Professor Justin Haegele, Ph.D., likes to say he doesn’t need to be smart — he just needs to work hard and hang out with a bunch of smart people.
“That’s basically my life motto,” he said. But his body of work — and the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), which presented him its 2024 Outstanding Faculty Award last March — beg to differ.
Haegele, a native New Yorker who came to Old Dominion University in 2015, is director of the Center for Movement, Health & Disability and graduate program director in the Department of Human Movement Sciences and Special Education in the Darden College of Education and Professional Studies. He is a scholar in the field of adapted physical activity and tends to focus on school-based physical education participation. He has been named among the top 2% most-cited researchers in the world by Stanford University, and in June, ODU’s Board of Visitors named him the next Colgate Darden Endowed Professor.
Who or what inspired your entry into the field of adapted physical activity?
I was a master student in a program (at SUNY Brockport), and I was looking for ways to harness my work ethic — I think that’s something that I’ve had for a while, being hardworking. A faculty member mentioned a bunch of opportunities and I said, “I’m in for all this stuff.” And so, I went from having almost no experience to going to Alaska and volunteering at (what was then Camp Abilities Alaska, now Camp Webber), and then I went to Perkins School for the Blind. I got to live there for about a month and learned what schools for the blind were like, which was a really important experience. It’s interesting how one decision really can lead down a pretty long path that hasn’t stopped yet.
You have done a lot specifically with people who are either blind or visually impaired. What inspired that track?
I think it happened because of Camp Webber. I went as a volunteer. They had a pretty considerable leadership shift after my first year volunteering, and they asked me to come back and be one of the directors, which I had no experience and no business doing. But in my life, I say yes to a lot of things because it’s fun to see what happens afterwards.
"To me, the question isn’t, ‘What does inclusion look like?’ It’s ‘What does inclusion feel like?’” - Justin Haegele, Ph.D.
What are some of the biggest shifts that you’ve seen in the field over the last several years?
When I entered the field, the conversations were still mostly about inclusion. But, what I think we’re seeing now is a movement toward anti-ableism. So instead of just putting kids in the same space, it’s a lot of listening to the voices of disabled people about their personal experiences and trying to reduce systemic barriers to participation. I think the field is becoming deeper, which is really interesting.
What are some of the biggest challenges or impediments to ensuring that children with disabilities have equal access to physical education?
Early on the idea was, we need to get kids into spaces. But I don’t think getting a child into a space is enough. A lot of the research we’ve done is talking with disabled adults or disabled children about what those experiences are like within those spaces. And for the most part, within physical activity or physical education spaces, the experiences just haven’t been good. The next question is, how do we work with disabled people to help construct recommendations for teachers or researchers moving forward to improve those experiences? And I think what we’re going to see in the next decade is a lot of empirical work that is harnessing relationships with the disability community to ensure that we’re making sound recommendations.
What does inclusion look like when it comes to adapted physical activity? What are some of the biggest misconceptions about inclusion?
I think historically inclusion was used as a political tool in a lot of ways — just, like, this idea to get people excited about something. Sometimes people would say inclusion is a strategy and use it like a tangible thing. I’ve spoken to so many kids who have been in those settings that the experiences were not good and yet teachers would still argue that it looked good because the kids are together. To me, the question isn’t, “What does inclusion look like?” It’s “What does inclusion feel like?”
We contextualize inclusion as an intersubjective experience where kids are feeling accepted, a sense of belonging and a sense of being valued within whatever space or place it is. I personally do not think that inclusion and feelings of inclusion need to be restricted to only settings that people with and without disabilities are together. To me, the composition of the group in the setting is not nearly as important as how people feel in those settings.
Interview by Victoria Bourne. Edited for space and clarity.
Camp Webber
The program Haegele has been connected to the longest — since 2008 — is Camp Webber, a free, overnight sports camp for blind and visually impaired youth that is held at Camp Birchwood in Chugiak, Alaska.
Formerly Camp Abilities Alaska, it is now named for Margaret Webber, who was the executive director of the nonprofit that ran the camp for many years. She died in January 2020. For the past two years, the M.E. Webber Foundation, also her namesake, has donated money to ODU’s Center for Movement, Health & Disability to operate Camp Webber.
“Ally Keene is the Ph.D. student who runs it now,” Haegele said. “I think she’s doing a great job. And we’ve brought so many ODU students to Alaska at this point. One year, we had 11 students or alumni at the program.”
The composition of campers is usually about 85% Alaskans, including many Native Alaskan children, Haegele said. “One of the unique aspects is our volunteer group, which is usually one-to-one with the kids. So, if we have 20 kids, we usually have 20 volunteers. They fly from all over the world. Last year, we had a student from the University of Bío-Bío in Chile just to volunteer for the week at the camp.”
Activities include hiking, kayaking and standup paddleboarding, as well as beep baseball and kickball, which use audio cues and special equipment to alert and guide players.