Overwhelm and Sensory Awareness in Pedagogy

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had a good break, if you managed to have a break, if only for a few days. I feel that this year so many folk are taking an extended break (if they can) and I am actually glad to see it and this first post of the year is going to navigate through some reflections of what I feel happened last term at different HigherEd institutions and on social media.

This holiday season was one where I did a whole lot of nothing which is very unusual for me. I didn't write a thing, and the only book I read was Candy Palmater's memoir (link opens in new window) which I really recommend. I felt a bit anxious about it because it was not how I usually spend that time; usually I write abstracts for conferences, or maybe edit an article, or try to draft a new piece of writing. Instead I took a bunch of notes of things as they occurred to me in my random reflection process and rest time, and left it at that. The result was that as I started work this week, I came back more rested than I have ever felt since I started in academe almost 20 years ago. And I have heard so much of the same from other folk, that many people did a whole lot of nothing during the break, which made me reflect on what got us here.

The word that keeps coming up for me and in my conversations with others (including students) is overwhelm. Overwhelm as a verb (opens in new window) comes from the Middle English to "turn upside down" or "knock over." There are even connotations that connect to submerging or having things wash over you and definitely last semester was incredibly overwhelming for everyone. It was overwhelming for students, having to navigate different on-campus course delivery, or hybrid schedules (where some of their courses were online and others on-campus), and the horribleness that is commuting. It was overwhelming for instructors, having to revisit courses that may have been delivered online for the last few years, and think of activities that would work for on-campus, often with larger cap enrollment sizes for their courses. It was overwhelming for staff like educational developers, who had to balance asks in different modalities and are perpetually keeping up with the literature and research on new things that are impacting pedagogical design. You will notice that I am actively avoiding talking about THE THING, because honestly that is part of the overwhelm; so many articles, and takes (many of them hot inaccessible takes) about THE THING so I am not going to add to that discourse because honestly I will just get angry and overwhelmed at accessibility fails.  

This overwhelm is something that I feel we need to be really aware of in the new year, and to design courses, our educational spaces, and our personal boundaries around ensuring that we do not put ourselves or students in more overwhelm situations. As a sensory scholar invested in accessible pedagogy, I keep thinking about the sensory overload that happens and is sometimes designed into educational spaces. The sounds of a large lecture hall; the pinging from the messages, apps, or email notification; the bright lights in spaces; processing information in different ways textually, visually, aurally; there are so many sensory aspects to our educational spaces. I am thinking about embodied knowledges, and how those embodied knowledges are different for everyone, and are important to think about in relation to accessible pedagogy and disability because that overwhelm is attained and processed in different ways for instructors, students, and staff. 

I will use myself as an example. I keep reading articles or books that talk about the importance of pleasure and joy and I know that I always quickly skip over those sections. Why? Because often those framings of pleasure and joy connect to embodied awareness that I know I am still on my own journey to process and those discussions upset me (and will until I have processed my own stuff). It is similar to when someone does one of the five senses grounding exercises and I always cringe because the things I hear are always the ringing in my ear from tinnitus and things I feel are always the slight twinge in my leg from chronic pain. It is really difficult for me to stay focused when someone asks me to actively remember and acknowledge these as separate. I know they exist, but if I am in a workshop, or in a seminar, and my thought process is interrupted by bringing awareness to a facilitator's need to separate parts of my bodymind, it is so much more difficult for me to get back into thoughts or content being discussed in the space. As well, I live in a unit in a house that is more than 100 years old. There is very little insulation, especially to sound, which means I hear every door opening and closing, every parcel delivery at neighbours' houses, every dog bark, and the planes that fly about the house rattle my mirror. I feel each of these vibrations. If I am in a work flow I feel them less, but if I am just resting, or reading a book, they are enough to distract me from what I am doing, if only for a few minutes, and then I go back to where I was on the page. I am sure I am not alone in this, and mention these examples because I am sure there are aspects of course design that cause students to feel sensory overwhelm, and they know themselves well enough that they feel now would be a good time to go fill their water bottle, or a good time to get a bit of fresh air. 

I feel the pandemic has caused folks to be more aware of their overwhelm sensory triggers, but when it comes to pedagogical design, that sensory aspect is still not quite part of the discussion. Yes people will bring this up when they talk about UDL, but it is always in relation to multimodal content delivery, and not hey what kind of embodied learning is being explicitly or implicitly suggested here? I would like this year to be the year where we have more of these conversations because they matter. I know for me, this year is going to be the year where I go back to actively framing and writing about the sensory more in relation to pedagogy, to disrupt normative understandings of learning that focus on the visual only. I am not sure where this will take me yet, but I am excited about giving myself space to work through these ideas and share them with y'all.