Inclusion Would/Should Be Nice

I have spent a lot of time this week have conversations with folk about "being nice." Similar to the honey and vinegar saying, there's a lot of belief in academic circles that somehow "being nice" is how you get things to happen. I have issue with this because "being nice" is always gendered and racialized. There are only certain people who have the privilege of being nice and having things happen. For rest being nice is assumed by the systems and when you are not nice (in whatever way folk frame niceity) then you are seen as mean or unreasonable.

This is important, not only because there is an excellent thread going round about a study done on gender bias in teaching evaluations but also that folk in marginalized communities experience a completely different learning environment based on these expectations of niceity. Asking for something to support accessibility is seen as not being nice. Asking for inclusion in course design beyond having a few non-white authors on the syllabus is seen as unreasonable. It is really a situation where inclusion would be nice, but asking for inclusion should be nice. And this makes me sad.

I go back to all the interest convergence that has happened in emergency-remote pedagogy, where all the supports disabled learners had asked for for years happened over night. Is it because they did not ask nicely enough before? Of course the answer is no. Folk have been asking nicely for years. So at what point does having to ask nicely stop? 

I often say it would be nice if we got to a point in academe where inclusion and accessibility is foundational and not a retro-fit or bolt-on. For those teaching legacy courses designed by other folk, I can see how that would be the only way to achieve inclusion. But for new courses or what I saw this week brand new conferences, there is honestly no reason why accessibility was not foundational to the choices made. How can you have a first ever conference on disability inclusion on an inaccessible platform that blocks an accessibility checker? 

And then you have the other folk, the folk at CALL where the theme was equity, diversity, and inclusion and they did just that. They reached out, they asked the questions, they made inclusion foundational to the framework and platforms used. It wasn't an inclusion would be nice situation, it was inclusion is nice, and I so appreciated being part of that. 

I was very disappointed in many folk this week, from conference organizers to individual folk who used every excuse as to why they were not doing things with an accessibility-first framework. There were a few glimmers of hope, like the CALL conference, like a visual campaign actually including information on how to alt-text images (but not before I reminded them of this a few times), but I keep thinking how long do folk have to wait to be included, especially in places that are literally for them? I don't know what the answer is, but honestly I am done playing nice.