Help Teach

Help Teach: Episode 13 - Para Parenting Pt. 1
Mihai Covaser: [00:00:00] Welcome, learners and learned alike, to season two of Help Teach.

Mihai Covaser: Hello and welcome back to our community audio project. I am your host, editor, producer, and project co-lead: Mihai Covaser. I am also a youth living with a physical disability. My most formative experiences living with a disability have come in the Canadian public education system. Many students like me, with physical, emotional, or mental challenges, go through their years of schooling lacking the supports and accommodations they need to partake of the same opportunities offered to their peers. The vision of this project is to provide educators in Canadian classrooms, students with disabilities, and members of the general public, with the tools and knowledge that they need to make our institutions more accessible and inclusive for all. Join me and a diverse cast of guests as we explore perspectives on disabilities and education in this podcast series. One last message for you teachers [00:01:00] tuning in: Listen in each episode for our key takeaway that you can implement in your classroom today to help us further this vision.

Mihai Covaser: Today, kicking off season two, I would like to first begin with another huge thank-you to all of the guests that have come on the show so far, everyone who has helped to raise this project up from the ground in all aspects, from editing and production to speaking on the show, as I mentioned, and of course, all of you fans for tuning in and listening. I couldn’t have done it without you, and I look forward to all the great conversations we’ll be having, starting today! And, to kick off this season, I would like to welcome to the show a very special guest. This guest is not only a researcher and a Paralympian, but also another person living with a disability who has some great experiences to share. So without further ado, I would like to welcome my guest [00:02:00] for today’s episode: Dr. Jaimie Borisoff. Jaimie, welcome to the show.

Jaimie Borisoff: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Mihai Covaser: So I know that we talked about our show today–you know, we talked about a number of subjects that are going to come up. This is going to be a bit of a longer conversation split into two parts, so right now, you’re listening to part one and please stay tuned for part two, in the future. But as I do with all my guests, I’d just like to invite you first to tell us a little bit about yourself. Maybe where you are, some of your history and disability, or with your work…whatever you’d like to tell us.

Jaimie Borisoff: Sure. First of all, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. I love this project, what you’re trying to do. So my name is Jaimie Borisoff. My occupation is the director of Make+ Applied Research Group at BCIT–the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Right now, I’m joining you from my office in Burnaby, where BCIT is located, although I live in Vancouver, which I love. [00:03:00] I love to take advantage of Vancouver’s parks and bicycling infrastructure. I have a disability myself; I’m a T-4 paraplegic spinal cord injury, from a car accident that I had in 1989, so it was a long time ago, over thirty years ago. So I’ve spent a lot of time using a wheelchair and living life with a disability. I was nineteen when that happened and that was after my first year of university, and so I’ve basically spent my entire adult life with a disability, with using a wheelchair, with navigating life like that. What I do at work is we do applied research. I wear a couple different hats; one of them is running my own research program. I run Assistive Technology Research and Development, so we try to design better wheelchairs, better assistive technologies. We design adaptive exercise equipment, and also technologies that may help people with disabilities. But the other hat I wear [00:04:00] is that I direct an applied research group with many other team members, and we partner with local businesses and other academics at SFU and UBC, for instance, around some of their research projects. So, for instance, maybe a professor at UBC has an idea for a prototype new device, a medical device. He might come to us to prototype it and design it for them.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm. Very interesting. So, as you’ve mentioned, there are a few different hats that you wear in your daily life and, you know, this’ll come up over the course of the conversation, I’m sure, but the place I want to start for the part one of this discussion is another hat that you wear, which is that of a parent. Now, I know that, as you said, you had your accident at nineteen, which means that you didn’t go through youth with a disability, but now you have children of your own, yes? Both school-age, and you’re navigating life as a parent with a disability with students in the school system, so [00:05:00] I want to start by asking you that: When did you first start to encounter challenges with being a parent with a disability? And I should mention also that this is a perspective we haven’t had on the show yet, which is why I’m so excited to talk to you today. We’ve had students, we’ve had teachers and some parents as well, but this is something new and, I think, a perspective that’s really interesting to explore, so yeah. When did you first encounter challenges in that regard?

Jaimie Borisoff: Well, I think that’s an easy question for me to answer, because the answer is probably immediately, soon as my son was born. I have two sons; they’re thirteen and nine years old. I mentioned I use a wheelchair, so you can imagine anything with wheelchair accessibility issues will be compounded, being a parent of a baby. I also mentioned I have a T-4 spinal cord injury. That means I have very poor trunk function, so I am paralyzed from about the chest down. So I don’t have good stomach muscles [00:06:00] and trunk muscles, so I can lose my balance really easily. What that means is, I often grab my wheel or grab the back of my wheelchair to, say, lift something, lean over, to reach, to do a lot of different activities. And so I think that’s a really good example of you can now think about: what is a newborn baby like? They’re little noodly creatures, they can’t stabilize, they can’t hold their head up. If you’ve ever held a newborn baby or seen one being held, you’ll realize you’re using two hands. Your one hand is holding the head, the other one’s holding the body.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And I found that to be challenging, unless I was in my command center. That was my couch. I could be in the couch in my living room in our apartment. I’m really stable, I’m kind of slightly reclined, and I’m super comfortable. If I lean one way or the other, I can’t fall over; I’ll just fall onto the couch, I won’t fall out of my wheelchair, for instance. I was far more comfortable with our baby [00:07:00] when I was on the couch, instead of, say, being in my wheelchair, which is quite a tippy wheelchair. It’s kind of a low back rest and so– It was really interesting to navigate those challenges to figure out how am I gonna interact with this baby, how am I gonna take part in the caregiving?

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: How am I gonna change the diapers and all those sorts of things.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, so, I mean, how did you end up navigating those challenges? I’m curious, because I had a conversation not too long ago with a contact of mine–you may know of him, his name is Marco Pasqua. He does quite a lot of work, again, accessibility-related, a lot of public work, and we actually met through an organization called Variety, the children’s charity, at first, and we hosted some events together. But he was telling me–yeah, yeah–and so he was telling me about how he adapted his home in all sorts of ways for wheelchair access, including desks and things to roll under, a specialized crib, all these other things. I know he’s crazy about all that accessible technology, [00:08:00] but I’m curious: how did that look for you?

Jaimie Borisoff: Similar to Marco. I did a lot of adapting things. Not so much in my apartment, per se; we still live there, it’s a wheelchair-accessible unit in our apartment building, so it has all those features. A wheel-under sink in the bathroom and the kitchen, and lower shelves, and that sort of thing, so that didn’t need any adapting. But let’s start with this couch, this–what I called my command center, so to speak, when I was looking after the baby. There I could change diapers, for instance, I could put the baby beside me, I could lean over, I could lean on my elbows and my arms and be fully stable and balanced, and I could manipulate the baby and put a diaper on and pick him up again and all those sorts of things. So it’s super comfortable there. But now, when I wanted to move with the baby, that was an interesting challenge, is how do I–And really just keep in mind, this is only [00:09:00] the very first few weeks and months when the baby is really–

Mihai Covaser: Sure, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: Helpless and not able to stabilize their head and their body and that sort of thing. When it got into, you know, several months old, the baby was crawling and then that was a really cool time when they could almost grab onto my wheelchair and crawl into my lap with me, of course, helping to lift. But before that, I made a little seat so they could sit on my lap. I’d put them in the seat and it had handles on it. I could start with the baby on the couch, put them in their seat, transfer it to my wheelchair, and then grab the seat by the handles, put them on my lap, and strap it to me. So Evan was his name–is his name–He was secure and with me. And that was great; I could wheel in the community with him like that and we were very stable, very mobile, very functional that way.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And there’s one other neat little thing I did, and the other one was the crib. You mentioned Marco probably did something with his crib; I did something similar as well. [00:10:00] One of my first inventions, one of the first things I ever designed was the wheelchair that I’m using now, that was commercialized, called the Elevation wheelchair. And it has gas springs that lift the seat up and down. And I thought about–It’s kind of a little bit like a person has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I had this Elevation wheelchair with gas springs, and I thought it’d be really cool to put a gas spring into a crib, and what I did was I made the front section of the crib, the front wall of the crib–Think of a DeLorean or a Lambourghini door.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: A Lambourghini door, how it scissors up. I made the front of my crib scissor up with a gas spring, and it would just stay up there, and the gas spring would hold it up there, and then the entire volume of the crib was accessible for me to manipulate.

Mihai Covaser: Ah, interesting.

Jaimie Borisoff: So it was a little bit of a fun project, but very useful and it’s one I did with both my boys and it worked really well for me.

Mihai Covaser: Interesting, putting the engineering [00:11:00] skills to work there, hey? Following that, we get to school-age, right, pretty shortly afterwards. You know, five, six years old and you’re getting into school and I–Seeing as that is the primary focus of my show, but also I know you have quite a lot of experiences in that regard, what was it like, getting to school-age with your two boys and then having to navigate that? At least, the first time around; maybe the second time, you had some tricks up your sleeve, but how was it when your first boy started school and you had to navigate that experience?

Jaimie Borisoff: Oh, yeah, thanks for that question. The short answer is that it turned out very well, but let me tell you a little bit about how we got there, because it was actually quite difficult. And the second kid–no problems, we had figured everything out by then.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: As every parent does, when you have a child in preschool and kindergarten is coming up next year, you start to [00:12:00] wonder: where does your child go to school, what our catchment area is. In Canada, you do French immersion and you do English-only, all these sort of things you wonder about and have to figure out, and then where are those schools? Are they the same school, are they different schools? It depends on where you are in your school area, and as I said at the beginning, I live in Vancouver, so we’re dealing with the Vancouver school board, and we made a decision that we would like to, if possible, go to French immersion.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And we live very close to a French immersion primary school, really just two blocks away, but it was one that was in our neighborhood for many, many years; we’re very familiar with it and one that we knew was not very wheelchair-accessible. It was the site of voting booths, for instance. When elections happened, the votes would happen there, and I would go there and have to have one of the election officers bring down one of the voting booths from the gymnasium, because it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm, mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: It was one of the very older schools, [00:13:00] it was slated for replacement, at that time, some time in the next decade, and so it was–Yeah, as we can all imagine, that there are these older buildings around Vancouver and around the world, for instance, that aren’t very wheelchair-accessible.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: So that was the school that we would normally be enrolled in, and this was a problem to me; I wasn’t very happy with, say, not being involved in the classroom and not being able to take my son into the school and participate in assemblies or school meetings and all these kinds of things, right? So I approached the Vancouver school board with a phone call to their front desk and asked to talk to someone about this problem, and that started off this whole chain of events and an interesting experience of trying to navigate the Vancouver school board as a parent with a disability.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And at the time–I’m not sure what it’s like now, but at the time, if we went to the webpage and looked at the resources. [00:14:00] there was no obvious links about wheelchair accessibility at schools in Vancouver, there was no phone number, there was no helpline, there was no information at all.

Mihai Covaser: I can say that it hasn’t much changed, unfortunately. I mean, if you look at many–I mean, at least in the areas that I’ve seen, school boards around the area here, definitely isn’t the case that that information is easily accessible and, as you say, sometimes you have to be the trailblazer. I mean, I was thinking about you were saying that with your second son, there were no problems because you’d established that, but I’m an eldest son as well, so it was definitely a bit of trailblazing, but yeah. Go on.

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah, so we–I called the front line or whatever, the main info line for the Vancouver school board and talked to a person, and they were–I describe it as almost astonished that I was calling them about this problem, like it’s one that they’ve never heard of before, that someone might inquire about wheelchair accessibility at their schools. And they wanted to really just [00:15:00] pass me on to the facilities department, because they’re the ones that deal with–with access to their buildings, and I was trying to explain to them how it’s really not an access issue, it’s an issue of, like, which school can we access, can we go to with our child; our catchment area school is not wheelchair-accessible, I know that already, I don’t need to talk to anybody about that. And they weren’t very helpful; they were almost offended that I was asking them such questions, and so that didn’t go very far.

Mihai Covaser: That astonished me when you first mentioned that, this air of offense. Personally, I think I may have spoken on this show about a couple of teachers that I had, you know, that were a bit less openminded in that regard, but for the most part, I think I’ve been quite fortunate with the interpersonal experience there, but that–just to be like, “How dare that you have a question about your accessible school!”

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah, and I’m sure it was the wrong person on the wrong day, and they were having a bad day, perhaps, and that’s just the way, right. But fortunately, there was a good ending to this story.

Mihai Covaser: [00:16:00] Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And I decided to call the superintendent and got their administrative assistant, this woman who was super helpful. She was like, “I don’t know the answers to your questions, but let me see what I can find out and I’m gonna get back to you.”

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And that’s exactly what you want to hear, that–We don’t expect everybody to have the answers at their fingertips, but it’s great to hear the fact that they acknowledge it as a problem and they will try to find out some information.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, absolutely.

Jaimie Borisoff: And so, very shortly after, I got a call from one of the assistant superintendents, who operated in our area, in the schools in our area, and I told him the problem, and he’s like, “Well, yeah, that is a problem.” He personally had not dealt with a parent in a wheelchair, but immediately acknowledged that there was an issue and [00:17:00] he basically said, “Let me get back to you and see about a couple of things we can come up with.”

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: And I had also–At the time, we had an ideal solution in mind already, because my son was going to a preschool at a neighboring school, about a five-minute drive away, that we knew was fully wheelchair-accessible; it was in one of the newer schools in our area. It had French immersion, it had several friends of my son that were going there. We got to meet a bunch of other families and it was–

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: That would’ve been a great solution, so we told the assistant superintendent about that, and the short story is he was able to facilitate our entry into this school that was not our catchment area; we were outside.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: He was able to pull the strings such that that happened for us, and–Recognizing that it was one of those equality versus equity kind of situations, I think, where sometimes, you know, to be equal [00:18:00] would’ve been me going to this inaccessible school, everybody gets to go to that school, but, you know, being equitable means that sometimes, you have to treat people differently, and make arrangements and accommodations for people, so that they get equitable treatment.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think that’s part of the reason that I am so passionate about offering some solutions for educators that they can implement in their classroom easily, you know, quickly, and that really make a difference, so that maybe next time, someone has to go to a school in their catchment area, they can actually go, you know? And it facilitates the process, not just for obviously the people that get to attend an accessible school, but even all the bureaucratic parts of it that you don’t have to worry about anymore, right, so I mean, that’s the goal, but we get there however way we can, right?

Jaimie Borisoff: Yeah. And so in the end, it had a good ending and we ended up in a fantastic school, and both my sons have gone there, and my oldest son now has moved on to high school. It hasn’t been an issue at all, and yeah, happy ending.

Mihai Covaser: You mentioned, [00:19:00] in our discussion prior to this episode, a few kind of key elements that you would like to highlight or that define the experience for you, in terms of navigating the school system, and we talked a bit about the third, which was individuals within the system that are, you know, just willing to accommodate, to acknowledge the problem, and to try and find a solution, which is often what we look for. But you mentioned a couple of other things, too, and the first was this idea of self-advocacy. So I was wondering if you could touch on that a little bit. What is it like to have to advocate as a parent? Because as I know, as a student, you know, I’m in the system, I’m the one experiencing the classroom, I’m there, and so in a sense, it gives me the opportunity to point out some real concrete issues, and as long as I have the skills to self-advocate, which, again, are maybe harder to build at that young age, but I’m lucky to have had them, then I can, you know, I can sort of ask for what I need. But I’m wondering if that’s different as a parent or at least, what your experience was like.

Jaimie Borisoff: Well, I think it’s so important with anything, with disability, [00:20:00] probably anybody navigating the medical system in any way, it’s important. I think an example that’s very similar would be someone with a disability dealing with their insurance company for getting a new piece of equipment, for instance. Often, the insurance company will say, “No, you can’t have that piece of equipment,” and they know that a certain percentage of their clients will stop asking it; they will go away and they’ll be content with that answer. And then you can come back to them and say, “No, I really need this,” then they’ll say no again and another percentage of them will go away and leave them alone. But if you keep at it, you keep asking in different ways and bring more information to the problem, eventually you’ll wear them down and they will, you know, fund the equipment, typically. I think dealing with WorkSafe or ICBC or other insurance agencies, it’s very similar.

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm.

Jaimie Borisoff: In this sense, too, with navigating the school system, you know, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so to speak. You just–I had to, you know, keep at it, keep trying to find the person that will eventually help you, and so I think it’s just so important for [00:21:00] almost anything in our life to deal with things that are a bit different. Dealing with a world, a society that’s not quite optimized for you, as a person with a disability or someone that uses a wheelchair.

Mihai Covaser: You know, that’s an idea that’s come up with a number of my guests, this idea that the world is just not always built for you, right? And that’s why we talk a lot about things like universal design, principles that we ideally would like to see implemented on a wide scale, but they just do make the process that much easier, you know? And to, as you say, to keep asking for the things that you need–Often, it’s not even just a comfort thing, it’s like, “In order to complete this process, I need this support in my life.” I’ve seen that often, that if you ask for it enough times, someone will have the sense to change it, and that makes it better for not just you, but for every person that comes after you, right? I don’t know if you’ve talked to any other parents with similar experiences in your area or otherwise, but…

Jaimie Borisoff: I actually haven’t [00:22:00] met anybody in my area; I have a couple friends in other areas that have gone through the system as well, and we’ve, I guess, compared notes. And I think everybody’s situation is unique, and, you know, here we are. We were living two blocks away from a very old, inaccessible school. You know, if I was living by the school that we ended up with that was in our catchment area, I probably would not have had this experience; it would’ve been just easy for me to do it, I wouldn’t have even thought about it.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: I can think of a couple friends that live in the Vancouver suburbs, newer communities that have newer infrastructure.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And their experience was far different, too, because the schools were built from the get-go with inclusivity in mind. So, you know, it really is gonna depend on those specific situations.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. For sure, for sure. And the last element here that we’re talking about, this idea of the institutional mentality, or the system mentality, and the processes there. I’m always curious to ask guests that are older than I am: have you found, [00:23:00] over the course of the last–I don’t know–decade, for example, that things have changed significantly in your view, in terms of institutions implementing accessible features, making the processes easier for people. Is that something you’ve heard, that you’ve seen yourself? What’s your experience in that?

Jaimie Borisoff: Well, I think the short answer is that yes, there’s definitely been positive change. I think the awareness we have now has come a long way, but you know, you still get these little examples in a system that we think is a bit baffling. Yes, there’s been huge changes and huge improvements in North America, in various parts of the world and certainly where we are, but at the same time, you know, again, sometimes these little things fall through the cracks, so to speak.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: One example I can think of would be just before COVID. I can think of this themed restaurant that opened up on Main Street, and we were walking by and we popped into it. It did not have a single accessible table. [00:24:00] They were all the new kind of trendy, high, barstool, countertop-like tables. That to me is baffling, in our day and age, how they get a license to operate, how they get a liquor license, how they’re allowed to run an establishment with the permission of the city. They have to have a business license, right, they have to have a liquor license...

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: …the province and the city, that they’re allowed to do that and not actually have a wheelchair-accessible table. Yes, the door–I can get into the door, and they have a bathroom that is now accessible; these are some things that are pretty obvious in the building code that people have got to comply with. I don’t ever–or very rarely do I think about calling a restaurant beforehand to see if it was wheelchair-accessible.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: Thirty years ago, if I was going out to a restaurant, I would often call ahead, just to find out can I even get into the building. Now I don’t worry about that; occasionally, it backfires, but almost–very rarely does it. But here’s another example, again, of–It’s almost like a fashion or a style [00:25:00] of “let’s have high tables, because they kinda look cool” or–I’m not exactly sure why, but it’s trendy.

Mihai Covaser: Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: And it’s really difficult, obviously, to eat from a table like that in a wheelchair, so…

Mihai Covaser: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jaimie Borisoff: Again, the system should take care of that.

Mihai Covaser: Absolutely.

Jaimie Borisoff: When you get a license to operate, to open a restaurant, to be established, it would be very simple to show that, “Oh, we have an inclusive enterprise, we have an inclusive premise.”

Mihai Covaser: Mmhm, mmhm. For sure. I think that takes us really nicely into what I would like to offer as the key takeaway for this part one of our conversation, which is that, in the classroom specifically and in education, but also anywhere, it’s important to make sure that communication is consistent and clear. And obviously, as someone who’s running a communication project, maybe I’m a little biased to that, but nonetheless, I mean, as we often have conversations that “had we just known”. It’s something I hear a lot [00:26:00] from a lot of my guests; I know I’ve experienced it myself, and so what I would like to offer to educators listening to this episode is that when you’re sending outgoing communication about the school year, for example. Often, you know, teachers will send a little email to parents, saying, “Hello, welcome. This is my class, this is what you can expect.” I would really like to see people attach important information about accessibility to those parents and to those students. Just to mention, for example, “How is my class accessible to you?”, like, “Can you get in the doors? Do I put captions on videos? Do I offer, for example–Do I write neatly and largely on the board?” Anything that you’ve thought of and implemented, whether you heard it on a project like mine or whether it’s just something you’ve always done; I think it’s really important to have that attached and available to keep everyone in the loop, as to what’s accessible in your classroom, and I think a lot of parents and even a lot of students would appreciate knowing that before they get there and start the new school year.

Jaimie Borisoff: Absolutely. Great ideas.

Mihai Covaser: [00:27:00] With that, I would like to do a little something different and tell our audience that you have been listening to Help Teach, part one of my thirteenth episode, opening season two here with Dr. Jaimie Borisoff, and we’ve just finished a conversation about parenting with a disability. I did receive, however, an email from an audience member and to kick off season two, not only by having a special two-part episode, but this is the first time an audience member has gotten in touch, and they’ve said this. So I got a message from Gracie, saying, “A topic has come up a few times that has very much piqued my interest, and that is para sport and the Paralympics. One of my family friends had a sister who competed in the Paralympics a few years back, and it’s always been a topic that I was interested in, but unfamiliar with, as a person without a disability and that experience. One thing I’d love to hear more about is the process that goes into para sport: how you get into it, the types of competitions there are, and how it all works and is put together. I personally think it’s fascinating and I’d love to hear more at some point.” So I’d like to give a big [00:28:00] thank you to Gracie for offering that question for the show, and to our audience members: Make sure to tune in for part two of this episode, where we talk about exactly that. Thank you very much for listening and I’ll see you next time.