ABSTRACT
The authors' Berkeley and Budapest experiences suggest that education informed by cultural disability studies promotes positive changes. This chapter realizes cultural disability studies promote an understanding of diversity and thus a place for dignity. It offers ways to eliminate stereotypical thinking and the resultant avoidance. In Hungary there is a tendency at some colleges to host seminars on how to communicate with disabled people. To promote this understanding, the academy should offer courses on these two components of Cultural Disability Studies and recommend them to students from various fields of study, including education, medicine, the media, law, architecture, environmental design, economics, and so on. The chapter considers what students who took the course in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and students who participated in the seminar at the School of Education at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, think about disability studies courses and their paradigm-shifting roles.
