Episode 17-Accessible Pedagogy Resolutions
0-0:12 Orthotonics Accessible as Gravity plays and fades out
0:14 Hello and welcome to Accessagogy a podcast about accessibility and pedagogy. I’m your host Ann Gagné and this podcast is recorded on land covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and within land protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Agreement, which is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
0:33 Welcome to episode seventeen. This episode, which will round out the first half of Season 2 is a bit of a mini mini-episodes where I’d like to lay out some accessible pedagogy resolutions for the New Year. I’m recording this as we are about to become December and this is the time of the year where folk decide on resolutions for the new year.
0:56 And part of my motivation for an episode like this is from conversations with others where they talk about and ask “well how can I work towards making my space more accessible?”. And each episode of Accessagogy tries to do this, but sometimes folk want a list, and so I’m going to give 6 suggestions that could act as your accessible pedagogy resolutions for 2024. Some are very timely for the season that we’re in and some will require very little explanation, and some may require a little bit more which is why this may end up being a little bit of a shorter episode. We’ll see.
1:34 So here we go. Resolution 1. In 2024 we will stop centring events around food and not respecting that some folk need to mask and that you are actively excluding folk from your space when the only thing that you think that will draw them to a space is food. Yes food is expensive, and yes you can support folk getting food, especially students, graduate students, and adjuncts and precarious workers, but when you have a space that centres on food people that want to mask will not feel comfortable there. You are creating an inaccessible event because everybody will be there being maskless and eating. You can have food, you can give people food, you can give them vouchers, coupons, to go cards, gift cards, those kinds of things. But remember that food is really activating for some people so think about how you’re setting up your event so that maybe some people will not feel very comfortable coming to it, this is especially important during the “holiday season” quote unquote.
2:40 Resolution 2. Stop with the tech ban solutionism. Please honestly. Every so often there’s this thread that will go viral about a professor wanting to ban phones or computers in the class. And then someone will say well you can’t do that cause that’s inaccessible, and then someone else will say well ya no disabled folk can use their tech, but they have to sit in the special place that I’ve designated in class. Please don’t do this. You are outing disabled students. Make 2024 the year where we don’t see threads like this going viral anymore okay.
3:17 Resolution 3. Model accessible practices in your pedagogy. Have masking options clear for folk. Have accessible hybrid options for engagement. Have captions, and ASL or LSQ or BSL or AUSLAN or whatever signed language is used where you are. This is even more important if you say that the a class, an event, a workshop, a webinar is about inclusion, equity or accessibility. If the space is not accessible then your content is not modeling what your space set up practices are plain and simple.
3:51 Resolution 4. Look for community building opportunities where possible and affinities between group of folk for advocacy work. Pool resources, no more siloed approaches, no more barriers for groups and for folk. I read this really great article about belonging the other day, which I’ll note in the show notes, and it talked about how important it is to acknowledge the different types of belonging that happen in academic spaces. Belonging does not mean the same thing for every person, and community needs to acknowledge that.
4:22 Resolution 5. Give yourself and your learners space for reflection. And give yourself and your learners space to reflect on what reflection is and how reflection can be done. We spend so much time going from meeting to meeting and doing things quickly that it creates lack of meaningful and authentic connection to the pedagogical practices and content that we’re framing in our spaces. Give yourself time to reflect, please, we all need time, and let’s find some.
4:51 And finally Resolution 6. Stop conflating terms like access, accessibility, accommodations, and UDL to mean all the same thing. I promise you these words do not mean the same thing, I’ve talked about this before on this podcast, and I can link to some other episodes. And when we say that these mean the same thing we are doing real harm and embedding real equity gaps in what we do. The common thing I see in higher education spaces is talking about access like access only means financial access which also allows for physical access, and this of course ignores accessibility points of view and disability points of view, that comes from design practices, architecture, and policy decisions.
5:37 So that’s it, that’s episode 17 of Accessagogy, with six possible 2024 accessible pedagogy resolutions that you can put in the practice come January.
5:48 Remember as well that I also want this to be the space where you can ask questions and share concepts that you’d like me to discuss. So if there’s anything that I mentioned here, that you would like me to clarify in future episodes please ask.
6:00 As always if you have any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you would like me to address in this podcast, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy so that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I will try to include as many suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 17 and Accessagogy and remember that Accessagogy will be back in the new year with new episodes sometime mid January. Thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Happy New Year!