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-eight and Season five intro of Accessagogy. I will say that I was shocked when I went to save this file and realized that I had done five seasons already of this podcast. In today’s episode to start the 2026-2027 academic year I want to spend some time reflecting on how and why we design courses and assessments. I think this is an important thing to reflect on as the semester starts because those design choices have impacts in different ways through the institutional and departmental ecosystems.
1:06 I want to start with the topic of design because ultimately it is where all good contextual accessible pedagogy should start. And even before we start with the design we have some parameters in terms of who we are designing for. And this includes disciplinary context, student demographics and overall alignment to the learning that has come before and the learning that will come after. These are foundational considerations usually.
1:33 However, what I’m noticing and I think others are noticing too but maybe not in the same way, is that there’s been a movement around who we are designing for in course and assessment design over the last few years, first when the pandemic started, and then again in the last few years in relation to generative AI. And I’m not saying the who we design for in terms of student demographic is changing, because yes it certainly is and that continues to change. But what I’m referring to here is that the student demographics are actually one and often a smaller consideration of who the courses and assessments are designed for.
2:14 So in this episode I’m going to reflect on 3 main “whos” that we are designing for, the first is the teaching team, the second is accrediting bodies or a fictional workplace, and the third and sadly finally the students. Those different whos create real impact in relation to accessible pedagogy, because we are now not only designing for the students but in fact designing as a reaction to austerity and lack of resourcing.
2:43 An increased consideration in relation to design since the start of the pandemic is capacity of the teaching team. In the last few years austerity across higher education in Canada, the United States, the UK, and Australia, has meant redesign with an awareness of how much can be done over the span of a semester with the resources available. In these situations, accessibility is often not part of these more holistic considerations, beyond moving towards a more say inclusive work/life balance for the teaching team members.
3:16 Designing for the amount of teaching support you have, including grading and facilitation makes a lot of sense if you don’t want a burn out a cadre of educators. It is a very human way to think about a semester, think about the touch points that happen throughout that semester, and who will be supporting not just the pedagogical responsibilities, but very often the emotional support needs. These are good things, and I really want to emphasize this. Taking care of the teaching team members in design is a good thing. Can you feel the but coming, cause cause here it is.
3:50 But, when the design tends to exclusively design for teaching team inclusion but not for the actual student demographics or lived experiences, that’s a problem. Because courses don’t exist without learners, and the learners need to fit in the design in all ways that they can show up in the course. And accessible design keeps the teaching team members in mind, but also realizes that there’s going to be students that they’re teaching engaging with, and sometimes (read often) those students will have different disabilities that will also need to be taken into account.
4:25 At the same time pressures exist, especially in professional fields, to design courses and assessments that directly align to professional expectations. So this in turn leads to discourse around workplace needs and training learners to be the next generation of workers. So this again is a good thing to consider, because workplace expectations are changing quickly, and learners need to be given the foundational skills to do the critical thinking and at times adapt to be part of a larger community space.
4:54 Because again this is not just about capitalist productivity culture, but also how to be a community member that is supportive of different causes and different work. This is where I remind you that anti-capitalist politic is one of the disability justice principles. But I won’t be getting too much into that because that is a bit of a different podcast focus.
5:15 What I want to emphasize though is that sometimes in an attempt to align to professional and accrediting expectations in design, that tends to reinscribe a normative learner and suggests a perpetuation of a type of worker that doesn’t include neurodivergent folk or those with different bodyminds. So in both of these situations, in designing for the teaching team only, or designing for an accreditation board only, the important piece of the design is forgotten which is the actual students.
5:47 So that takes me to the last who, which used to be the only who to be honest that we used to design for, which is the actual students, the actual learners. But even in times when we used to design for students only, there was a tendency to design for a stereotypical model of a learner and not the actual learners in the class. And this is where edge case beliefs came in in relation to accessible pedagogy. That you can only design for the majority, and that somehow disabled learners were not a consideration, or so rare that they could be labelled as edge cases which is simply not the case, or at least not the case any more.
6:24 I mention these whos and lay them out cause there’s this concern and discourse around generative Ai, and these considerations forget to take into account accessibility and disability in the learning space, and we seeing design for teaching teams, and design for some fictional future of work, and so much less design that’s actually supportive of learners, and really not supportive of disabled students. This creates more policy and procedure barriers, more meetings, more emails, more arm-chair diagnoses of learners by folk in the teaching team whose job is not to diagnose because that’s not their job nor do they have the information nor should have that disclosure to create some sort of fictional diagnoses.
7:11 Teaching teams have much less support for everything right now, so they’re designing so that they can have work/life balance. And that makes sense, it really does, but what makes even more sense is to design in an accessible way that is supportive of teaching team members AND the learners in their ways of being, keeping in mind that we can never design for absolutely everyone. What we can do (and is happening) is design for absolutely no one in the class except for the teaching team folk, and that is very sad indeed because it guarantees a lack of relationality in the learning space and a place where learning just will not happen.
7:48 So that’s it, that’s episode 58 of Accessagogy, with space to reflect on the kinds of design choices we make or encounter in higher education and the intended and maybe unintended impact those choices have. Hopefully it has given you space to reflect on how you are designing your courses or the courses you’ve encountered and what can be done to make them more inclusive and accessible.
8:09 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 the tension between accessible pedagogy and living in austerity times with low resourcing, please ask.
8:23 As always if you have any ideas about 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’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 58 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a good week and have a good semester.