Does educator workload trump accessible teaching and learning practices?
Very often, yes. With an untenable workload, educators have to prioritize. Those priorities can reflect both the ableist values of the institution and the precarity many educators feel.
The development of accessible practices within HE relies on faculty and other staff having the knowledge and skills necessary to change and improve what they do; therefore, staff development is an important element of accessible practice…
[Upon rolling out campus-wide trianing] …resistance from faculty was the greatest barrier encountered as they were fearful of feeling less competent, anxious about the innovative use of ICT, and concerned about insufficient resources and time…” (p57-58)
Burgstahler, S., Havel, A., Seale, J., & Olenik-Shemesh, D. (2020). Accessibility Frameworks and Models: Exploring the Potential for a Paradigm Shift. In J. Seale (Ed.), Improving Accessible Digital Practices in Higher Education: Challenges and New Practices for Inclusion (pp. 45–72). Springer International Publishing.
The reality is, the majority of the post-secondary labour force didn’t grow up learning and practicing digital accessibility. It feels new. It feels overwhelming. It won’t always.
In Canada, educators, tailors and weather reporters alike survived the change from Imperial to Metric units in the 1970s, now known as the “metrication.”
Canadian children have received only metric instruction in schools since the early 1970s.* Yes, Canadians still use a quirky muddle of measurements, choosing to stick with inches and pounds when a living room is measured or a baby is born, and swapping to metric for driving speeds, and the volume of milk containers. Nevertheless, educators are no longer standing in the way of the universal adoption of metric, the way they currently stand in the way of the universal adoption of accessible digital practices. We will survive learning and employing accessible digital practices, too. We just need to start.
*An exception to metrification was made in Ontario schools, fueled – pun intended – by the American car manufacturers who had manufacturing plants in the province. “This was done in light of the refusal or reluctance of much of the private sector to metricate;” and the argument was made that students were graduating high school without a knowledge of measurement that could be applied in the workplace.
When do you think schools and Faculties of Education will start to normalize digital accessibility the way they normalized metric? And how will they support educators to do the work?
