Here follows a thread on how not to be an ableist jerk with your pedagogy—inspired by the marking meeting I sat through today until I had to say something:
1) the university is not a level playing field.
1) the university is not a level playing field.
2) it follows that if the university is not a level playing field, doubling down on its carceral character with late penalties is more discipline that reinforces structural inequities.
3) your classroom is not a level playing field when you do not privilege access as a process.
4) your classroom will never be a level playing field if you mistake an accommodation for structural change.
5) it is not cheating to ask for an extension. You cannot cheat rules that are not neutral and are designed to privilege some body minds.
6) if your response to offer extensions is “what about the people who don’t benefit from the extensions they didn’t ask for,” see points two and three.
7 a) when I hear “but what about the people who didn’t ask for help” I answer with, when you create educational situations that require disclosure to remedy their unevenness you’ve already missed the point.
7 b) when you tell me that you hear the revelation of someone’s difficulties as something “everyone goes through,” what you tell me is you mistake this for what they cannot share.
7 c) you also tell on yourself as someone does not really respect students and teaches as if their experience can be, should be or is a universal
8) do not confuse the respect, care, and authority owed to BIPOC instructors and especially women, trans, queer and femme identifying BIPOC instructors with a draconian penalty process.
9) do not make jokes about wearing masks as being odd because your life isn’t threatened by a return to campus policy that has needlessly put disabled and immuno compromised people at risk.
10) Just because COVID didn’t hurt you, doesn’t mean it won’t hurt someone and all their loved ones. long term chronic illness is not a minor inconvenience.
11) not everyone can access formal accommodations: medicine reproduces the racial logics of diagnosis and eugenics continues to underpin the university and its settler colonial logics of intelligibility and rigour.
12) don’t grade “hard” just to reinforce (post) humanistic study as equal to stem or business degrees. grade with compassion and verve and generosity precisely because it is in (post) humanistic inquiry that mechanistic theories of nature find their end
13) grade generously because the chiasmatic relation between a taken for granted human subject and the sciences that study and buttress it is recoverable in post humanistic study
14) grade with care b/c we do not need scarcity to combat the crisis of the humanities, we need collaboration and study that steals from the colonial institution to build a better world where defending access isn’t being soft and studying literature isn’t just market relativism
15) tl; dr: education should not be a carceral logic, and no university is neutral.
#academicableism
#academicableism
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