Episode 57- Season Four Recap, Context Is The Reason
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-seven and the season four recap of Accessagogy. So I’ve somehow made it to four seasons of this podcast. And I really appreciate those of you who reach out and tell me that this is something that you listen to, something that you engage with, and something that resonates with you; and that you are finding things that are applicable in the spaces that you are in. This feedback is important because I know how very difficult it is in higher education right now, especially for those of us who do accessibility and inclusion work.
1:09 There has been increasingly less value seen and put on the work of accessibility, and those of us who do this work, and the folk that are in disability community tell others time and again, how much barrier free opportunities matter. Being able to engage in different modalities, being in places where folk still recognize COVID as on going and not something that ended years ago because people were done caring about others, this is why even talking about accessibility and inclusion matter.
1:39 I’m recording this right after Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And I facilitated or co-facilitated two workshops to two completely different types of audiences, but all with the same intention, to have folk reflect on how to make their digital resources and media more accessible and how to supplement their in-person events with digital spaces to make their places more inclusive.
2:04 In Season 4 I had 14 episodes and the most popular was the season intro about AI, because of course it was. That is all that everyone can talk about right now. It was followed by Episode 45 that talked about the harm that generalization does in accessibility work, and then Episode 44 which was about oral assessments and how to make them more accessible. This makes me happy because I think it’s very important for us to think about oral assessments and how they can be designed more accessibly since so many spaces are wanting to return to these as an assessment strategy to apparently counter any AI use.
2:44 This was then followed by the episode on trauma-informed pedagogy and then the episode on moral injury, two topics that have been very much top of mind for me right now. So collectively these five top episodes from the season, on AI, on generalizations, on oral assessments, trauma, and moral injury pretty much sum up what’s happening in higher education right now. Folk are looking for anything to help support their thinking and instructional design in relation to Generative AI because they feel that they’re not getting the guidance or support from their institutions or professional associations.
3:20 But I think the issue is bigger than this; it’s not that they’re not getting support on how to think through or frame Generative AI use in their spaces. It’s because they’re looking for checklist ways to engage with AI and are discovering that the guidance that they’re finding doesn’t really work in their context, because guess what nuance is a thing. And that is also why the number six most engaged with episode this season was the one on checklists and the checklistification of accessibility.
3:51 Because higher ed systemically strives for checklists, it strives for scaling up in austerity times, and fun fact, you can’t approach AI and inclusive design with checklists and scalability in mind because all you care about is budgets, because in that scaling you precisely lose the inclusion and accessibility piece. That’s the real irony in all of this right now and why moral injury is real; the systems have been sold AI as a way to scale education, but by scaling education you are actually making it less inclusive because it is now no longer responsive to context and individuals. Then the students see in that modelling, that all that matters is scale and production and not insight or lived experience or connection. And then teaching teams become beside themselves when students hand in slop. The system has taught them that slop is all the matters, and reflection on accessibility and inclusion has no place here.
4:51 So we’re stuck in some sort of incredibly discouraging ouroboros, and it’s honestly only by breaking free of these systems that education space can be rewarding again. And again sadly, this is exactly what colleagues who have been working in Indigenous pedagogical space, in decolonization pedagogy space have been saying for years and years. If we really want to decolonize education, we actually need to end the systems that we have now. And fun fact no one who has any money invested in these system wants that so they don’t want to lose money and so therefore the systems are maintained.
5:29 As always, listening to those with lived experience could have saved us all this aggravation and moral injury, and losses, and hurt that we’re seeing now. But instead, the only thing that perpetually matters is the financial not the ethical and so here we are. So this summer while I’m on hiatus, I challenge you to think about ways that you can actually break the systems that you’re in, in little and large ways.
5:53 For some it can happen in their teaching over the summer, if you happen to be teaching or you’re lucky enough to have teaching this summer. For me I will be continuing my community work, I’ve been doing a lot of that locally, and also breaking the academic association conference organization system apart by laying bare the hypocrisy and lack of reflection innate in their attempts for inclusion. Because of course that is how I’m going to spend my time.
6:21 So that’s it, that’s episode 57 of Accessagogy, with a recap of the episodes that you liked this season and the things to think about in times where there seems to be very little nuance and context when it comes to artificial intelligence, and that is causing harm to so many. The second word that you should be pushing back on and questioning in HigherEd right after generative AI is scale. If you see the word scale…question.
6:47 I’ll be taking my usual June to August break, because even as May starts I can see the click rate decrease on the episodes as folk are busy with other summer type things, at least in this part of the world, and other responsibilities. If you are around STLHE in June please come say hello. Remember that I always I want this to be a space where we can ask questions and share concepts that you’d like me to discuss. So if there’s anything that you would like me to focus on in season 5 when I start up again at the end of August or beginning September please ask.
7:21 You can send any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you’d like me to address in the podcast, in an email to 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 57 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along this season and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great summer and I’ll see you in September.