About That Article, And Articles Like It

This is of course not what I wanted to write about this week, but here we are. And I am sure some of you selected the link to this blog hoping to find out what article I am talking about. The thing is I am not going to link to it, because that particular article is not really the point and the clicks is what they want anyway. As we know even if you are coming across this blog post in 5 or 6 years, there will have been another 10 or more articles just like it every year since this original post saying the same thing and needing the same kind of response I am going to try to give here.

So the thing is about articles that say "we give too many accommodations" the sky is falling chicken little in my day we had more rigour like that ableist piece that was published this week is that ultimately it is never an article about how the system is failing everyone, which those articles should be if we want to get all bothsidesism about it (which is a whole other thing). It is always an article hedged in research that they find specifically to support that ableist argument, things that will support the "kids these days are snowflakes" type narrative that folk want to keep perpetuating. Things that support lack of trust in learners, not lack of trust in the system actually. That particular article in fact went all the way back to 1999 to find some article to make the point, not because it was foundational, but because that is how far back they had to go to make their regressive point. 

They are always articles that sort of support a more medical model, like how dare folk in Arizona not get diagnoses, because diagnoses are the way we have to do this, that is how disability services things run. They almost never talk about how difficult that medical model is on folk with disability, the resources required and the different kinds of capital, social and financial and even the kind of consistent bodymind lived experience a diagnosis requires. They never talk about those things, because those are not their lived experiences, nor do they even have folk in their bubble that have that lived experience and if they do they paper over it with words like disABILITY, cause I want to focus on the ability and not the dis (I see things like this so often and I know we all do).

These articles are often talking from a position as a tenured faculty member that just remembers how it used to be and they want to do their best John Houseman in The Paper Chase each day (the irony is not lost on me that I cannot find a single captioned video about this movie to share) and why do they have to deal with these pesky accommodations things don't they know I have must more important things to deal with or run to like my holiday or summer house. You know because they can run, they still have that kind of mobility of bodymind and finances to do all of that. Disabled folk mostly cannot, and how dare you remind me daily that disabled folk exist through the accommodations process. 

This is where those articles come from. They come from a please don't remind me that folk with different lived experiences to mine exist. And when they don't come from that particular point of view, they come from the point of view of a sessional/adjunct where the system makes it really difficult to support accommodations the way it is set up now, because of time and precarity. That was sort of what that Walrus article was about a few months ago. But in the end it is never a critique of the system that makes sessional/adjunct design possibilities difficult, it is always a critique of too many accommodations. Because to see it as a design problem and a systems problem is too complicated, too out of the realm of the fixable possibilities. It is much easier to say, down with all accommodations, than to say, hey we should advocate for more time on our contracts to do inclusive design because that is what our strategic or academic plans say the institution cares about apparently. 

When we do occasionally get that hey let's do inclusive design article it is often a sponsored advertisement for CAST books or workshops, or insert any new ed tech company here with an AI framework UX which is actually not accessible to assistive technologies or advertising a workshop that is actually not designed using UDL (Universal Design for Learning) principles cloaked as an article about pedagogy. 

And this blog post is here to say that both of those kinds of articles make my work extremely difficult to do. The no accommodations, no cell phones, no computers, chicken little articles make it harder for me to have the kind of caring, compassionate, inclusive accessible pedagogy conversations because it simplifies it to, hey if we just didn't have accommodations in the first place I wouldn't have to worry about caring because I have other things to care about or I just don't have the capacity (again not a changing the systems conversation).The ra-ra UDL articles tend to use this "for all" narrative that basically is like nails on a chalkboard to me, because it suggests that there is a checklist easy fix to thinking about accessible pedagogy, and sorry no that is not how that works. We are not robots, we are not The Borg, and so similar in all the ways that one thing will work for all. Access friction exists, and in particular access friction exists between learners and instructors and that is a reality we have to talk about. This is what the articles should be talking about. Both these types of articles are suggesting a utopia that does not exist nor will it ever, and we honestly need to deal with that reality if you are in any kind of eduspace.

I know this is already really long, but I am going to make an attempt to tie what I have said already to what I really wanted to talk about this week which is how identities get forced on us. The scenarios of the articles I mention above tend to suggest two different kind of identities of instructors, one who is ableist and non-inclusive, and the other who is inclusive and understanding. And you know what, that is also not true. The down with accommodations articles are often motivated by exhaustion and a deep halcyon days aesthetic and ethic. The UDL everything articles are often well meaning but are rarely intersectionally inclusive, so this is where you get article about anti-racism that does not acknowledge BIPOC disability, or disability articles that don't acknowledge their own whiteness or different kinds of privilege. 

There is a thing that is going on in academe right now which in a meeting this week with trauma-informed UDL folk I coined as "you mustness." Academe is simultaneously mired in a crisis of trust and deep sense of "you mustness" about everything. You must use AI, you must be UDL aware, you must hate accommodations, you must be at least this tall to ride. Okay maybe not the last one, but probably actually. The "you mustness" of academe is deep normativity cloaked in rhetoric. And it is also a source of moral injury. A type of friction between one's morals and values and the morals and values of your institution which creates an exhaustion that a nap won't fix. It is an emotional and soul tiredness. 

Those who rail against accommodations are soul tired because they want the system to take accountability, but won't ever say it like that, so the easy way (because everyone wants the Staples Easy button) is to say down with accommodations, or folk are lying about their disabilities (like gosh if you were really part of disability community you would know how ridiculous that is), just like it is easy to say no more equity and inclusion programing. It is easier to say let's get rid of the thing that "didn't exist 20 years ago" because we lived in our ignorance, than to say maybe we should design better things and be aware that we are in a time of better awareness.

Those who do the kind of work that I do to support accessible pedagogy are soul tired because the system is not set up to support our work, and then articles like that one this week allow for spaces of "and other thing!" with pointy fingers and move the Sisyphean rock way back. We are also soul tired because we see folk we used to consider allies and accomplices sell out to big tech to not be so soul tired themselves and actually in turn create more technological inaccessibility in procurement processes. But when you say that, you get yelled at, you get chastised, you get sent off of inclusion island (insert Survivor theme song here). It is not a coincidence that my most read blog post is about complicity in supporting conferences and organizations that are not inclusive. 

I spend a lot more time alone than I used to. Before I used to have great conversations with folk on Twitter about things of this nature, or in the association meet ups I was a part of. But now I don't because most of those people left for the sky that is blue in an exclusive choice that I still really feel a lot of upset about (but that is another post). I can say that my blood pressure is better because I am not having those same discussion/arguments with the people. I can also be sure that those spaces don't miss me much, because I was always the one reminding them of their American bias, and that Canadians exists and these are things they don't want to hear (in fact one of the critiques of that article this week is because he used a Canadian study, and the Americans were like how dare you, that is not the same, which made me laugh so hard actually because gosh get over yourselves). These folk will say well we have to be part of this because that is how we do the work "from the inside." And I just want to say whomever told you had to be on the inside to do the work lied to you, because if you are on the inside already, you probably have sold part of your ness to the "you mustness." 

As I approach a big milestone bday next year I realize more and more every day that I actually fit in no where, and that is okay. I have always been like that; in high school I was the person most likely to have a collection of theatre kids, sporty kids, and emo kids at my locker on break chatting together because I didn't fit in one place, I was kinda in all those spaces simultaneously. I do a lot more micro work than macro work these days. We had 14 people sign up to read Margaret Price's Mad at School together this term at my university, which is like a real victory to be honest. I never had more than 12 people in the reading group at my old school. That 14 people want to talk about mental health and disability in academe is what makes me keep doing this work. I don't want to change my identity to "former accessibility advocate" because I am not, I am still doing this work in ways that are meaningful to me. In ways that mean I don't have to pay membership fees to support ableist conferences or publications. Will I go to conferences? Sure, but on my own terms, and not because of the "you must" be part of this association. Because I don't have to must anything. 

That article and articles like it will continue to be published. They will continue to be published because in different ways we support the publication of those articles, through clicks, through writing and talking and texting about it. Because we can't just let the ableism go and they know that, they are banking on it in fact. You must click that headline (a headline they changed by the way but the url is still the same which says a WHOLE LOT), you must monetize through advertisement, you must write a whole super long blog post about it, because if an article was published in The Chronicle and no one talked about it, was it published at all?