Episode 46- Moral Injury and Accessibility
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.
0:33 Welcome to episode forty-six. In today’s episode I want to take a moment to reflect on a post that I shared on LinkedIn a few weeks ago about how moral injury is now being added to the DSM or the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. I take time to discuss how moral injury being added to the DSM has impact on accessible pedagogy and the way that we talk or maybe frame moral injury in our classrooms.
1:02 So any good topic of course comes with a story. So I’m going to start this episode with a story. Someone from one of those higher education resource companies reached out to me via email and asked if I would be interested in talking to them about this topic. They gave me options in the message about what that could look like, but ultimately I never wrote them back. And the reason deeply connects to moral injury.
1:30 Moral injury in higher education most often comes from a real tension in individual instructors, teaching teams, and staff members having morals or values that are in conflict with the policies, and actions that happen at the institution. Sometimes this comes from how the policies and values at the institution say that they believe in one thing, and then in practice it’s a very very different thing. A lot of this also has to do with seeing individual members of the institution as infinitely marketable, or ultimately a cog in the system. Who they are as a human gets emptied out for who they are in relation to the institution. Sara Ahmed talks a lot about this, and I will link to her work in the episode page, how having someone who has a title of say, I don’t know, accessibility person, does the work of accessibility without actually doing the work of accessibility. It’s the title that does the work. And so this also happens in higher ed adjacent spaces like that group that reached out to me last week.
2:32 That group which again I will not mention who it is, but honestly could be any random ed tech group in HigherEd right now because they all have the same set up, has in the past had deeply problematic framing when it came to the accessibility of the resources that they share. And have been, I want to say, I am going to use the word hostile, and I am not going to use that word lightly, but hostile to me when I brought up these accessibility gaps to the powers that be over there. And this is a common response to me and my work, I’m used to it. I get these kinds of responses all the time.
3:06 And though some of those accessibility pieces have been rectified, yay, what remains is that they really brushed off the accessibility things until it kind of became “fashionable” I suppose to care about the accessibility things instead of building that in from the start when they say that they actually are committed to inclusion. So when I see things like this this gives me ick, but it also gives me deep mistrust, because I start to question morals and values of the group and ultimately it’s how those morals and values are shown, and is it really about morals and values or is it more like morals and value as in value add to the group, just like what happens in colleges and universities.
3:52 So it made me think about how, yes dowe need to have a chat about moral injury and that being in the DSM- 5 and what it can and cannot do. But it should be in my space and on my terms, because the way that I support moral injury is through embedding opportunities for fostering trust. I’ve talked before about how I have made certain choices with this podcast, and why I do the podcast in the way that I do. I do this because I want folk to have trust in the things that put out there, the resources that I share, the topics that I think are important to cover in under 10 minutes.
4:28 I also have talked a lot in different spaces, at conferences, and even in workshops that I give run workshops on moral injury. Moral injury is a topic that is listed on my website as a topic that I’m more than happy to talk about to groups, and I have been talking about this since the pandemic started actually. But to do so you need to be in a space of trust. And to do so that discussion needs to be contextual to what is happening in your spaces on a real micro level. That you’re approaching a discussion of moral injury with openness and not in an attempt to brand something as this company or this institution approved this discussion of moral injury, because the moral injury in one department may be very different than another.
5:10 So this takes me to point one for today, which is having conversations about moral injury with students, with peers, with communities in higher education, has to take into account all the holistic ways that moral injury appears in micro or macro ways in the institutions. So it could be coming from the top, as I say through institutional policies or values or academic plans. But it could also be coming from departmental ways of working, departmental policies, or even signature pedagogies that happen to happen in certain disciplines. So if you’re an instructor, for example, who’s committed to inclusive pedagogical practices, but you’re in a department that is very much still in lecture, or Freirean banking model land, then that moral injury can be very real.
5:58 This is sort of connected to point two, which is awareness of technological disappointment leading to moral injury. We use so much technology in the work that we do, and a lot of that technology has connections to some not really great companies or practices. Sometimes we bring technologies into institutions or departments without vetting the tech for bigger concerns such as accessibility, or where the money for the contract is coming from or going to. Sometimes these decisions are made by committee, but more often than not they’re made up of committee members who don’t really have a lot of lived experience or holistic awareness of the connections that the tech company or the tech has.
6:39 And so you can refer to the story that I started this episode with. So basically if you’re in a space long enough, you gain experience about the products, the companies, and their marketing, and thus you know who you do and do not want to be associated with. This happens in spaces that we’re in in academe all the time. Think about the problematic sponsors for conferences. Like you know how surveillance companies are sponsoring higher ed conferences. All of those choices have real injury impacts that are ignored because capitalism and also brand awareness.
7:16 And so this brand awareness finally takes me to point three, which is bringing us back to the DSM. So I posted on LinkedIn about how the concept of moral injury in the DSM may give some value or discourse space when it comes to higher ed. That maybe now folk will start thinking about it, and talking about moral injury not as some thing that comes up and folk just roll their eyes at when it’s mentioned in departmental meetings, but something that is present enough to be put in something like the DSM. But I also acknowledge, as someone who very much works in accessibility and disability space, the harm is real in terms of what the DSM has done. The diagnostic tendencies in higher education, that are very much linked to a medical model of disability, uses the DSM to include and also exclude learners and members of teaching teams. We live in a time where if people do not come with pieces of papers signed by doctors then accessible design is ignored or you know accessible design is articulated as not being necessary. Lived experience has very little space in higher education, and that causes even more harm.
8:23 So moral injury being in the DSM is very very complicated. Complicated because it should not take it being in the DSM for people to actually take moral injury seriously or to put trauma-informed practices in place for it to not happen in the first place, and it’s complicated because the DSM is certainly not the trust space that higher ed needs, at least not holistically.
8:45 I have already spoken about the connection of accessibility and trust many times on this podcast, on episode 18 which I’ll link to I’ve talked about that as well. So if this announcement does anything, I hope it’s to bring awareness to more folk in higher ed about what moral injury is, how it happens in higher education, and how it’s connected to trust and the lack of trauma-informed pedagogies to be put in place in these learning systems and these learning spaces to decrease the likelihood of moral injury. And that maybe you should look at what kind of trauma-informed pedagogues are around doing that kind of work and support the work that’s being done in those spaces.
9:33 So that’s it, that’s episode 46 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of moral injury and how it impacts the work of accessibility. And a reminder that just because something is in the DSM doesn’t mean that it is a solution to what is happening. There’s some real work that’s needed in higher ed to acknowledge moral injury in a real way and to embed more trauma-informed pedagogies on-campus, online, and in policies in Higher Ed.
9:57 Remember as well 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, about moral injury and how it connects to supporting accessibility and accessible pedagogy, please ask.
10:11 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’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 46 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week.