Reading to Process

A lot has happened since my last blog post. In some ways Twitter has imploded even more than it has before and last week has seen people leave to different social media in an attempt to find their communities. It is a move that I have been calling "The Great Siloing," and it has left many, especially in disability community, without a viable place to be in community with others and to get the support that a lot found on disability Twitter. Like with most things that have occurred over the last three years, it was very reactionary, and the lack of proactive planning to where groups of folk would go or find each other, meant that those who had different overlapping areas of influence could more readily go to a different place and try to re-create what they had than others.

Expressing this last week on Twitter meant that I had to lock down my account, after many did not like to be reminded that other people exist, as they were flocking to Bluesky and using their academic Twitter capital to find codes. My mentions in turn became filled with people who thought I did not understand what a Beta release meant (you know the person who has been talking about EdTech since 2009, of course why would I not know what something in Beta means, rolls eyes), instead of engaging with the fact that design, even "inclusive design" is almost always foundationally inequitable and inaccessible. If you want to read a great book on this topic I would suggest you read Design Justice by Sasha Constanza-Chock (opens in new tab and page has information about reading this book open access).

At the same time this movement and flux was occurring, I also was working through health things. One of the things that was helping me work through all that was happening, while simultaneously thinking about what would be supportive from a pedagogical point of view for September as generative AI conversations are still on-going was reading Let this Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba (opens in new tab). So the rest of this post is going to bring in some ideas from this book and how some of the points helped me reflect on the equity work I have done in the past and how to open up spaces for conversations as we move towards the fall term.

One thing that Hayes and Kaba reinforce throughout their book is the importance of remembering that organizing work is long game work. Anyone who works in equity spaces in higher education knows this as well. It had me reflecting on the union work I did in grad school and the work that I have been doing for many years now to support accessible pedagogy, and the common refrain of we don't have enough time, money, desire, resources for such and such thing to happen. We work with this feedback constantly, and some choose to keep doing the smaller steps to support equity, be it with course design strategies, or different assessment designs that allow choice and more accessible multimodality, or a movement towards a more constructivist approach to what usually happens in eduspaces and authentic meaningful conversations and assessments.

There is so much in this book that is applicable to those of you who may feel frustrated at how everything seems to keep status quo because that is how the systems run. As we have more conversations about what burnout means in higher ed, this particular quotation from Ejeris Dixon, "I think the best way to burn out an organizer is to leave them alone" (206), had me thinking about how many "the onlys" exist in relation to equity and inclusion work on campuses. Systemically because of there being only one of someone doing the work, without reinforcement from other places, policies, or resources, that isolation means meaningful work becomes more and more difficult to do. Yes organizing work and equity work is a long game, but even with that long game framing, there still needs to be space to share and move forward. 

Hayes and Kaba had me thinking about what it is to live and work in hope. What does hopeful design look like in our eduspaces? What do hopeful conversations sound like in our eduspaces? It had me thinking about how all these social media spaces and silos were purposefully broken up to dismantle some structures folk did use to organize, and how disabled folk and multimarginalized folk are creative and will find hopeful ways to continue the organizing and the work (and not in a toxic positivity sort of way, in a this is how we survive sort of way). Again Constanza-Chock's book can help support this work, and alternative ways to meet each other. 

I know this is absolutely not an easy time for so many. Change is difficult and it creates more exclusion. Both of these books have helped me process these difficult changes, but also have helped me think more about capacity building and sustainability of the work we care about so deeply. In order for more proactive procedures, policies, and designs to be supportive for September 2023, we need to take the next 6 weeks and slow down; think about what it is students, instructors, and staff need to be supported and not purposefully isolated by a push to use tools (any tool) that hasn't been vetted for inclusion (I am looking at you GenAI evangelists). Can we do all of that in 6 weeks? Absolutely not. But do we have to have conversations about who is missing in our social medias, our eduspace tool use, and what steps can support the sharing of stories that is crucial to understanding (as Hayes and Kaba talk about a lot in their book), yes we absolutely do. 

This blog is one of the spaces where I am going to continue to process these ideas and I hope you will join me. I also posted the Season One recap of my Accessagogy podcast this morning. I know these ideas are things I will revisit in Season Two in September, as I work to continue having meaningful accessible pedagogy conversations and support design changes that can create more inclusive eduspaces.

References

Constanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press.

Hayes, K and Kaba, M. (2023). Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Haymarket Books.