Reflection

My socio-economic and racial privilege had blinded me to the problems across the globe. Focusing on the social, racial, economic issues in the United States, I rarely thought about how my daily actions impacted others from other nations. The articles I read about the sustainability efforts by the four major cloud providers were mortifying. While each promotes their “green” initiatives, the investigative reports show something entirely different. The photos of men digging cobalt by hand in the Congo are seared into my brain with a regrettable sadness of my past eagerness to purchase the latest Apple device. While the technology companies are finally succumbing to desperately needed sustainability changes, I fear it may be too late as consumer greed has taken over the world.

The University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point Education Sustainability 915 Creative and Innovative Technology Thinking course has opened my eyes to many injustices worldwide. It gives me hope that my classmates and I are eager to help create change locally and globally.

My major takeaways from this course are not all gloomy. I have never created graphs in my life, let alone visual and interactive charts. In my adult career, I have not spent much time looking at statistics. I found this experience to be very eye-opening. I spent countless hours scouring for appropriate data regarding the violence on people with disabilities and mental illness. Moreover, an equal number of hours of researching data shows the benefits of art for people with disabilities. There are many data collected about mental illness. I found many holes in this data regarding individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Data about people with disabilities is challenging to assess, and many researchers have not focused enough on this population. Since many government policies are based on this type of data, it is not surprising that people with cognitive disabilities are overlooked in education and social-economic programming.

I wanted to do more than show the data visualizations from the last project in the app development project. I wanted to create an app that may be useful for others interested in art and people with disabilities. I wanted to create an app that I would use. I found twenty adaptive art programs for people with disabilities in visual art, music, theater, and dance. There are many more adaptive art programs in the United States, so this list is only a start. It will be helpful for art lovers and travelers to find galleries and theaters that are inclusive. After reading all the statistics about violence against people with disabilities, I needed to focus on something happy and cheerful. It was inspiring to learn about many adaptive art organizations in our country. It made me feel less isolated in my drive to create more creative opportunities for this population.

After being the teacher for twenty years, I was nervous and apprehensive about taking a class, especially a technology course. The research and readings I did this summer were what I needed to pursue this community-based teaching. Since I am not in the doctoral program yet, it was amazing to see the program firsthand. I will be submitting my application to be accepted into the program this fall.