Thread by @kawaiilovesarah

[thread on disability + teaching🧵🤍]

if you missed the live version of "udl in apocalypse time" that's okay, because i also publish passionate disability rants infrequently lol

i'll summarize it in this thread: what's wrong with access for everybody?

journalofmultimodalrhetorics.com/6-1-2-issue-cu…

1/ okay, so i have a theory about how your university, my university, everyone's university made ridiculous amounts of money when the pandemic kicked off. my theory is simple: how they defined "access" was IMMENSELY profitable. and there's a lot of word-twisting going on here.

2/ it played out in my mind as a 3-step process: redefine access, commodify access, then use a version of access to gain educator compliance.

yes this is eventually tied to UDL, i'll get to that. I'LL GET TO Y'ALL. but first, why should we redefine a common word like "access"?

3/ if you can make "digital divide" (re: PHYSICAL access to tech) and "access" mean the same thing, you can advertise yourself as increasingly accessible in an all-digital learning environment - even if you AREN'T actually accessible.

but you get WAY more international students.

4/ when i get WAY more int'l students, i can charge WAY more tuition. 3x as much, actually. and i can recruit them with "access-friendly"-ness.

by making HUGE online classes with industrial output, i collect a lot of extra $$$. but where are all the extra educators to do this?

5/ if you taught a course in COVID, you're laughing because the answer is "there are no more hires"! it's just you doing more work!

@Emily_Brier_ has great managerialism commentary i call in to help explain this.. and educator "resilience" in this online hyper-recruitment.

6/ so with all those extra students + all that extra money + low facility costs... why were unis claiming to run deficits/austerity budgets?

they lied.
- UBC's market cap = Jack in the Box
- UW's market cap = Turtle Beach Gaming
- UoT's market cap = Madison Square Garden

7/ none of these schools allocated ANY extra funding (outside of federally-mandated legal amounts) to accessibility at all. they built namesake equity with it :)

but so many educators suspected this - how did we revamp 'access' to get their compliance with this mess?

8/ @banville_morgan and @brennacgray helped me talk about "dataveillance": the amazing amount of DATA i can get with all this new "access" technology like infamous LMS + video call platforms. i can use this data to feel like i have control of students in digital classrooms.

9/ i can "access" eye tracking, page load times, keystrokes, time spent in other windows, time spent logged in/out, pages accessed, classmates spoken to, other platforms concurrently running... all on my students. MS Teams is the worst for this if you're keeping score.

10/ these algorithmic analytics were designed to point out 'at risk' students... but it only looks for "abnormal" behaviours. at best, what you've built is an extremely functional disability detector.

see: D2L's Students at Risk. it flags students it thinks are going to fail.

11/ we also over-invested in proctoring or policing tech (a la @jeffreymoro 's glorious rant). programs like LockDown Browser also function as disability detectors - they're looking for non-normalcy, not objective evidence of risk. it also disables disability software...

12/ okay so you've been really patient. ALL OF THAT IS NOT GREAT. but i'm just an educator / i have heard of UDL, what am *i* doing wrong specifically??

let's talk about that lol, we will heal together. "Access for everyone" is so deceptive because it sounds like a for-all win..

13/ in @AnnGagne 's words, the "for-all"-ness of that win is the problem. when we make classroom solutions that "increase access for everybody", we're making a couple complicated arguments about
1. who matters, and
2. why they matter, and
3. for what reason they matter.

14/ if i gave 5 students the same red ball, and asked them to bounce it for 5min, i'm practicing equality: everyone got the same thing, and the same instructions.

but one student is ADHD, and another is Blind.
both these students have much deeper barriers to 5min bouncing.

15/ UDL as explained by education juggernauts would have you give those students different balls (or explain it 50 ways, or etc). but now you've created another layer of difference by identifying they need different things. this causes affective alterity with you and their peers.

16/ a better way into that access argument is not to design activities that can so tersely identify who can't do it. maybe i have 5 GROUPS of students experiment with how to make a ball bounce for 5min. then i'm not creating equality, i'm stepping closer to equity (and community)

17/ universities relied on the for-all version of UDL as the mass-understanding because checklists, tip sheets, and easy "equity overlays" can service a LOT of students, REALLY fast, in HUGE sections. you see how these pieces come together now? we've created majority-rule access

18/ and majority rule access (or utilitarian access) sounds a lot to me like.... PRE-UDL TEACHING. which is to say, it doesn't actualize udl in the crip sense at all.

@AimiHamraie has a great breakdown of disability + udl that i borrow from in the article version.

19/ but because universities KNEW that UDL (the crip version) is not scale-able, they relied on a mass misunderstanding of how it works -- and it worked spectacularly!
now there are 34957498 workshops about misapplying UDL for classrooms of 3x more students than ever before!

20/ what they've created here as a sub-argument is a rhetorically complex means of saying "i tried" (to be accessible), and "i tried" to give more students more learning.

but this came at the *expense* of who access was originally supposed to help. that's pretty ironic, right?

21/ @KateMarburg did a great breakdown of why the 'mental health' mechanisms couldn't come close, and i paired that with @Sneilsonwwh 's breakdown of "student resilience" to show that students never really stood a chance in this disabling matrix of co-opting "access" for profit.

22/ this article also featured @rorhetorician 's take on "productivity", @HannahntheWolf & @daniellelorenz 's "academy violence", and @PriceMargaret @AdamHubrig on disabled access counterpoints.

23/ thank you @DrCCedillo for homing@JOMR, and thank you, reader, if you actually make it through the full-article version! 😂🤍
#DisabilityTwitter #udl #AcademicTwitter @PhD_Genie @theADHDacademic @DisabledAcadem @CactusMHS @projectlets and @DisInHigherEd 🖤 thank you allies.

24/ i am unbelievably rude, also tagging @CASDW_ACR @balloonleap @smhumphreys @Katja_Thieme @rogergraves @joelhenghartse @DrGarbati and the canadian rhetcomp gang who the live version was designed for. i so sincerely apologize, i love y'all to biscuit bits. 😂😂💛