On Leniency, Ableism, and Why Words Matter Redux

This may be a bit of a shorter post because I have one point to make and it is a point I have made many times, but I have a new example, which is the words you use matter, and the words you use have impact in different spaces.

This week in the midst of all the articles usually circulated about generative AI and education, there was one that used the word leniency in the same sentence as accommodations. In that same sentence it also conflated accommodations and accessibility with access which happens a lot in education spaces. So let me break this down a bit.  

First, I will start with what I normally start with which is the etymology of the word leniency. Leniency comes from the French for relaxing, or to have mercy. So that in and of itself does a certain kind of work. The first kind of work is that it aligns accommodations against this spectre of rigor that lives in academe and that somehow accommodations lead to "less than" learning which is untrue. In fact my whole work life is me having conversations with folk about learning outcomes, and objectives and skills to be demonstrated in an assessment and how outcomes can still be met and align in different ways. And yes sure sometimes if an essential requirement in an accredited program asks for a skill (as in you must know how to take blood samples) then sure that cannot be done online. I mean you could watch videos or read texts on how to do it, but if there is doing to be done that will need to be done in-person. 

But the second kind of work that the word leniency does is brings in a medical model and the charity model in that there needs to be some sort of mercy or charity given when accommodations are in place. When the majority of conversations about accessibility, disability, and accommodations tend to be conversations about attitudinal barriers, then this word choice does work in reinforcing those same attitudes that make accommodation conversations difficult.

The conflation of access and accessibility is one that I have talked about a fair bit as well. And I know that this comes from provincial government using "access programs" and "access funding" to mean a certain kind of thing - an opening of doors to folk who may not have had doors open, or a funding of technological supports for folk who may not have had access to technology. But we need to be so careful when we use these words to mean the same as the accommodation process for disabilities. Yes you can have access to assistive technology as part of an accommodation, but not having Internet access in your home is not something that the accommodation process in post-secondary institutions will help support. They are different things. We need to talk about them in different ways, and the imperfection of the English language means that so often they are talked about in the same way, so much so that it is actually becoming so so difficult for me to find research in the accessibility sphere I am in because the terms are used so much without differentiation. 

So I again ask you, before you put something out into the world to consume, make sure you are not perpetuating stereotypes, or reinforcing ableism, or gosh just making my job that much harder to do when it is already a difficult space to navigate. And I know for some reading that article that would have been a gosh "it's not that serious" moment, or a "that's not what I meant" moment. And sure, great, but impact is a thing even if intent isn't. And sure yes, I see things and pick up on things more in that space because I am firmly in accessible and inclusive pedagogy land, and I have a PhD in English so the Inigo Montoya in me is active often each week. But like noticing the spider crawling across the ceiling out of the corner of my eye, I can see the impact it will have, and I can feel the ableism that is its home.