Disability, Embodiment, and Pedagogy

Today is the start of the series of blogs I am planning for the summer that speak to the sensory, embodiment, and pedagogy. I am going to start with a bit of an overview of conversations that I have encountered, or experienced, when it comes to having conversations about the sensory and embodiment to hopefully move away from a stereotypical understanding of learners we may share eduspace with. Often when wanting to engage with conversations about bodies, the senses, and learning, folk will assume that this is a conversation that will exclude disabled folk. Or assume that any conversation about embodiment in eduspace is only about mobility device users. Often these assumptions that a conversation about bodies will not include disabled learners, as though disabled folk are disembodied, comes from a normative understanding of learners' bodies in higher education. And so it is important to work through this a bit before we start focusing on specific sensory aspects as intend to do over the next few weeks.

One book that may help folk think through these ideas is Susan Hrach's Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (2021). She reminds readers throughout the book to really disrupt this belief that learners are just brains on sticks without embodiment. As well the work done by Margaret Price, who coined the term "bodymind" ( you should also read Price's Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (2011)), is important foundational reading for recognizing we bring our whole selves to spaces, not just our mind, or not just our body, in whatever ways they are able on a particular day and time. This must be a holistic consideration in curricular and pedagogical design. I mention the particular day and time because the dynamic nature of disability may mean that how someone can show up one day can be different to the next.

Let me give you a tangible example. I need captions to support my tinnitus, but some days I need captions more than others depending on the sound, and the context of that day (did I sleep well last night-rarely, did I have a lot of audio work to do the day previous etc.). Reading more about dynamic disabilities, a term coined by Brianne Benness is also an important part of understanding how embodiment and sensory, including sensory disabilities must be a pedagogical design consideration. 

However, we do tend to see a focus on the sensory in relation to pedagogical design taken to mean an emphasis on learning styles, which is of course not something that has been proven to exist as a way to frame teaching and learning. There are a lot of great resources on why learning styles do not exist, and I am in the process of writing one myself for use where I work. In the mean time I can suggest this website from the University of Michigan on learning styles, There are many reasons why learning styles are so prevalent in the educational discourse, like conversations of the VARK model. But we more commonly hear about learning styles especially in relation to UDL conversations and this is not of course accidental. This is because in K-12 teacher education, you will still see learning styles being mentioned and taught as a way to do differentiated learning, and of course the other place where we see mention of differentiated learning is in relation to UDL, so it is not surprising that all these concepts are perpetuated and conflated. 

So to help clarify, learning styles does not have data or studies to support its existence but it will still be taught in some teacher ed programs. UDL does have some data to support how it can support student learning at different levels though for the longest time (and somewhat still) most of that data is at the K-12 level. This resource from the Taylor Institute at the University of Calgary gives good context for UDL in different disciplines if you are interested. 

It was important to have this conversation about learning styles because the spectre of this will always be part of any conversation about embodiment and the sensory in education, especially in disability conversations. And this is because learners definitely have learning preferences and some of these preferences may be sensory in nature. However, these preferences are highly contextual and often discipline specific. For example, maybe I would appreciate a more Socratic engagement and oral discussion when discussing something like English literature for example, however, I may prefer micro-videos or other infographic visuals when learning something like the Krebs cycle in biology. These preferences or even levels of comfort that can be sensory in nature can be different for each student, and also different each day. And this is why it is so important to think about our pedagogical design holistically in terms of the kinds of sensory assumptions it is making about the learners. Just because a way in to a topic worked one day for me does not mean that same way in to the topic will work tomorrow, especially if I am having a migraine or can't look at a screen today.

If you assign a 10-minute video as work to be done in a flipped model pedagogical design and that video is supposed to teach students a scientific concept, but the video has captions but does not provide descriptions of the visuals in the video, that's a barrier. That is designing with the assumption of visuality (which I will talk about in next week's blog). So the purpose of today's introductory post is to both give you some resources connected to the topic that you may want to explore further, but also give you some time to reflect on these two prompts before the rest of the blog posts to come. 

• What senses are you assuming your learners will use, or what level of sensory use are you assuming of your learners with your pedagogical design? Think about the activities done in class, the assessments for the course, and the resources provided as foundational as well as supplementary. 
• If you encounter a barrier in that design from a sensory point of view, upon reflection, what other options are available that can allow learners to meet course learning outcomes, or activity objectives?

I hope this helps start the thought process around the intersections of embodiment, disability, the sensory, and pedagogy. As I mentioned next week I will be talking about the primacy of the visual that happens in our eduspaces. Have a good week.