School Travel for Families Living with Childhood Disability

The rise of automobility during the past century has contributed to children becoming more sedentary and isolated from public life and, correspondingly, exhibiting reduced independent mobility and a troubling range of chronic health problems. Concern over these issues has led to an increase in attention to school transportation among planning scholars and practitioners. School transportation has come to be regarded as an opportunity for creating change since converting sedentary trips to and from school into trips involving active modes could help to mitigate the children’s health issues. Unfortunately, the increased attention to school transportation has come to pass with little regard for childhood disability. This dissertation engages school transportation’s childhood disability gap. Using a critical ableist studies perspective, attention is given to questioning and unsettling the ableist normative ordering of childhood disability as excludable within the planning and design of school transportation and school sites. A systematic review of disability’s treatment in the active school travel and children’s independent mobility literatures demonstrates and offers insight into the childhood disability gap. Following this is a presentation of an ethnographic research design that used photovoice, institutional ethnographic conceptual tools, and numerous inclusive measures to study how families living with childhood disability experience everyday school travel across Ontario, Canada’s Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Pilot study findings are then presented and discussed to demonstrate the value of piloting qualitative research designs involving disabled children. Lastly, findings about how families of disabled children experience parking at school are considered. The findings show how the families are expected and relied on to take on various types of inequitable work (e.g., work that is social, physical, and temporal in nature) to overcome normalized, ableist school site designs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Geography

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Ross, Timothy Paul

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Buliung, Ronald

• childhood disability
• critical ableist studies
• inclusive design
• photovoice
• pilot study
• school transport

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/101746

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/101746