Harry Potter and the First Order of Business: Using Simulation to Teach Social Justice and Disability Ethics in Business Communication

Course Design and Objectives

This introductory business communication course emphasizes that business and professional writing and speaking are culturally situated processes. To this end, students centralize accessibility for their intended audiences in their approaches to their assigned writing tasks. My class consisted of 16 students in their first and second years who were taking my course to fulfill their general education requirements. I had students in a variety of majors, none of whom were writing majors. The objectives and outcomes for the course were as follows:

Underlying these objectives was the challenge for students to understand how rhetorical appeals and document design function for various audiences across a variety of contexts. Accordingly, students were responsible for providing analyses of the rhetorical situations that arose throughout their planning and for providing support for their decisions about effective and accessible professional communication design. Students explored alternative ways to effectively connect with varying communities and to define communication and technology as they relate to varying differences and abilities. I identified three primary skills students need in order to design accessible communication: Students must be able to (a) evaluate the users’ communication needs in the specific rhetorical situation, (b) identify the essential function of any communication technology or tool, and (c) effectively use a communication technology or tool to respond to the communication needs. I saw this course as a way to prepare students to write across different settings and experiences by linking writing, cultural studies, and disability studies.

Structure of the Course

The course described here was the third iteration of the business and professional communication course set in theHarry Potterworld. The course centered on the students’ semester-long project, which was to organize a sporting event (Quidditch World Cup) for the wizarding community with particular emphasis on universal design principles. Universal design is a set of ideas and concepts that underscore access to as wide a range of people (and abilities) as possible. The simulation followed a model based on sports management, specificallySolomon’s (2002) An Insider’s Guide to Managing Sporting Events. In this version of the course, students purchasedMarkel’s (2012) Technical Communication(10th edition), as well asSolomon’s (2002)text. I also required students to purchaseNexon and Neumann’s (2006) Harry Potter and International Relationsto help them understand and negotiate the tensions that arose in theHarry Potteruniverse in the wake of the Second Wizarding War. These tensions were addressed in the course description that appeared in the syllabus. Because sports are often a conduit for bringing people together, particularly in the aftermath of a national tragedy, organizing a global sporting event after a major war in theHarry Potterworld provided the opportunity for me to have conversations with students about coming to terms with the changing national and personal identities in the wake of major societal changes.

Primary documents (what I refer to ashistoricaldocuments) were also integrated into the course with an emphasis on documents around planning for the 2016 Olympics. I chose them for two reasons: First, the Olympics is a large-scale, international sporting event, and the writers and organizers often have to attend to the same kinds of issues I ask students to consider in their own planning. Second, most of these documents were released in the months before the course began, so they were easily accessible on the official website of the 2016 Olympics in Rio (www.Rio2016.com/transparencia). The website has since been taken down and rerouted to the official Olympics website, without access to the documents.

Did It Work? Business Communication and Social Justice

N. N. Jones and Walton (2016)defined social justice research and pedagogy in terms of agency, collaboration, and engagement. With the space to collaborate, students felt a sense of agency and inclusion, demonstrated by the initiative many students took in order to ensure access of all kinds in their unit deliverables, including providing documents in multiple languages (including Braille) and multiple formats. Very quickly the class became less about how characters such as Mad Eye Moody (a disabled veteran with a magical glass eye) might navigate his way through this postwar sports spectacular and more about why and how sports venues, for instance, have the capacity to separate spectators based on class, ability, gender, and race. In this way, their desire to accommodate a fictional character transformed into a desire to interrogate accommodations and access—more specifically, the lack thereof—and encouraged them to understand how access and participation are conditioned by the contexts in which they arise.

More important, attention to accommodation gave students the drive to interrogate the implications of those sites and to treat them as representative of the values and cultures that built them. For example, in Unit 4 (Location/Venue), students were passionate about the venue choice—whether to build a new venue or use an existing one—often appealing to the access an existing venue offered, including parking for mobility-impaired guests. I urged them to consider the transportation technologies of theHarry Potteruniverse and asked them what the value of parking spaces would be to wizards who would likely arrive via magical means. Many students replied that transportation was not the point: Even witches and wizards have a right to choose whether they want to be magically transported to the venue or to arrive with other, perhaps nonmagical, guests. What ensued was a lively discussion of how the accessible parking should be designed; drawing on the design of accessible parking on campus, students brainstormed ways to improve this system. In fact, many students who were in this class went on to produce a report about access on campus, citing this particular unit as a motivating factor.

Indeed,N. N. Jones (2017)argued that once our pedagogical practices as teachers of business and professional communication are reconsidered in light of students’ agency, positionality, and inclusion, the business and professional communication class activities can become a grassroots way for thinking about diversity and social justice. In this way, an emphasis on agency is fundamental to a social justice approach to business and professional communication pedagogy: the agency of the communicator and the agency of the audience.Meloncon (2013b)argued that the body is what generates agency and that understanding it as a tool allows us to maintain an emphasis on agency at the forefront of all communicative efforts. Focusing on the bodies of the writers and audience, access becomes the central point around which ethical and effective business and professional communication practices can emerge.

Similar to a shift in the goals of the disability justice movement, this course serves as an appeal to shifting our structural beliefs about access.Shapiro (1993)described the disability justice movement as a “mosaic movement” that centralizes diversity and seeks to dismantle the systems of what leading disability activist blogger MiaMingus (2011)has called an “equality-based model of sameness” (para. 5). Where access and movement toward universal design and user-centered environments motivate most of the work at the intersections of disability studies and business and professional communication, disability justice asks us to move beyond access and “question a culture that makes inaccessibility even possible” (Mingus, 2011, para. 6). Thus, while the intersection of business and professional communication and disability studies provides a way to reimagine access, disability justice asks us to reimagine inclusionafteraccess. Disability justice looks more toward a social justice model that lends itself to and relies on intersectionality and interdependency so as to understand the varying experiences of being disabled. Emphasizing this approach in a business and professional communication classroom simulation provides students with a more nuanced framework for what it means to communicate effectively to specific audiences with specific access needs. When students are given agency in shifting their understanding of communication from a nondisabled center to a disabled one, the agency of people with disabilities is no longer enveloped in narratives of charity or care. When students learn the fundamentals of business and professional communication practices in a simulated workplace environment where access is expected, access and equality for people with disabilities is no longer something to be provided; rather, it iscreated, not as a retrofit but as a hallmark of effective and ethical business communication.

Conclusion

K. Jones (1995)noted that simulations provide an opportunity for students to make mistakes or even fail in a low-stakes environment. This is not to say that simulations set students up to fail but rather that simulations set students up to practice a form of communication that centralizes the voices and needs of as wide an audience as possible. This approach to simulations as something that engenders mistakes proved to be a crucial lesson for both my students and me. This course certainly had its unsuccessful moments: It was difficult at first for students who were not familiar with or fans of theHarry Potterseries to become comfortable with the simulation; many students wanted the class to be a class aboutHarry Potter; and as with most introductory writing courses, getting students to work collaboratively and offer constructive criticism to one another was difficult. However, on the whole, many problems I faced in earlier versions of this class were resolved by resituating my own role in the classroom. Unlike traditional pedagogy, teaching a simulation required that I step back and allow students to fail; stepping back allowed students to discover their own agency and value the agency of others. In other words, giving students the power to set their own course of action validates students’ experiences, knowledge, language, and culture, which, in turn, can help them develop their social and cultural identities and enable them to understand their history in meaningful ways. Students gain a sense of personal and social agency that extends to the world outside the classroom as well; they begin to feel as though they have the power to make a difference and to see themselves as makers of, as well as part of, history (Freire & Macedo, 1987). Therefore, what made this simulation successful—as opposed to the two earlier attempts—was its immersive nature.

I, too, had to situate myself within the simulation along with my students, and not just as the arbiter of it. I was their guide as we talked through the theories and practices of business and professional communication principles, and I drew on my own deep knowledge of the series to be their audience as they developed their own documents. By this, I mean that I took on the roles of the characters to whom they were writing. At the outset of each unit, I gave them the name of the character I would be and provided them with a quick reference guide for where they would find more information about these characters in the series and beyond. This became an exciting way to teach them audience awareness, as some of the characters I took on were former death eaters, war heroes, or even magical creatures. It was up to the students to decide how to pitch their documents to me based on my character’s place in the wizarding war.

More important, in choosing a simulation to facilitate difficult discussions, I had to balance the need to make the simulation realistic but not so real that it appropriated the experiences and stories of others. In an argument against using simulations to teach the Holocaust,Totten (2000)warned that simulations minimize, simplify, distort, and deny the complexity of oppression and the horror of genocide. With this in mind, I chose to useHarry Potteras a simulation because of the number of primary source materials associated with it: the Muggle-Born Registration Act, newspaper articles, Ministry of Magic documents, and even the characters’ own experiences and responses to the world around them. I was careful to draw only on these sources as a way for students to contextualize their project: The Quidditch event they were tasked with organizing was presented to them as the first after the conclusion of a brutal war chronicled in theHarry Potterseries.N. N. Jones (2017)has reminded us to recognize and embrace the concerns of students and ourselves within the political and politicized contexts in which we teach. In this way, students were not simulating the eugenicist practices against unwanted peoples in the series but rather responding to their situated and contextualized concerns so as to begin moving forward. Of course, this could only be done once the realities of the war’s horrors had been discussed and taken into consideration as they planned. It was during these moments when students drew on their own knowledge of the real world to try to understand the task they were taking on. For example, when discussing the design of the Quidditch stadium, a discussion ensued about the placement and accessibility of the top box; fans of the series know that the top box is accessible only by stairs, and that apparating—or teleporting—to it is illegal for security reasons. When the students wrote the official site proposal, they had to balance the security breach that had happened in the top box at the previous Quidditch World Cup with the need for access. To account for this need, students included a description of a network of transportation modes and guidelines that supported accessibility and connectivity without compromising security. Thus, what made this simulation successful—as opposed to my two earlier attempts—was my full commitment to both the simulation and taking on these uncomfortable conversations in a way that honored the real-life experiences and histories the students drew on in order to understand the simulation. AsGutstein (2003)argued, an essential part of social justice pedagogy is the students’ involvement in the solution to injustice. This involvement is possible only when students are given the opportunity to see their own experiences and knowledge as a valuable part of the learning process. Indeed, once students begin to consider questions that have meaning in their lives, they are more capable of grasping the systems, structures, and power relations that form their experiences. Simulation can create spaces for students in the business and professional communication classroom to consider the “unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols” that uphold marginalization, disenfranchisement, and disempowerment (Young, 1990, p. 41).

The value thatHarry Potterprovides to a simulation is the engagement with disability and embodied difference in direct ways—that is, in ways that help students see the impact their understanding of normality and difference has on their communication practices and productions. Rowling’s emphasis on Harry’s embodiment and sensations engenders a similar embodied identification between the text and the reader. Engaging in this kind of simulation, then, asks students to consider their relationship to their bodies, writing, and the cultural practices that shape their understanding of difference. With this understanding, students are able to engage with social justice issues by moving beyond seeing access as specific to people with disabilities to seeing access as an essential part of business and professional communication. In particular, because this is an introductory course, it establishes the field as always already considering access in social justice frameworks. Ultimately, the course described here addresses the growing need to expand our understanding of what business communication means, what it does, and the power of its practitioners.