Oppressive systems and mental illness in higher education
‘Education is always remade in the praxis. In order to be, it must become.’ – Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed
This is a short summary of a video interview with Anna Nibbs from 2019 and worth being reminded of. Anna is autistic and was previously a Learning and Teaching Enhancement Adviser at the University of Sheffield. In this revealing conversation, Anna provides an expert and astute view of individual and systemic issues in health and well being and inclusion in the workplace, from direct experience.
At the same time this video interview was being conducted, in researching power and abuse in educational institutions, Jason Huxtable was writing:
“(in recent research)…it was found over 50% of arts students respondents had experienced ‘bullying and discrimination including sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour’. Specific cases of sexual abuse being covered up by institutions are particularly shocking.” — Huxtable J. 2019
We offer this to provoke thinking about stuck education systems and abuse of authority if there’s a lack of openness to diversity. As an autistic professional well placed to see and (unfortunately) experience some of the discrimination, Anna and I also discussed autistic culture shift, neurodiversity, combatting anxiety, mentoring, leadership and my community Autism Dialogues, in which she participated between 2018–2020.
Anna said, “I had a clued up manager who asked,
‘What does this person need in order to work well. Regardless of a diagnosis, what does this person need in order to do their job?’
She goes on to say:
“If the systems are poor and the experience of the workplace is poor, it saps energy and resources which means that there’s less energy available to deliver a good service to the end user. For me as a disabled person, an autistic person, I think that’s a huge thing because so much of our internal resources are sapped away before we’ve even got a chance to use them for the good that we want to bring into the world.”
“There’s a lot of talk about health and wellbeing but a lot of it is sticking plasters that don’t address the systemic cause of low well-being and mental illness among students and staff.”
So what are those systemic causes that result in the opposite of what the institution is supposed to do?
What are your thoughts or experiences about stuck education systems and abuse of authority?
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