Knowing When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough

We are seeing a lot of conversations lately in HigherEd about the need to recognize when it is okay for something to be "good enough." And this is definitely something that has been part of the discourse, certainly since the beginning of the pandemic (which is not over by the way) but I am seeing a lot more of this mention of good enoughness in academic spaces and on posts.

This blog post has been sitting in my mind for the last two weeks or so. And it is one that is meant to work in conjunction with my podcast episode releasing today which is Episode 48 Towards Accessible Podcasting. But of course my life being my life other things have happened between that podcast recording and me posting it today which will help support this blog post today as well.

So first a story as to why this blog and this podcast are connected. I recorded a podcast about what I felt made for accessible podcasting. And what I wanted to focus on is how the recording of the podcasts and the tools used need to be also accessible to the person recording. So this needs to be part of the assessment design and instructions if podcasts are used as an assessment option in your courses. But "irony of ironies" overlapped with "modelling it is a thing" when I recorded the podcast and it recorded on the wrong channel and thus the recording was done using my computer audio input and not my podcast microphone. Thus, the recording itself sounds a bit tin canny compared to my other episodes. 

So I faced a dilemma, re-record the episode with the microphone, or decide if it was "good enough" to be released to the world. And I decided that it probably was good enough to release to the world and probably sounded a bit more like my first few episodes of my podcast when I lived in a place that was really more echo-y than I do now. It also has a transcript, like all of my podcast episodes do, to support, and as always I am open to support anyone where the audio is just not working for them for that episode. But how incredibly stars aligned type situation is that that an episode on accessible podcasting, may not have been the most accessible recording, but yet was accessible to me as the person recording because I am very much running on low energy right now, and so rerecording was some spoons I don't have. So know that I didn't take this decision not to re-record lightly, of course I didn't, because those who know me know how seriously I take accessibility, but it also opens up space to have a conversation about how good enough gets thrown around a lot in HigherEd.

Sadly, accessibility and inclusion is often the thing that lives in "good enough" land in academe. And this is because of resourcing, and thinking that the resources put towards accessibility and inclusion are fiscally good enough, when they are really not. It also happens when folk don't actually share the values of inclusion, but feel like they need to pretend they do. It shows up in pdfs of reports that are not screen reader accessible. It shows up in non-proofread documents released to the institutional masses because they know that only a small group of people will actually read the document anyway; good enough they say. It happens when folk know they should go to an event because it would be good to be seen there, but also stay for about 3 minutes, don't talk to anyone or learn anything, just to say their face was there or take a picture; that's good enough. It appears when someone who is given lots of keynote moneys to tell people to have hope writes a book that has the words accessibility and disability exactly once in the book; good enough- hope is not for disabled folk anyway right?

The point I am trying to make is that good enough is often used as a reason to not do the hard and heavy work of actually building inclusive spaces. Good enough is actually a barrier to community building or actually shows that folk are not actually interested in community building. Good enough are words in plans not doing the work in the plan. Like the conversations we have had about trust and the need for trust building, trust is a consistent showing up, and if the consistent showing up is a check box, quick, good enough showing up, that is not trust. Also this models for others on your team what passes for "good enough" inclusion, and it often can be harm producing. 

The fact that I felt I needed to write a whole blog about how the audio of my podcast this week is not where it should be, as someone who already has some audio support needs that make editing audio difficult, when most folk would have been like, good enough publish, without explanation, that is the difference between knowing when good enough is not good enough. And it is also that tension that is causing folk to maybe run to tools that are not so ethical to do the work that they can't do because they want to stay at that level of good, but their bodymind is saying enough. 

So yes, there are many things that can be good enough, and we deeply need to know when that is. Like with everything in academe not everything is a off/on, yes/no situation. If you are not feeling well, and you do not have time to respond to the 100 emails in your inbox, an out of office explaining that is definitely good enough. If you do not have time to put detailed comments on each page of the article/document you are reviewing, but can give high-level feedback because that will allow the person to go through and edit those areas, that is definitely good enough. I am also a big fan of knowing that the conversation should be a conversation that is had in office hours (in person or virtually), as opposed to 10 back and forth emails like they are texts. I am not a fan of AI generated images with poorly spelled/non-decipherable English, because it is decoration anyway- good enough (please don't do this it shows people a lot about what matters for your group). Pedagogically we make a lot of these decisions. They are important ones. Our decisions are based on if the learning outcomes will still be met. The decisions are based on capacity where systems are asking more and more of us. Good enough decisions are not decisions to be taken lightly, and that is really what I want to emphasize here. It is my hope that in all of the "good enough" discourse that we come to know when good enough, is just not good enough, for the sake of the relationality that is foundational to education.