How Reactive Decisions Hurt HigherEd

Content warning for ableism, and discussion of medical triage in last paragraph.

Originally the title of this week's blog post was going to be "Everything is Shit" and I was going to type everything is shit in the body of the blog and hit publish. Then I reflected a bit and realized that was probably not great modelling and would not necessarily add to reflection on teaching and learning theory or practice. So I decided in good pedagogical interest to give specific exemplars of everything being shit in the hopes of giving a space for conversation and learning. This post is going to be about three intersecting concepts, language choice and use, lack of reflection, and reactive decision making in higher ed. 

This week I had a post go viral on Twitter. As of writing this it has 39 retweets, 9 quote tweets, and 196 likes. It is a post asking folk to stop using the word crazy as a stand in for words like outrageous or ridiculous. I wrote this being aware and acknowledging that some folk in mad studies use crazy as an identifier and I want to be clear that that tweet was not about that. The origin of this tweet was two fold. The first was an event that I attended this week where they were talking about a book on UDL and the person who edited the book identified as someone who worked with disabled students and suggested that some of those students were neurodivergent. In her responses she used the word crazy about a half dozen times to refer to things not related to the students, things like the pandemic situation, things like academic publishing. I was really saddened that a person who works with neurodivergent folk would use such language so flippantly. You would think that someone who is actually in the field would recognize how problematic that is. The second origin was being in two text matching software demos (which is how plagiarism software folk are trying to rebrand themselves) and listening to the word crazy being used multiple times by multiple presenters in exactly the same way, to refer to the pandemic, to refer to student behaviours in relation to assessments, etc. I will return to the particular dumpster fire that these demos were shortly.

It occurred to me that folk use these words because they don't stop and reflect on what these words mean. Folk are not thinking about the words they use and how those words can be hurtful. This lack of stopping to reflect comes up in other ways too. In that same UDL event I went into it wanting to read the book, but after hearing the speakers I realized that there is nothing contextually relevant for me in this book. However, what really sealed my decision to not want to read this book was going on the website and trying to order it from Canada and realizing that the book could only be ordered and shipped to the US. I asked if this could be changed cause this is really not inclusive for a book on UDL. The answer I got instead had to do with Amazon and the costs of putting a book on Amazon. So the question is "Did I ask you to put it on Amazon?" No I did not, in fact I would be no less likely to buy it on there because I refuse to give Bezos any of my money for the way employees are treated (acknowledging that disabled folk use Amazon as one way to receive the things they need and if that is you I am putting no judgement here- it is just not something I personally can support for my purchases). If they would have stopped and reflected they would see the ask was make the publisher site inclusive to international orders, not help Bezos. I really really do not understand why American companies 10/10 default to Amazon being the thing that folk should use. Again I would love your reflections on this. I just don't get it. There are so many educational publishers I won't buy from in Canada because everything is routed through Amazon. Everything is shit. 

The lack of stopping and reflecting on how these decisions may affect inclusion and may affect who has access to your particular book or event is what is slowly killing and hollowing out HigherEd. Now for my last everything is shit example. The group responsible for organizing and hosting events for queer faculty and staff at my institution was hosting a social get together event to celebrate Pride. I was very excited about this event because it was going to have cocktail/mocktail demos, conversations about nature spaces, and general talk to your peers stuff. I was also excited because all their other programming so far has been exclusionary. Come do trivia on 80s queer movies you never saw cause you grew up in the middle of nowhere. Come do trivia on a specific cultural media thing you know nothing about and if you were an immigrant to Canada you probably would know nothing about either.  Come play a game with us together cause you are queer and queers love games right? Right? I was also triply excited because it was probably my first social event in months. I honestly cannot remember the last time I had a social get together with folks online that did not veer into work chatter and ultimately something else to add to my lengthy to do list. I signed up thinking this would be a Zoom meet up because why would it be anything else. Imagine my surprise when 4 hours before my event I am sent an email with a link to a completely new platform that they are expecting folks to learn and navigate. Of course I do what I do and I look for a VPAT I find nothing. I go on the website and see things mentioned like "dynamic sound" which means if you want to hear someone you need to move your avatar closer to the person speaking.  Basically if you want to participate in this space you have to be a creeper. This is absolutely not acceptable in face to face spaces so why would it ever be acceptable in a virtual environment. 

I raised concerns with the organizers that this was a barrier to participation that this had no keyboard navigation ability, no captions and of course the creeper angle. I was asked if I asked for accommodations and if I was asking for them now. NO I AM ASKING YOU TO BE INCLUSIVE IN YOUR PLATFORM CHOICE. And if I would have known your platform choice was a triggering dumpster fire then you bet your life I would have checked that box and made you reflect on your choices. They said they could have a Zoom backup space for folk if they couldn't do this platform. Not an acceptable situation of course because you are basically outing the people who could not use this platform for whatever reason. I shook my head so many times that a group that is supposed to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion could be so exclusionary. It was of course revealed that this was something that seemed cool when we tested it out and we didn't actually think of accessibility, because you know why would we as an EDI serving group sigh.

So I tried it for about 5 minutes before I had to bail. It was bad, really bad. Imagine being in a room with 25+ strangers and hearing all this stifled chatter in the background but not really knowing where it is coming from. Imagine if you couldn't hear that chatter and you are expected to engage in this space. It was really sad. I logged off my computer and sat on my deck with a beer and watched the swifts moving in and out of the dead tree next door eating bugs. And I sobbed, like full on uncontrollable sob for a long while. My neighbour happened to be outside watering plants and saw me and of course was very concerned and asked what was going on. I explained that that basically the community I was supposed to part of decided that I wasn't part of that community based on a reactive decision to use a cool new tool and not think about how that tool was by default including some folk and excluding others. He said hey do you want to eat supper on the porch together, which of course was a nice thing but not the thing I needed at that time cause I had no capacity to small talk while being so upset. I know he meant well, and I also know that very few people know that the response in these situations should be: thank you for sharing, rephrase what you heard to make sure you heard it correctly and are not misinterpreting what was said or asked, and what do you need/ how can I support you? 

I sat on the deck until it got dark thinking over and over again how these reactive decisions in HigherEd are actively hurting people. How this cool tool paradigm happens over and over, where folk see something that seems cool but don't think about the pedagogical affordances (if there any at all) or how the design of the tool is excluding a user demographic. Some will say well we don't have the time to think, we don't have the time to vet, we don't have the time to be intentional with our choices and think bigger picture. You know what make time. All these reactive decisions on macro and micro levels are hurting people in big and small ways. If you don't have time to thoroughly think through a situation maybe just flag that for the folk that will be affected and return to it. This neo-liberal hurry up please it's time framing creates learning spaces that are toxic and that can create or trigger trauma. This same thing is playing out in HigherEd spaces over and over again. 

This takes me to the dumpster fire demos from this week where the vendor said if selected they would run workshops on critical thinking design for assessments. You know the kind of stuff I do for a living. Except outsourced. To a company. That does text matching software for LMSs. A reactive decision that does not take into consideration all the expertise and knowledge that is already present at the institution, but maybe not in that particular part of it. 

Basically I am pretty much a walking wounded right now and so many others I interact with are as well. Our wounds come from reactive decisions with no reflection. Our wounds come from ignoring the voices of experience that have given lifetimes worth of feedback and insight. Our wounds come from words with no action. Our wounds come from systems that create haves and have nots. Like in medical triage walking wounded are often the lowest of priorities and are usually the highest of casualties. Everything is shit. Stop, reflect, no more reactive decisions, fix it before you hurt more people.