Accessibility agreements: a consent-based model for approaching collective access in the classroom #Thread I have given several accessible teaching workshops lately and people always ask how to navigate the need to increase classroom access alongside the need to limit instructor burnout or enforce public health protocols. One strategy is to approach access through a consent model.

#Thread for sharing COVID-related disability archives and projects. Please add below! 1. Remote Access archive: documenting how disabled people have used technology for remote participation, before and during the pandemic, curated by @criticaldesignl mapping-access.com/the-remote-acc…

This semester, I taught a graduate course on Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Activism. We focused on theory (with a lot of emphasis on disability justice and transformative justice) and students opted to form and run a mutual aid collective. Here's what happened: 1. At the start of the semester, students unanimously chose for their final assignment to be forming a mutual aid collective (instead of just writing a paper and leading discussions) and to receive a collective grade at the end of the semester.

Alternatives to doomscrolling: #slowdwelling
1. Make a stack of cookbooks next to your bed. Read each recipe in a different voice (in your head or aloud). Describe the images in as much detail as you can.
2. Sharpen your knives. Sharpen your scissors. Refresh your rotary cutter. 3. Eat plain lettuce (red leaf is my favorite) without any dressing. Feel it, taste it, smell it, sense its texture changing in your mouth. Also try this with plain oatmeal.
4. Water your plants. As you do, report to them on the weather outside and about any birds you heard/saw

Are you feeling exhausted by pre-semester planning? Dreading the new school year? Not sure how to slow down? Here's a tool for planning your time with intentional slowness, care, and accountability to yourself and others. bit.ly/SlowSemester #slowprofessor #CovidCampus Access note: folder contains PDF with alt-text and headings and a Google docs text-only version. Both have printable/editable tools for your use in planning the semester.

Yesterday, my mother reminded me of the most incredible story, passed down from her great-grandfather, about food forestry on our ancestral lands in northern Iran. Generations that worked and grew food in forests of wild, thorny pomegranate trees. In my grandfather’s generation, a turn to supposedly modernized ag and row cropping meant that they dug up all of those old trees and cleared the land. They continued growing saved seeds for a long time (some of which I still grow and propogate)

You can support safe(r) approaches to campus reopenings (including a default online policy) and also be against deporting international students. #thread 1. Do not conflate the immense, justice-driven and coalitional work done to protect vulnerable and marginalized people from COVID (including online teaching) with complicity with ICE. Instead, recognize how anti-immigrant racism works thru ableism to put lives at risk.

#CoronaAbleism looks like: #thread Tl;dr: disability justice needs to be at the center of our discussions right now: 1. Assuming that you and everyone you know will survive this and return to normal. Vulnerable sick and disabled folks are not making this assumption now or ever. We are trying to get to the future by surviving now.

Let's talk about online teaching and accessibility. Shifting courses online is an opportunity to build in accessibility from the beginning. #thread #criptechnoscience 1. If you already use an online course manager, you may be familiar with some basic accessible teaching strategies: Image descriptions for all images and videos, 2.captions and/or transcripts for all videos, 3.PDFs with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for screen reader access

Hey people who think that accessibility is only for disability-related events: #thread 1. I spent this week at a conference about the history and philosophy of biology. It was not a disability studies conference. There was nothing about the topic we were discussing that seemed to be explicitly about disability. And guess what? They rocked at accessibility.