How a Traumatic Brain Injury Shaped Emily Tarconish's Mission for Disability Advocacy
Emily Tarconish thought she knew where she was headed with her career. A severe accident changed all of that. Now, she’s on a path to ensure that people with disabilities have advocates in the classroom and beyond.
Emily Tarconish always wanted to be a teacher. Her parents were both high school teachers. She figured she’d follow in her mother’s footsteps and teach English.
And then the car accident happened. She was a passenger in a car her dad was driving less than a mile from home.
She was 15 when the impact of the crash caused her to fly out of the car and land head-first on the road. That she survived at all was a miracle.
“I have no memory of the accident,” says Tarconish, now beginning her third year as a teaching assistant professor in the College of Education’s Special Education Department.
“My memories of the next year are also vague due to post-traumatic and shortterm amnesia.”
She was in a coma for nine days after the accident. She had experienced a severe traumatic brain injury.
“When I woke up from the coma,” she says, “I was like a baby in a fifteen-year-old body. I had to relearn everything—how to walk, how to speak, how to read, how to be around people. The injury has had lifelong effects on my abilities.”
She hopes to model self-acceptance and the need to be flexible and adaptable for students with disabilities. “I’ve come to fully embrace that I’m neurodiverse and that thinking and learning take longer,” she says. Tarconish acknowledges that self-acceptance contrasts commonly upheld deficit views of disability. “Disability is often positioned as a negative, and being able-bodied or neurotypical is the positive,” she explains. “People with disabilities are pushed to learn or act in the same way as people without disabilities, and in cases of acquired disability, the purpose of rehabilitation is couched in ‘returning to normal,’ or function before the disability. My brain injury changed most aspects of my life. It took some time, but I accept my abilities and needs and realize how crucial it is for environments to be accessible and accommodating.”
Pushing on With Her Dream
Her injury didn’t derail her aspirations to become an educator. But it did shift her perspectives on education.
“The first step to creating accessible education systems and communities is to create platforms for disabled people to share where barriers exist,” Tarconish said. “This is a particular need in postsecondary education.”
Using Research to Remove Barriers
“Teaching future teachers about disability is a big part of every course I teach,” she says. “I also want teachers to know that post-secondary education is an option for every student, from people with ADHD to those with intellectual disabilities. All those people can attend college, and we know that doing so leads to better employment and life outcomes.”
Leveraging Key Partnerships at Illinois
Tarconish is partnering with DRES (Disability Resources and Educational Services) to study effective practices for postsecondary disability services offices.
“One study I’m running right now examines the DRES coaching programs,” she says. “The research tells us that coaching for college students with disabilities is a highly effective practice, but it doesn’t exist everywhere. I’m interviewing students in the program to learn how the coaching affects them and how it helps them develop skills. I’m also collecting data to determine how coaching affects grades and self-assessments of student’s academic skills.”
Tarconish is also conducting a study on how peer support for students with disabilities helps students understand themselves and complements the accommodations they receive.
A third study explores how career counseling can improve the graduation and employment rates of students with disabilities; both rates are lower than those of their non-disabled peers. DRES offers an innovative career counseling service focused on disability—one of the few schools in the country to do so, Tarconish says.
Educators Need to Be Allies and Advocates
“Ableism is everywhere,” Tarconish says. “The world is inaccessible because it was built by able-bodied people for able-bodied people. This is unfortunately true of our schools, too—especially higher education institutions. Every educator needs to be an ally and an advocate. We need to challenge whenever we see inaccessibility and ableism, and we do this by partnering with people with disabilities.”