Terms and Conditions May Apply

This may be a bit of a shorter post this week as I work through the fact that I cannot sit for a long time right now (chronic pain is fun, not) and typing laying down or standing up is hurting other parts of my body. This week's post is about the terms that we use, which is a bit of a revisiting of some thought threads from before but with a new twist.

I was messaging back and forth with an awesome colleague at another institution and she noted how there are so many terms that seem interconnected and people use interchangeably and how that is really not great because it causes confusion and ultimately affects accessibility. I totally agreed, and what she was talking about goes a bit further than what I already discussed in my podcast episode about UDL and accessible pedagogy, but it was still something that made me think just how many of these terms float around and people may have completely different understandings of what they mean. She suggested some sort of Venn diagram to show how they are all interrelated and that motivated me to try to create one. I workshopped what I thought that diagram would look like in a workshop I did on campus this week for my departmental colleagues. I am still working on a final version of this and it will certainly become part of the book on accessible pedagogy that I am writing. Regardless of when I do bring these out I will a thousand percent credit the conversation I had with JJ (you should follow her, she rocks) as the spark for this diagraming work, because that is how you uphold and acknowledge the knowledge and lived experience of community.

The other part of acknowledging the source of ideas of ideas, and sparks for further research is that is helps create a lineage of thought, and demonstrates how that lineage is in fact often not linear at all and that our different conversations, communities, and ideas intersect in interesting ways to push advocacy, policy, theory, and praxis further. Why this is really important is that it can prevent people from thinking that they were the one who invented a very common concept or term just because they were not in those circles or communities who have used that concept or term for a very long time. This happens a lot, in fact it seems to be happening more and more, especially in academe, but also in different design spaces where companies and designers take disabled creators or disabled community thoughts and pass them off as their unique innovation. Sometimes people pick up these ideas from things they see on social media, blogs, podcasts, and then continue it as their unique contribution knowing full well it isn't and the more social and cultural capital that person has in particular spaces the easier it is to erase the real innovator. 

Sometimes that person doesn't remember that they picked it up from a social media post, a podcast, a blog, and continues on like it is their concept. Sometimes people will call them on that and say, hey this is something so and so has been talking about for years, or hey this is a really common framing in disability community, or in educational practice, it isn't new, nor is it necessarily yours. And the way that person reacts to that information is the important part here. Some will gracefully acknowledge that yes this may be something they read, and kindly link to the work of the other people they were informed by and forgot. OR they can block and deny the people bringing this up because they know it will have a direct effect on their status within a particular space and would rather erase others than acknowledge learning from them.

So my question is, especially for those who teach and interact with students on a regular basis, what kind of ethics does that demonstrate to learners if your reaction is to not acknowledge other's work instead of sharing where that information came from? We can't simultaneously talk about academic integrity and citation practices, and artificial intelligence sky is falling when it comes to sourcing research, and then also just fail to acknowledge where our own work is inspired from because it may benefit some in specific ways, in specific circles.

The terms we use come from somewhere, that is why I am a big fan of etymology. Where did the word come from, what is the source? I am always trying to be aware of where my terms come from and the context of those terms, because as educational developers, instructional designers, and accessibility folk know and have written about for decades, context is a thing. That is why I own this t-shirt (Scott has great products you should check his website out, and no he is not paying me to say that, I just have a lot of his stuff lol).  So this week can we think about how terms and conditions may apply, and be more open to the conversations when folk remind you of where something comes from?