Fall Semester Prep Reflection

I have always been the type of person where the words can't wait. Like if I have words to share I can write out an outline, but if they feel like they need to come out, I can't just say oh I'll do it tomorrow. Because you don't know if the words will be there tomorrow. This is also how I write my poetry, when it comes it has to be written then, not in some hopeful future. So I am writing this blog now, on a Wednesday in the middle of my week off vacation for the summer, because the words are there now and they need to come out. This may be a long post, so come back and engage in ways that make sense to you when you can. I am using subheadings in this one so you can skip to where it makes sense for you topic wise.

Fall Term is Upon Us

The majority of this week's blog was supposed to be about preparing for fall term. This means a lot of reflection, design choices, anxiety, and shopping for ideas or materials to make the year successful for students and members of the teaching team. Of course a lot of the reflection and discussion will include Generative AI, large language models, agentic AI, and all the other tools and tech that eduspace is immersed in. As I have been saying for at least a year or more now, a lot of these discussions have excluded conversations about accessible user experience (UX), and inclusive assessment design. This is of course sad and discouraging for someone who does the kind of work I do. I keep looking at the research, the discourse, the conversations had in countries, in institutions, in professional organizations, and these conversations if present are surface level, and not where they need to be for true inclusion as praxis. This is where moral injury comes in, because if you are in spaces where folk treat inclusion as afterthought, community gatherings with no masking mentioned, new cool tools that don't work with screen readers, poorly designed resources, these decisions (or lack thereof) already tell people this is not a space of trust.

Failure of Trust in Academe

I have talked a lot about trust in this blog, on the podcast, and in workshops and keynotes I have delivered. I talk about it because each day, each week, I see trust eroding in so many spaces and it necessarily changes how we engage with each other and those spaces. For example, the city where I live trust in the municipal, regional, and provincial government is at an all time low. Just this morning I woke up at 4am, because well there was a thunderstorm, a heavy one, and I saw so many of my peers also up and online, waiting for more water in their basement, which for me did not arrive, but for others did again, for the 4th to 6th time in a month. In different places in North America, trust in the food we consume is also at an all time low. No one knows when it will be safe to eat salad again, and everyday a new thing is added to the list, eggs, blueberries, etc. So here are two very foundational life things where trust has been destroyed: food and shelter.

Another part of so many people's lives is work. If you are reading this blog chances are your work has something to do with education. And here too each day, with every headline, with every decision, with every gatekept piece of information, with every lack of communication, that trust evaporates. Faculty on social medias saying they don't trust their students (either explicitly or with their choices) bringing back handwritten assessments, asking for device-free classrooms, and different kinds of assessment designs that don't take accessibility or disability into account. Each day disabled students wonder is this the place for me, and what does this mean for other places after school, like work or community space. Drip, drip, the taps of academic trust; leaky, sad. 

Is This Place Safe For Me?

Part of this discussion about trust is also a discussion about how disabled and neurodivergent folk, Queer and Trans folk, BIPOC folk, have always been extra amazing at determining if spaces are safe for them because they have to. And that decision is often quick, because it also has to be. In trauma-informed pedagogy we talk about safety playing a role in design, but also realize that you can design something or put something out there that to members of the teaching team and staff feels incredibly safe and inclusive, but for many other is a danger, Will Robinson, danger. And that danger often comes from a lack of holistic understanding of how things are interconnected and a lack of representative voices at the table. This last week the outpouring of articles and discussions about the loss of Jason Arday brought that interconnectivity and lack of trauma-informed awareness to light. Academe is not a safe and trusting space for Autistic folk, for Black folk, for Queer folk, for Trans folk, for Neurodivergent folk, for so many folk.

The other thing that needs to be reinforced is that safety and trust is not one and done checklist work. You can't just declare a place safe, or a group or space trustworthy; they are not performative speech acts. This is not a Jean-Luc Picard situation and that is hard for places looking for quick wins, number crunchiness, and scale-upability. Trust and safety is work, that is why it is so hard to maintain, because folk don't have the capacity nor do they want to have the capacity to actually maintain the conditions needed for trust and safety. So in lack of safe and trustworthy spaces, teaching team folk and students have to reflect on how they can protect themselves in ways that are true to their positionality and lived experiences while still being able to engage in learning and reflection. In ways that can literally keep them alive. 

Know Your Boundaries

So I don't have any great wisdom on how to do that for fall 2026, except this, fall 2026 and 2026-2027 year will be one more than any other since maybe 2020, where it will be important for folk to know their boundaries and to articulate them clearly, and to work within them. You need to reflect on what is possible, in terms of time, resources, and supports and then work within that. Part of that too is an awareness of bodymind needs, and this includes how spaces can or do not support your health and wellness. The more you are aware of what spaces and design decisions allow you and your heart to grow and what spaces and decisions are centres of moral injury, the possibility of a May 2027 without burnout becomes more real. I know that boundary as a term has also been weaponized a bit from therapy discourse, so the important thing to remember is that with a boundary, you control what a boundary is for you, and what you need. 

If spaces have perpetually demonstrated that they do not understand or want to understand support needs then it is okay to have a boundary about this. I see this happening so much in community organizing space where organizers act as though COVID is over, and the COVID-conscious folk who would be happy to support the space just stop attending or supporting because their lived reality of being immuno-compromised, etc, is not part of the organizing conversations. Sometimes it becomes a scope issue, in that the particular organizing people don't see how disability can intersect with what they are advocating for, and you can do some education for sure, but if there's no desire to engage, no ability for empathy, no holistic awareness, boundaries are completely okay. 

Conclusion: Find Your People and Your Thing

I have spent most of this vacation reading Tea Mutonji's new novel My Person. I have about 50 pages left and part of the reason why I started writing this blog now is that I don't want the book to be over, that I know that when I get to end of the novel it will be like losing a friend. It is honestly that good, and you should all read it. Reading this novel has been really great in that there were so many situations, landmarks, spaces that I could recognize and that resonated. There are a couple of books like this that I have read in my life, Atwood's Surfacing is another, that remind me why I like words so much and why they are magical. Books like this also remind me of the importance of finding your people, of being okay if those people change over the years because you are a person and not a robot, and it is okay to find new people and spaces if you find out that the people you thought were okay are deeply not. It is also okay to try to find folk who are closer to your lived experience as well because others may not "get you" and it is healthier to be around folk who do. 

I usually make myself a list of things I want to accomplish for academic year as we approach September. Sometimes that list is way too long. This year the list is very short: write. That's my list - write. Words are my thing, creative spaces that use words in different ways are my thing, and this academic year I will explore that even more in ways that I can in the 24 hours given in a day and not just the Capitalist Neo-Liberal hours. So my wish for you this year, whether you are a member of a teaching team, a staff human, a learner, is that you find your people this year and that they care for you as much as you care for them. I also wish that you find that one thing, that one thing that lights your heart, that one thing that undoes all the moral injury you may be surrounded by socio-culturally. And maybe in the finding of the people and the finding of the thing, you will also find the trust and safety of space you deserve, that we all deserve. A space that recognizes the work of trust building is never done, but sometimes folk lose their privileges to try anymore because you know your worth and value. Good luck everyone!