Episode 34-Accessible Pedagogy Resolutions for 2025
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 thirty-four. This episode, which will round out the first half of Season 3, if you can imagine, is another mini-sode where I will lay out what I feel are again some accessible pedagogical resolutions for 2025. I tried to put off recording this as close to the end of term as possible in case there was some last-minute things that could come up in the eduspace that I’d want to include here. But I think I have given us some space here to reflect and see where your own resolutions can coincide with these ideas if any.
1:10 This year I am going to go for 4 resolutions instead of the 6 that I gave last year because I think that 4 is a bit of a more manageable number and actually relates to the first resolution- so here goes.
1:23 Resolution 1. In 2025 reflect on that to do list, and see what is a need to have, what is a good to have, and what is a nice to have, and never make accessibility the nice to have, make it the need to have. Sometimes we have too many to dos and it’s easier to relegate accessibility and inclusion work to the nice to have, but I am here to remind you again that inclusion and access is foundational to our eduspaces no matter what the systems or funding bodies may say.
1:58 Resolution 2. Check in on people more. Have some low stakes check-in moments in your class if you are teaching a larger class. This could be one of those which cat image are you moments. Or if you’re facilitating a smaller space this may be supporting conversations about difficult topics and concepts that may come up over the school year. So do those check ins in whatever ways are meaningful to the context of what you’re teaching.
2:26 Resolution 3. Which is kind of connected to Resolution 2, which is remember the human. Have opportunities to give yourself as an educator and the folk that you’re engaging with, either the students, or other faculty, or staff grace and understanding. There’s a lot going on in people’s lives right now, life is complicated for a lot of reasons. To make learning spaces more inclusive you need to be aware of those complications, and acknowledging that, and acknowledging that you will never know what else is going on in someone’s life and that they don’t owe you that explanation actually. So it would just be good to approach that with that in mind and with some grace, and to remember that we’re all humans and not robots, at least not yet.
3:10 And finally Resolution 4. Find your community. Now more than ever that community space is important and give the learners in your class the space to build that community space. Build in activities and time in your course design for people to connect and to connect in ways that are meaningful to them. This can be synchronously, asynchronously or any combination of the two. The micro-communities that we have in the places right now and that inclusive support will be incredibly important in 2025.
3:43 So that’s it, that’s episode 34 of Accessagogy, with four possible 2025 accessible pedagogy resolutions that you can put into your practice come January.
3:54 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.
4:05 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 34 of Accessagogy and remember that Accessagogy will be back in the new year with some new episodes sometime towards the end of January. Thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Happy New Year!