Simulation Exercises in Disability Awareness Training: A Critique

This paper takes a critical look at simulation exercises. Little evidence exists that these exercises have a positive effect on either attitudes or behaviour but, despite this, they are used extensively in disability awareness training, both for children and adults. It is argued in this paper that by individualising and medicalising disability, and by focusing excessively on problems and difficulties, simulation exercises provide false and misleading information, and inculcate negative, rather than positive, attitudes towards disabled people. It is suggested that simulation exercises fail to simulate impairment correctly, and address neither the coping strategies and skills disabled people develop in living with impairment, nor the cumulative social and psychological effect of encountering social and physical barriers over a lifetime. Rather than using simulation as a means of attempting to understand the experience of disability, the paper concludes by advocating the use of disability equality training, which is devised and run by disabled people themselves.