Experience disability

On July 3, 2021, visitors were able to experience disability at a stand in the Frauentor City Center in Görlitz. The stand was initiated by lecturer Dr. Carsten Rensinghoff  and was part of the seminar course "Self-awareness as a driver of inclusion". Rensinghoff himself experiences life as a disabled person on a daily basis. In 1982, at the age of twelve, he suffered a severe craniocerebral injury. Since then, he has lived with spastic hemiplegia on his left side and is physically disabled.

Students in the Shb 18 class of the Special Needs Education/Inclusion Studies degree programme at the Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences focused here on perceptual impairments. By drawing a star, students were able to experience impaired eye-hand coordination, since the drawing was done solely by looking in a mirror. Another visual challenge involves naming the visible color when the color is written down differently. For example: the text is written in “black,” but the font color is red. In this case, the student must say “red.” For people with specific disabilities, this leads to confusion that might not even catch the eye of someone without such a disability. This problem is often the result of a neurological condition, such as a stroke.