore influences a view of learning in which access is not an accommodation added afterward, but something that should be considered in the design of learning from the beginning.

References: 

Brand, S. T., Favazza, A. E., & Dalton, E. M. (2012). Universal design for learning: A blueprint for success for all learners. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 48(3), 134–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/00228958.2012.707506

Heumann, J. (n.d.). About Judy. https://judithheumann.com/project/about/

Weller, M. (2020). 25 years of ed tech. Athabasca University Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993050.01 

AI Use Plan and Transparency Statement

I plan to use generative AI as a support tool during this assignment, primarily to help me work through and organize my ideas and revise my writing for clarity. I will not treat AI-generated information as automatically accurate. My guardrail is that AI will not be my final authority for factual claims or sources. I will determine what information to include based on my own research and will retain responsibility for the accuracy of my work. I will review and revise AI-generated suggestions to ensure that the final work reflects my own thinking and is supported by sources I have independently checked.

AI Reflection

Using AI, specifically ChatGPT, afforded me a way to think through an idea that initially felt somewhat outside the traditional boundaries of educational technology. Knowing that I wanted to write about someone from a disability perspective, Judy Heumann came to mind early on. Using AI as a thinking tool to talk through my choice of Judy Heumann helped me clarify the connections that I saw but initially struggled to articulate. I found AI most useful as a thinking and writing partner. At the same time, I needed to maintain control over the research process and critically examine its suggestions, particularly because AI can present information confidently without it necessarily being accurate. This experience reinforced that AI can be useful for developing and refining my thinking, but it should not replace my own research or critical judgment.