Socially Shaping Technology with a Group of Adults Living with Intellectual Disability through the Production of Self-Advocacy Videos

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This communication presents a collaborative action research with a group of adults living with intellectual disabilities (ID) who were caught in a housing crisis in Canada’s capital city. In January 2007, with the support of various partners, an Ottawa charitable organization started purchasing condos for its participants. Two years later, there are already 20 people living on their own. They each faced their own set of daily challenges, and women participating to the project were encountering very particular issues while going through their process of community and residential integration. In this study, we used collaborative action-research methods along with digital technologies in order to study particular problems participants were facing in their daily lives. One such use of technology was the production of a series of videos specifically tailored for each participant. In these videos, participants were voicing a message to people around them in their own way. Building from the premise that we remember 20% of what we hear and 95% of what we teach, participants were encouraged participants to use the videos to teach other participants something about a challenge they face in their daily lives. The objective of the communication is to reveal the production stages of what we called “self-advocacy videos” and to discuss how such videos contributed to the group’s community and residential integration process.

Stream: Special Education, Learning Difficulties, Disability

Paper: Producing Self-advocacy Videos Through a Process of Collaborative Action Research with Adults Living with Intellectual Disabilities

Dr. Ann-Louise Davidson is an assistant professor of Education at where she teaches in the graduate program in educational technology. Her research interests revolve around the changes brought by ICT in society and in the educational system. In education, she uses collaborative action research methods as a means to understand and explain the relations between pedagogy and ICT. In non-educational settings, she studies the impact of digital technologies on the social integration of minorities and marginalized populations.