Excerpts from "This is What we Think"

by:
Daniel Doherty, Richard Hughes, Patricia Phillips,
David Corbett, Brendan Regan, Andrew Barber,
Michael Adams, Kathy Boxall, Ian Kaplan and
Shayma Izzidien

If you want a copy of everything that we wrote in ‘This is What we Think’ please write to:
Jo Frankham
ESI, School of Education
University of Manchester
Oxford Road, Manchester
M13 9PL
jo.frankham@man.ac.uk

Or see: Goodley, D. and Geert Van Hove (Eds) (2005) Another Disability Studies Reader? Antwerp: Garant.

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This article has been written by all of us. Some of us know what it is like to be learning disabled; others are university researchers who don’t know what it is like. We had lots of meetings about writing the article and we used a tape recorder to make tapes of what we said at meetings.

The university researchers asked questions during the meetings to make sure that they had understood what people were saying. They also listened to all of the tapes and changed them into writing. In our article, we mostly used the words that the learning disabled writers said on the tape without changing them. We also used large print and put in some pictures. The order was then changed around so that the article would be easier to follow and each section of the article was read out loud week by week, and checked and changed, if necessary, by members of the group.

One of the first things we did was talk about the words we would use to write about people in our article. The learning disabled writers said that people should be called learning disabled . ‘Learning disabled’ is the name we have chosen for ourselves, it widens it to more than us, to other disabled people. Disabled means the same, whatever disability you’ve got. ‘Learning disabled’ is the words we would use, not being told to or given by professionals. We don’t like the old words that people used to use ages ago. We won’t use words like that in our article.

We talked about whether we would have two parts in our article; one part for the learning disabled writers and a ‘professional side’ for the university researchers. In the end we decided that if we did two separate sections we wouldn’t learn from each other; it would be like ‘them’ and ‘us’. It’s better all in one together with everybody helping and learning from each other, so the two groups have worked in partnership writing this article together. But really there haven’t been two groups because all of us are researchers and we have supported each other in writing this article. The university researchers, who don’t know what it is like being learning disabled, have supported the learning disabled researchers to write the article and they have learnt from the knowledge of the learning disabled researchers.

Things have changed; the world has turned now. It's time to stop it always being the professionals doing everything. We want people to listen to us; listen to us and learn from us. There's a lot of things that are misunderstood or mis-quoted about learning disability and it's time they included what we've got to say and what other learning disabled people have got to say, not just the professionals' and experts' views.

We don’t think university people should double check (or “peer review”) this article. No disrespect to university people, but they don’t know what it’s like to be learning disabled, they don’t have the knowledge. If you get university people double checking this article, they won’t be able to say if it’s good enough or if it’s not good enough. We think our article should be double checked by another group of learning disabled people. And they would get the opportunity to know what we are doing too. The more learning disabled people who get involved in this article the better.

Some of us work with other disabled people who aren’t learning disabled. They generally have the same views on what we’re saying, so maybe it wouldn’t need to be another group of learning disabled people that checked our article, maybe it could be another group of disabled people, it would be better than professionals or university people checking it.