This activity centers on analyzing if certain groups of student bodies, like aboriginal, international, disabled or transgendered students, are equally treated through the concept of Universal design. Our group’s topic is to find out whether transgender people on campus have the equal opportunities as other students. It’s quite interesting for me to have transgender community as an object of study but as an international student myself seems to limit my considerations for them.
Our approach started at the UBC work learn website, which is a platform that offers working opportunities for all current UBC students to develop professional skills and learn in a working environment. While we were browsing through the web page, its statements seem to be neutrally positioned so our research on it got stuck. The words that the site uses are so official and almost perfect. After we got advice from our TA, we realized that critical thinking on this site is quite important. Then we realized that is not just enough to be neutral. The site could be better help transgender students instead of being just neutral. So while we put ourselves into transgender people’s positions and try to think in their ways, our group came up with ideas including using a gender-diversified photo in the front page instead of a white male merely, promoting positions clearly reference transgender people, display stories of transgender people in “student stories” section and making direct statements about solutions to bullying on transgender people.
Those improvements, that we can think of, to the work learn website are heavily limited due to the fact that none of our group member is a transgender and also we don’t have friends as transgender. Without the direct access to transgenders all we can do is to try our best to make transpositional consideration for transgender community so those improvement could be helpful or useless even hurtful at the same time.
When I listened to other groups’ presentation, many of them have the same limitation as we have. Thus, they tried similar approaches like analyzing items in menu in the site and they discussed photos in the front page. For example, another group which is also responsible for transgender students pointed out that the web uses a photo implicitly indicating people’s gender in it.
To look more broadly at our subject, the common phenomenon tends to show that those communities(transgender, aboriginal, international etc.) seem to have the equal opportunities as others because, of many activities provided by our school, those sites use official, descriptive and inoffensive language to avoid conflicts or debates but it can bring along underlying problems like people may hold harmful stereotype while they are working with LGBT group of people. It could be called unspoken-unequal rules or silence violence. If problems raised above can’t be avoid or solved, it may becomes normal to have those discrimination on those groups. That is so called “self-fulfilling prophecy” as we learn in class. Once people tacitly approve wrong opinions from the beginning, it might becomes true in real situation. However, it’s hard to operate action which especially sets up for those groups of people because if they are specially treated, they are divided up from us. Maybe all they want is to be treated just like us. To further demonstrate, once they ask for equal opportunities, they admit about their abnormality and the ongoing inequality at the same time.