Episode 51- (De)Radicalizing 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.
0:32 Welcome to episode fifty-one. In today’s episode, I want to talk about how accessibility or conversations about accessible pedagogy some how seem to framed as radical, and I want to pick that a part a bit so that we can problematize why there’s these connections and what we can do to move accessibility forward.
0:56 I think part of the conversation is deeply rooted in how we understand or frame the concept of radical. In most academic spaces, radical is seen as extreme or thoughts, extreme thoughts, extreme actions, or actions that are outliers. But etymologically as I’ve talked and mentioned many times, and so have others like bell hooks, and Kevin Gannon, radical etymologically means foundational or the root.
1:28 So this is what I’m sort of nodding to in the title of this episode, in that we need to both be moving away from an understanding accessibility as radical in terms of being an outlier, but also a reaffirmation of accessibility as foundational. So I’m going to talk through three areas that I see a fair bit when it comes to accessible pedagogy that may help frame our need to problematize the radical.
1:56 So one, the idea of accessibility as radical is deeply attached in Higher ed to workload. So any conversation about accessible pedagogy and rethinking design has a tendency to be seen as radical because it’s asking for a stop, a reflection, a revisiting and well, ultimately, that’s work. And anything that seems like work, or at least work that some may seem to some folk as outside of what they were intending to do, that can be pegged as radical.
2:31 So this is where discussions about designing inclusively or as inclusively as possible from the start become important. Because if there are options built in, in terms of choice of topic, different modalities, then it makes it a lot easier to provide those things for learners when necessary. And then in turn that seems a little less radical.
2:52 Two, we need to have an honest conversations about the different types of accommodations that exist so that when instructors come across them in accommodations that they don’t seem like an outlier ask. This week I’ve had a lot of conversations about fluorescent lights and lighting accommodations. And it’s interesting to me that some people simply may not understand why these accommodations exists, because maybe they’ve never had a migraine, and they’ve been lucky enough to never have a migraine. And it’s deeply interesting to me how sceptical people get around accommodations that are new to them because they simply didn’t know what they don’t know.
3:28 So here I think the key to sort of uncoupling this concept of radical, or things that are kind of new to them as radical is to have more conversations about the different scopes of accommodations beyond, extra time, or the UDL conversations that we have. We need to talk more about space and how the learning space has an impact on leaners. Things like light, smell, being able to enter rooms as a wheelchair user, needing to sit in certain places due to acoustics. These are definitely not things that are mentioned in grad school professional seminars when we talk about pedagogy or even things that are part of lesson design conversations so we need to make sure that we add them, more commonly or more actively, to our professional development instead.
4:19 There is a lot of talk about screen readers right now, but many folk have never even used or know what a screen reader is or where like text to voice supports can be found on their computers. So demystifying these tools and the support that they provide can help make different accommodations seem less radical to those that encounter them for the first time, and thus that takes the burden off of the learners and their support teams to advocate for things that disability profiles would clearly call for.
4:49 And three, and finally the only way to think of accessibility in relation to radical is through the etymological way of looking at radical which is foundational. So basically to do this we need to find ways to reposition conversations about inclusion, any kind of inclusion, as something radical in terms of outrageous. The reason why accessibility is seen as radical is because inclusion is not seen as valuable or inclusion is seen as something like woke, or whatever some folk may think woke is. And sometimes icky things are done around this idea of bootstrap narratives when it comes to accessibility and inclusion. And this bootstrap narrative also goes hand in hand with that sort of grit type discourse that we see. And that grit discourse is actually really motivated by a sort of cult of productivity and just plain ole capitalism. As always everything is really deeply interconnected. And so if we could stop and reflect on how calling inclusion and accessibility radical in the bad connotation sort of way is just an extension of normalizing productivity and ways that we do productivity in workspaces. We could then take away the power a way from a word like radical and disrupt it to make accessibility conversations and inclusive design part of our foundational everyday.
6:14 So that’s it, that’s episode 51 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of how accessibility and accessible pedagogy can be framed as something radical, for good or for bad, and how we need to frame those discussions better as foundational.
6:27 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 this tension between radical and accessibility, please ask.
6:38 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 that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I will 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 51 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a good week.