Getting Ready for the Semester

So I am back from my brief hiatus on here and it was good to get away from the screen for a little bit. However, I am now deep in getting ready for semester prep which many who are starting (or have already started) are doing in many countries right now. 

We have come to be used to getting ready for the semester start posts and podcasts. They are usually posts that remind folk to be gentle with themselves, to give yourself extra time to do the things, to plan in those gaps because you are going to need them. These types of post also remind you to think about your own workload and your teaching team's workload before finalizing the syllabus. All of this is great advice and is necessary even more now than it was before.

But you have heard these things before. Me writing them is not necessarily going to make you do it because you have heard it before and haven't really taken the advice, but maybe the reinforcement will help so that is why I state it here. But what I am also going to do instead is write something for you to do this semester that you may have not heard before.

This semester please advocate for something social justice related. I can hear you already, I am too tired to advocate for anything, I have no space to advocate. Well guess what, not making space to advocate means the conditions will not improve and I don't just mean the conditions for yourself of course, but the conditions for learning and the learners in your spaces which you say you care about and is important to demonstrate. Also note that I specified advocate for something social justice related, and that's important because there is plenty (WAY TOO MUCH ACTUALLY) self-advocacy as marketing out there in the HigherEd space right now (so much so that it is drowning out the pedagogy conversations) and that is not what I am asking for here. I am not asking you to promote your books that are supposed to be about inclusive pedagogy, but barely, if ever, mention accessibility or disability supports yet again. I am asking you to look at the gaps around you and advocate for something that will decrease barriers and bridge gaps. May I suggest advocating for accessibility?

Quelle surprise right. But honestly if folk used a quarter of the time that they use doing book promos on advocating for accessibility in their different spaces where they have tons of social, cultural, and other kinds of capital and privilege, HigherEd would look way different. And I am also looking at you Fac Dev. Yes you. You are really not doing a great job here and if faculty development wants to model the inclusive support framing that should guide the work, then there needs to be much more accessibility advocacy going on than the 0.1% I am seeing now. 

Am I still mad even though I had a week vacation? Yup. How can one not be mad when HigherEd is sitting back and watching its own destruction because pocket book lining is more appealing than supporting accessible and intersectionally aware educational spaces. So take a moment and decide what you are going to advocate for this semester. And tweet it out, you know cause accountability is how you build trust within community. The single voice in a field times are over. Use the positionality and context you have.