The Access Tension of Treating Equity Like a Bucket

Today's blog may be a bit shorter because I actually think my brain needs a break from all the thinking today, but I wanted to share something that I have been thinking about since last week that has larger pedagogical implications.

Last Saturday I went to Toronto to go to the Disability Pride March, and it was lovely to be in community with folk and to see friends that I had not seen in a long time (over a year and a half at least) because when you move so many things change. It was a very warm day and there was continual reminders of hydrating, supporting others in ways we could to make the day more comfortable and supporting different needs as a group. I witnessed things that reminded me why disabled folk are really good at thinking big picture because the spiderweb impact of different types of decisions, legislative, operational, personal, are often unseen or unfelt until they are and a proactive approach is always better than a reactive one. 

However, I also witnessed conversations and interactions that reinforced the kinds of things I have been thinking about how we tend to do mutual aid, and that there is a siloing that happens around what is assumed to be a shared lived experience which in fact does not really exist. This connects to the work that I do and the conversations that I have around Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the false belief that if you put some UDL components into pedagogical design that somehow that means the course is now accessible to and for "all." 

Oftentimes this is where I like to remind people that if you have met one disabled person, you have met one disabled person. Access needs that support one person may actually be in conflict with the access needs of someone else, and when you say things like that it sends HigherEd folk into a panic because what do you mean we need to treat learners like individuals. Systems are set up to be approached more in a collective way, like equity buckets, and approaching equity like a bucket in fact creates so much inequity. We cannot collective or universalize our approach to anything in eduspace, because we are not, as of yet anyway, robots, as much as so many systems would love us to be.

And this is where the rubber hits the road in HigherEd, because a space where everything is moving to delivery at scale allows for the exact types of conversations we are having (or not having) around generative AI. Generative AI is appealing because it scales, but a lot of people have concerns about it because it seems to empty out contextual meaning, because it is a model that is based on statistical commonality. What folk do not want to hear is we have collectively created the conditions for generative AI to be in our eduspace by wanting to empty out meaningful engagement with ideas and peers because how do you do that in a 500, 600, 1000 person class. Transmissive models lead to generative language models, the path between the two is straight and not narrow.

Transformational models of education, where folk engage in ways that are meaningful to them and that means something different for every single person in a classroom environment (on-campus, online, or blended) is how we need to be thinking about the future of education and the kinds of access tensions we can encounter. We can't keep doing equity bucket models of design that are reinforced by an at-scale fiscal response to scarcity of funding. 

So I keep hearing folk from the disability reading group I am in saying "so what's the plan?" in response to a statement like that. What's the plan when there's no money they say, when everyone is burnt out, and there's a massive scaling back of the scope of a teaching team in terms of teaching assistants and seminar leaders for example. And the only thing I can think of right now is we so need to "smallify" what the pressures are telling us to "massify." 

Can we have a "pedagogy of moment" movement please? What do I mean by that? A pedagogical design that stops and allows for the stopping and questioning that leads to learning, an awareness of what is happening as ideas are forming in the "right now," and a valuing of that need to pause because we do so need that pause. I talked a bit about this in an article I wrote with my friend Adriana Grimaldi in 2021. There is so much to benefit from by just designing in that pause, when so much systemic pressure is asking us to speed up beyond what is sustainable. Basically I want us to collectively put a hole in the buckets, dear Liza, dear Liza, because they are using them to operationalize the make believe that we are all the same.