Episode 37 Accessibility Narratives and Stereotypes
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.
0:32 Welcome to episode thirty-seven. In this episode we will be focusing on something that definitely comes up in relation to accessible pedagogy and accessible design possibilities which are the pervasive narratives, stereotypes, and false beliefs around accessibility and disability. This idea came up from a message I received from Heather Rissler who was asking about the role and the space of counter stories, which is a great question.
1:02 So this had me thinking about the kinds of counter narrative work that the folk who work in accessibility spaces have to do on a regular basis. A lot of the work that we do is in fact as much about retelling, and making sure that we have an accurate story to tell about disability, about who disabled folk are, and how accessible pedagogy works, than it is the actual design and assessment in those conversations.
1:31 So today I’m going to focus on three (but I think actually more like four) stereotypes or false narratives that we encounter often in the work that we do and what folk who are invested in being allies or accomplices to this work can do to spread the truth and not the lies.
1:50 Okay so false belief number one, that it’s easy to get accommodations at higher education institutions. This of course is absolutely untrue, not within the systems that we have in place at the moment. In fact, accommodation needs take so much navigation of different systems that often some learners will choose to not go through the accommodation systems just because of the time and the money that it takes to achieve those supports. A lot of this is because of the systems being ridiculously underfunded and also under valued. So if you hear a colleague say something that’s the equivalent of students can just go to their accessibility office on campus and get xyz accommodation like they’re going to Subway to get a sandwich, I think it’s your responsibility to correct them in that inaccuracy.
2:38 And to get an actual accommodation of course involves support from a medical team, it involves assessments from case managers, it involves time and planning to make sure that the accommodations are in place for the term they’re needed. And there is absolutely no deli counters in the work that we do.
2:58 So this takes me to false belief number two, which is that all accommodation needs are the same. The reason why the kind of work that I do as an educational developer is important is that the context of each individual class and each individual student is different. And also as we know, some disabilities can be episodic, or dynamic so even accommodation support for one learner can vary from one semester to the next. For example, chronic pain flares can happen at any time.
3:28 And so I know that if you look at all of the accommodations, and let us use extra time accommodation as one of them, it may seem as an instructor that everyone getting different extra times should all be the same time, but I assure you that there are real reasons for those differences. Some learners need breaks, some learners need extra time for processing. And all of these are individually dependent so you can’t simply just give one blanket extra time for everyone, because you often don’t know the situations, and those situations will change.
4:00 And so this takes me to false belief number three, which is that we can design a course, assessment, or activity that will absolutely work for all learners, every single one of them. And again I’m here to say no, and you’ve heard me say this many times. The idea of designing “for all” sounds good, in fact that framing and phraseology is used in a lot of UDL spaces because the folk doing this work truly believe that this is something that can happen. But the issue is that believing that no one will be excluded suggests a belief that all learners in some ways are the same, or that some subset of learners are all the same. And I have I have stopped counting the amount of times in the last year that I’ve used the phrase or something like it, “because we’re not all robots, at least not yet” to explain something. And and so here I am again using that phrase because we’re not all robots, at least not yet because that “for all” narrative suggests that there’s never going to be such a thing as an outlier, and I am here to tell you sure, yes, there are definitely outliers and in fact I can almost guarantee that there will be.
5:13 And so when I started this episode I said oh well maybe I should stick to three because three is a very manageable number for this episode, but here is a bonus false belief stereotype that’s connected to this design piece that we just talked about- which is false belief four, which is learners need to tell you exactly what their disabilities are, that they need to disclose everything to the instructor or members of the teaching team in order to be accommodated in a course. And there’s so much to be said about this. Institutions very much thrive on disclosure, and in fact in our hypervigilant world, disclosure is something that becomes almost part of this extractive system that we’re in. A person’s lived experience of disability, and the story of living with that disability, is a story that’s often is held as being necessary for trust or belief to be built.
6:05 But I’m here to tell you that nobody owes you this story. Nobody owes you their story. We talk a lot about when the pandemic first started about how some instructors wanted cameras on at all time. And then research started being shared about how this is not a trauma-informed or disability aware in any way. And you know some of the cases that were made in fact was that no one owes you a disclosure of what their living situation is like. No student wants that. So I guess misconception four is that somehow disclosure is necessary, and I’m here to say, no, maybe we just need a bit more compassion.
6:45 So that’s it, that’s episode 37 of Accessagogy, with a few stereotypes and false beliefs that you’re probably encountering in your discourse and narratives at your institutions, within your departments, and how we can really emphasize the truth and the trust and support learners instead.
7:04 Remember that I 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 elaborate on please ask.
7:13 As always if you have any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you would like me to address in this podcast, like Heather did, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy so that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I’ll try to include as many of these suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 37 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week!