Elizabeth McLain, she/her, Instructor of Musicology at Virginia Tech

Disability accommodations and inclusive pedagogy can be challenging under the best of circumstances, but they become especially daunting in the performing arts classroom. However, disabled artists have always been here. Based on lived experience as a disabled student and current instructor in Virginia Tech’s music department, as well as a professional member of RAMPD: Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities and cross-disability facilitator for documenting the inaugural CripTech incubator, I will offer some practical frameworks for approaching true inclusion for disabled student-artists. Next, we will brainstorm strategies together. I invite you to bring hypothetical or anonymized real-world situations for us to problem solve together. The majority of the daily experience of disability is creative problem solving, which is why wisdom from the disability community is the secret ingredient of inclusive pedagogy of disability.

Elizabeth McLain, PhD. is Instructor of Musicology at Virginia Tech. Her lived experience as a chronically ill cane-wielding autistic compels her to transform music scholarship through the principles of disability justice. Co-chair of the Music and Disability Study Group of the American Musicological Society and a professional member of RAMPD: Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities, her research on disability culture and the arts has an (auto)ethnographic bent, capturing an insider’s perspective on the creative lives of disabled artists. Her current book project is Krip Time: the Rhythm of Disabled Music, Life, and Activism.