The Education System About Diversity With Ryan Raghoo

As part of my 12 week internship at Pulse Social, part of my job was to write and produce blog posts surrounding different topics within sports.

This particular blog post focuses on the importance of having conversations within the education system about diversity with Ryan Raghoo.

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Throughout the many podcasts created and published here at Pulse Social, one of the biggest topics that has come up repeatedly throughout them all, in regards to any and all subtopics, is lack of diversity. And this goes for all areas of sports: gender, disabilities, race, class, and so forth.

In an upcoming podcast episode with the founder of Enabled Not Disabled, Ryan Raghoo, we spoke particularly about the work he does within disability sports and the importance of having conversations around diversity within the education system as his main example.

One of the key issues he highlighted is how many of the words used to described or label people who may have something different about them is that they often imply things that then go on to create stereotypes around the word.

“All throughout my life, people have told me what I can’t do. I started to break down the word ‘disabled' and I broke it down into two words,” Ryan said. “You’ve got dis and then abled. If you put dis in front of most words it makes it a negative word.”

“What you’re doing by calling someone disabled is saying they can’t do something. And I fundamentally don’t agree with that. It’s not that I’m not able to do things, I might need adaptions and I might need to do things differently, but we need to change the way we think about things and the way we talk about things. We should be empowering people.”

A key part of Ryan’s job is going into schools to talk to students about his personal experiences as someone with a hidden disability, in his case Cerebral Palsy, in the sporting world and especially as someone who competed professionally in the World Juniors and the Cerebral Palsy World Games.

“I realised that it [talking to students and teachers in schools and colleges] is actually really powerful and it was something I wanted to carry on doing,” he said. “It’s always massively humbling. It’s something that I have to pinch myself at sometimes.”

The conversations Ryan has had with both students and teachers alike have led to many amazing impacts that he explained he has witnessed first-hand at these schools he spoke to.

Ryan said: “I have a box full of letters and posters that young people have drawn in schools after I visited. They sent me these and they spoke about how inspired they were and how much they learned.”

“And I have also seen how in the schools I have visited and gone back to two or three years down the line, the physical changes in the school where they have made things more accessible or they even now have disability sports as a provision,” Ryan said.

“The feedback I get back from teachers and people in businesses is how they wouldn’t have thought about it until I bought it to their attention. It’s always really positive.”

What is obvious just from speaking to Ryan is just how important it is to actually have these open discussions with people of all ages where everyone can learn something from one another.

The UK’s education system itself obviously has a lot of mixed opinions around how good it actually is and whether young people are actually being taught what is important and necessary.

However, it does seem that teachers and young people are very open to having people coming into schools to offer a new perspective on topics that are such a key and necessary focus within society.

Towards the end of the podcast though, Ryan also emphasised the importance of taking action following these conversations because it may be easy to talk about them, but actually following up with action is often something that goes forgotten.

“The longer I’ve been doing this, the less it’s become about me. It’s about change. It’s not just about awareness anymore. I realised that we’ve been talking about it for a while but what’s happening? Actually, I want to tell people about disabilities but I also want to give them the tools to do something about it.”

“The things is, because we have made so much progress, there’s no doubting it. If we look at where people with disabilities are in society today compared to fifty years ago, there’s no doubt about how far things have come along,” Ryan explained.

“I think one of these issues that we have, particularly in this country, is we tend to rest on our laurels. But there is always more to be done.”

In the podcast episode with Ryan, we also talked a lot about his personal experiences as an athlete in the World Juniors and the Cerebral Palsy World Games, particularly as someone with little experience in sports and coming from being scouted at university.

To listen to the full podcast, make sure to stay tuned here at Pulse Social by following and subscribing to our social media and YouTube channel!

By Abby K Lake

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Read the article at Pulse Social: https://pulsesocial.co.uk/blogs/f/the-education-system-about-diversity-with-ryan-raghoo