Episode 23- Accessible and Supportive Spaces
0-0:12 Orthotonics Accessible as Gravity plays and fades out
0:13 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.
0:34 Welcome to episode twenty-three. In this episode, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be in a supportive space, as a student, as an instructor, as a staff member, or even as a community member that’s coming into higher education spaces. I want to reflect on what needs to be in place for a space to feel as though it is supporting others in their work and in the things that they value.
1:02 I will outline four things that will help model an accessible and supportive higher education space in order for folk to feel connected to where they are working, studying, creating and sharing knowledge and lived experience.
1:17 So One, the first thing we need to keep in mind is having lines of communication open that are meaningful to folk. There are certainly ways for folk to keep in touch and communicate in the spaces that we find ourselves in. In fact there’s probably too many ways to communicate and connect if that’s possible. But in order for folk to feel supported and in the space that they’re in, and that that space models accessible practices, the way that communication happens has to be meaningful to that person, and in a way that they can access it. So some people do not respond well to instant messaging programs like Teams or Slack, or text messages, and some people don’t like emails at all because they feel they get buried in them. And we talked about emails way back in episode 4.
2:08 But what needs to happen is a conversation about how best folk want to receive information and keep lines of communication open. That may be you know, meeting either virtually or in person if both parties feel comfortable doing that. Being able to have that conversation about how folk want communication to happen can mean the difference between feeling like you’re talking with someone as opposed to being talked at or talked to. And that difference is the difference between feeling supported and included and being in a place that does not value your point of view. So the more that we can open up those lines of communication, and that communication to be meaningful to that person, the more that support and accessibility will be there.
2:58 Two, connected to communication, but a little bit different is the deep need for transparency. There are already so many things that happen in higher education that are unclear, from policies to procedures, and that lack of clarity and transparency are barriers to exchanging ideas and knowledge. There’s been a lot of discussion about the TILT model in Higher Ed, which I will also reference in the show notes, and this need for transparency in teaching and learning extends out from the classrooms, the labs, the seminar spaces to how meetings are conducted and organized, to how bigger decisions are made institutionally or even departmentally. The more transparency that there is, the less assumption of someone knowing why a decision was made instead of explaining the reasons, the more accessible and supportive of individual lived experiences that space will seem.
3:54 Three, try to model a trauma-aware framework in higher education spaces. I know that I’ve mentioned this a lot in this podcast in previous episodes, but there’s a real connection between a trauma-aware practice that brings in things like choice models, community building, trust, empowerment, and the feeling that a space is both accessible and supportive. The more that learners, instructors, staff, and community partners feel empowered to make decisions that will impact them, and thus be trauma informed, decisions that will impact their classrooms, their research, the scope of their practice, the more a space starts to feel more trusting and aware of the folk who make up those spaces.
4:41 And that leads to four, which is the need for positionality-informed practices. And what this means is having more conversations about positionality, intersectional positionalities as well, and making conversations about positionality part of that decision-making process, part of the curriculum, part of meetings, and as I mentioned before being more transparent in terms of what programs are for, who they are for, who they’re not for. And that means that there be more opportunities to talk about who are being part of these decisions and who are part of these discussions and who is clearly being excluded, what real representation is needed in the context of this learning space and the resources being shared.
5:28 I was looking at the etymology of support and I noticed how this idea of advocacy really intersects with it. Supportive and accessible places are places where folk feel comfortable advocating for inclusion, noting the lack of accessibility, and enacting the kind of change that means that there maybe difficult conversation that needs to be had, and yet, it is from those difficult conversations that a better environment is created. I know that as we get closer to the end of the academic year, at least in North America, there’s this push towards wanting to park these ideas and initiatives for next academic year. And some of this is of course logistic, but what that also does is that it creates possibilities for a lack of support to linger over the summer months or the few months and more inaccessible spaces to become even more inaccessible.
6:23 Folk want to feel supported because in that support is an acknowledgement of value and care of who they are as humans and the ideas and experience that they bring. By thinking about who to communicate with and how to communicate in meaningful ways, by being more transparent in the decisions, by keeping trauma-aware practices in mind, by having a commitment to positionality that includes socio-cultural and also socio-historical awareness, people will feel more supported and part of an inclusive and accessible eduspace.
7:00 So that’s it, that’s episode 23 of Accessagogy, with a short discussion on the need for supportive spaces and how that can in turn make for more accessible spaces for us to work in, to be in, to write in, and to research in.
7:18 Remember as well that I also want this to be a 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’d like me to clarify, please ask.
7:29 As always if you have any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you’d 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 23 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week!