Engaging Pedagogy that is Accessible

I will start my first blog of the year with a theme that I carry through most of my work and blog posts which is access. I read a book over the holiday season that discussed the intersections of disclosing disabilities with identities and positionalities in higher education institutions. One of the articles in the collection spoke from the position of an educator who had a disability that was not necessarily visible. This disability meant that the faculty member had to sit to lecture instead of stand and walk around. They said that one of the student evaluations mentioned how their sitting was not engaging and they should stand and walk around to make lecture more engaging. This one particular statement really had me thinking over the past few days about what we mean when we say engaging pedagogy.

Many articles have spoken to the need to step away from the lectern, like Weimer , gesturing, like Cook, Yip, and Meadow (2010) and many other connections of physicality with pedagogy and content delivery has been discussed. However, we have to think about how accessible these suggestions are and if in fact they are rather ableist in nature. More importantly, how can we translate these suggestions, which at the core are about making sure there is “doing” in the pedagogy instead simply providing information, into suggestions that are more accessible to both educators and students. On one level it is all about making sure that the curriculum is multimodal as is the pedagogy. To support this is to think about using inclusive design principles that take into account the needs of everyone in the educational space. On another level this question is about taking stock of what we already have in terms of resources and how those can be used towards a more engaging pedagogy that does not assume a type of ability.

I feel it is extremely valuable to take time to best use what is already at our disposal and not frame pedagogy actions (or inactions) within an ablelist paradigm or assumptions. The collection also mentioned many instances of physical barriers to teaching such as the switches for projectors being too high or the computer that is attached to the projector being only accessible via 3-4 steps. The physicality of the classroom is something that should be reviewed but so should what we conceptualize as “engaging pedagogy.” I go into to 2020 with these many thoughts and actively working to expose ableist assumptions that may find their way through to our theory and praxis.