Annie in wonderland

Difficulty, Not Discrimination: Literacy, Critical Thinking and Learning to Question What We Think We Know Why difficult conversations matter One thing I have been thinking about a lot lately is literacy, media literacy, and the importance of critical thinking — especially within disability and support conversations. We live in a time where people are surrounded by information constantly. Headlines. Short-form videos. Social media debates. Opinion pieces. Algorithms deciding what we see. Outrage cycles designed to get attention. In this environment, one of the most important skills we can develop is not knowing everything. It is knowing how to think. Critical thinking does not mean automatically agreeing with someone. It also does not mean automatically rejecting someone. It means listening. Questioning. Researching. Comparing information. Looking at evidence. Understanding context. And then deciding where you personally stand. That applies to everyone. Disabled people. Non-disabled pe...

This is a big topic, and honestly, there are so many layers to it that I think it deserves a series. So let’s start at the beginning. Imagine you’re a support worker trying to educate people on the realities of your job—not the glossy, feel-good stories we often see online, but the actual, day-to-day challenges. You post a video about violence in the workplace, highlighting that no one goes to work expecting to be assaulted. This isn’t just about the support worker; these incidents also affect other clients and their families. In this case, the setting was a day center environment, which meant that everyone there was impacted. When support workers are pulled away from small groups to manage these incidents, lower-support-needs clients can end up unfairly left behind. Support work is meant to be about skill-building, and if someone is experiencing frequent meltdowns, we have to ask: should they even be in a day center environment until they can regulate their emotions more effectively? ...