Inconvenience

The ad hoc accommodations model renders learners an inconvenience.

Typically, a learner is responsible for informing the educator at the start of term, if they have been granted academic accommodations. Just as educators are trying to get the course they designed off the ground, they are inconvenienced by having to source accessible materials or make one-off changes to assessments for individual learners.

“…providing special ‘exceptions’ to the ordinary rules also singles out disabled people as targets of resentment.”

Jung, K. (2003). Chronic Illness and Academic Accommodation: Meeting Disabled Students’ “unique needs” and Preserving the Institutional Order of the University. The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 30(1).

When we institutionalize mass education and operationalize accommodation we make difference inconvenient.

We are each an irreducible and evolving complex adaptive system of characteristics and needs. This uniqueness and wild, organic diversity has been inconvenient when it comes to designing products, communication, environments, or policies. It defies mass production, mass marketing, mass communication, mass education, as well as simple and straightforward public policies.

The Three Dimensions of Inclusive Design, Part One. (2018, March 29). Inclusive Design Research Centre.