Exploring Adolescents’ Understandings of Disability in a Blended Environment of Interactions

Abstract

Understanding how disability is socially constructed is important for establishing inclusive schools, since the ways in which educators and non-disabled nondisabled students understand disability affect their actions towards disabled students. As social interaction today is very often an interplay between online and offline communication activities, this study aimed to explore how young adolescents in Cyprus construct the concept of disability in a blended environment of interactions. A qualitative research approach was adopted involving focus groups with 18 adolescents, online and face to face semi-structured semistructured individual interviews, participant observation on a Facebook group set up for the purposes of the study, and the first author’s reflective diary. A combination of thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis and analytic elements from the field of visual semiotics were used for data analysis. Data analysis indicated that adolescents understand disability mostly through medical and charity models. Based on the data, these understandings arise from the construction of disabled people’s multimodal ‘invisibility/absence’, in both online and offline contexts of adolescents’ everyday reality. Suggestions for further research in disability constructions in blended environments, and implications for the field of inclusive education concerning teachers and pre-service teachers’ educational practice are discussed.