[00:00:00] Bonni Stachowiak: Today on episode number 393 of the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast Ann Gagné joins me to talk about aligning our values through accessibility.

[00:00:14] Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

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[00:00:22] Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak Bonnie. This is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. Today’s guest Ann Gagné is an educational developer with a focus on universal design for learning at the University of Toronto Mississauga and a sessional instructor at George Brown College. Ann has also worked as a curriculum developer and instructional designer and taught in person, blended, and online courses.

She has a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of Western Ontario, a master’s in English from York University and a certificate in curriculum development and instructional design from Mount Royal University and is passionate about inclusive and ethical pedagogical strategies and works with instructors to ensure curricular and pedagogical accessibility. You probably know her, and you’ll hear about this on the episode, as the person who always talks about alt text on Twitter, and as a side note, so much more, I’m very grateful for Ann and for all of you to get to hear this conversation with her. Ann Gagné, welcome to Teaching in Higher Ed.

[00:01:58] Ann Gagné: Thanks for having me, Bonni.

[00:02:00] Bonni: This has been a conversation a long time in coming. I’m so grateful to get to have this continuance of a conversation that’s been really special to me. Although has, up until this moment, taken place exclusively via social media. One of the treats you gifted me with about, I don’t even know, three or four months ago is the pronunciation of your name. It was so powerful that I literally have never forgotten it since. There’s a lot that I forget on a daily basis. Would you teach it to everybody else? Because I think it’s both a cool thing but also good for us to think about for our own names.

[00:02:33] Ann: Yes. Thanks for that. I’m glad that it stuck. Because of my last name, sometimes when I get folk who called me or even my students, they’re not quite sure how to call me. I get a lot of like, Dr. Gagney or sometimes, I’ll pick up the phone and say like, “Is Ms. Gong there? I’m like, “Oh boy. Don’t know.” One semester, early on in my teaching career, I was in the classroom, and my students were asking me like, “How do you pronounce your last name?” I said, “You know what,” I thought about it for a bit. I turned on the board and I wrote down, Gagn and then hyphen Y-A-Y, so Gagné. I said, “This is how you say my last name. Hopefully, not how you think about me after 14 weeks.”

They all burst out laughing and they’ve never forgotten it since, and I use it every semester. I’m sure people, if they have friends that have been in my class before, they’re probably, used to the old joke, but I think it’s effective.

[00:03:31] Bonni: My husband and partner, Dave, he has a similar thing for our last name, which I borrowed is I’m standing in front of a stove, but I have to stutter a little bit so st-ove home, and I’m cooking up two dishes. I’m cooking a capital letter E and the yak, which I always make the joke, taste just like chicken, which is one of those hardy har har jokes, but Sta-cho-wiak. I’ve got one, too. It does work. It creates that little mental picture for people.

[00:04:01] Ann: Absolutely.

[00:04:03] Bonni: We are going to start out with one of the many, many things that you’ve taught me so much about. I don’t know if you know this game in arcades from when we were little. I think they still have them in arcades. Oh my gosh. Now, I’m forgetting the name of it. There’s a hammer and there’s little groundhogs that pop up from 12 or so boxes. Whack-A-Mole.

[00:04:26] Ann: Whack-A-Mole.

[00:04:26] Bonni: Oh, it’s a mole. It’s not [crosstalk] [laughs] It’s Whack-A-Mole. I feel like you’re a little Whack-A-Mole on this particular point. We’re going to be talking about something that’s called alt text. That is we’ll get into what that is and how people might use that. I’m going to begin with a story about a starfish, and then we’ll come back to alt text because I think there’s some parallels here. This is a story which many people have probably heard before that’s brought up a lot in terms of when we want to make a difference. An old man walking along the beach, came upon a child sifting through debris left by the night’s tide.

Every so often he would pick up a starfish and toss it back into the sea. The old man asked him what’s the purpose of his efforts. The tide has washed the starfish on to the beach. “They’ll die unless I throw them back.” The old man looked around miles of beach, or in your case, Ann, miles of tweets, tweets, and tweets, and tweets. “There are more starfish than you can ever save. You cannot make a difference.” The child bent down to pick up the tweet, I mean, the starfish, and sent it back into the ocean. Then he looked up at the old man smiled and replied, “I can make a difference to this one.” Ann, you make a difference. Tell us what alt text is and why we should care about it.

[00:05:53] Ann: Oh, that’s very you to say. Yes, following that story, for sure. I’m going to start by– This might be something that you want to put maybe in the show notes. There’s a really a Twitter thread by Connor Scott-Gardner, and Connor does a lot of work on advocacy in alt text. In that Twitter thread, Connor did a really great job of emphasizing why alt text are important to blind folk who are navigating Twitter. Alt text simply put is where you describe the image that you’re tweeting at. A lot of us tweet out images, maybe even selfies, infographics, little cards that we create in Canva to promo our events that are happening on campus.

Folk usually just attach these to Twitter, and then they send them out into the Twitter-verse without an alt text and without those alt text, all of that information is just visual. When folk are interacting with the Twitter, as I like to call it, then people that can interact with it visually in that way will be able to receive all of that information. Folk who use screen readers, for example, will not because there’s no description for those images. Basically, alt text allow you to put a description of what you’re tweeting out in terms of the image. That goes for images, for gifs, for infographics, and any of, like I say, those Canva, “Come to our event,” things that folk send out.

[00:07:36] Bonni: We’ve been mentioning Twitter, but what other kinds of places might alt text show up?

[00:07:43] Ann: You can alt text in Facebook if you’re still on Facebook. I know a lot of people might be, I’m not. You can alt text in Instagram, for example, and all the social medias. Then also, when you’re creating a website, you’ll need to have those things indicated as well, so that when people are navigating through your website, that they can get that information.

[00:08:05] Bonni: Because of your influence on me, I’m now looking for it. I’ll use a tool. If it’s even decently accessible, they do seem to have alt text. I’ve been sending out since January 2021. I moved over my email marketing services, and I realized “Oh gosh, I’ve been putting these quote graphics in these emails, and I didn’t even know that there was an alt text.” I went looking for it. It wasn’t particularly discoverable because I first have to upload the graphic. Then I have to go back and click on it.

Not only did I discover there that I could add the alt text, which is now very important to me, but also there was another neat thing where on the email then people could click on the quote graphic, and it would take them to the episode. Is it called metadata? Is alt text included under the universe of metadata?

[00:08:58] Ann: Yes. It could be. That’s a really interesting topic that you bring up because there are definitely really, I would dare say, heated conversations about the role of alt text. On a base level, in terms of like a foundational level, the alt text is there to help increase information to the most amount of focus possible. Then there are a lot of people, especially in this marketing field where they see alt text as just another place to like increase their SEO. If they have that information there, then it’ll allow for more clicks and so on. This gets to the ethics of alt text. Like, “Why are you alt texting? Are you alt texting because you want more clicks? Are you alt texting because it’s just generally good information to the most to have?”

[00:09:51] Bonni: Yes. I first started doing transcripts for the podcast for ethical reasons. I want to be clear, too, also for practical reasons. There were people who were saying that they can’t even share it with their faculty unless it has that. I just wasn’t clear on it. A lot of podcasts back then didn’t have any. I’ve really seen tremendous changes. Many, many more now have them. In this is all funded out of my own pocket. The most really cool thing that happened was I sent out an email to a LISTSERV that I belonged to because if I was going to spend the money out of our personal bank accounts, I just wanted to make sure that it was actually going to meet the needs.

I just said to– it was to faculty developers, “Hey, if we were to do this, this is the kind of thing that we’re thinking about. There would be plain text on the website but then also a PDF people could download,” et cetera, et cetera. “Is this what would meet the needs?” or whatever. I said, “Before we spend the money–” The literal first email I got back, I’ll never forget it was from James Lang, offering that the book series from West Virginia University Press, they would sponsor it. They’re all, “This is how much it’ll cost you, we’ll just pay for that.” The first 200 or so transcripts, if you look at the little bottom, they’re sponsored by them.

Then now there’s an organization that continues to sponsor them now, so that we don’t have to be out of pocket anymore, but we can still have that as a resource. Sorry for that little tangent. I started out with the ethics of it. Then even just from a personal thing, being able to search and as your own little knowledge base is really powerful for me, too. If PDFs are accessible, and then they can be searchable through many of our technologies, both on our local computers as well as on cloud services, et cetera. Yes, there’s a lot of good stuff there.

[00:11:44] Ann: Yes. Even the pedagogical aspect of that, too. Because more and more folk are using multimodal assignments. If a podcast is a possible resource that the students will be using in their courses, then having that transcript just makes it a lot easier if they’re writing an essay or creating a report of any sort. Then, yes, they can easily bring in that information.

[00:12:07] Bonni: Yes. Let’s go back a little bit to Twitter because I have learned so much from you. It is not super apparent how this whole thing works, as in how would someone even know that something had alt text? If they knew something had alt text, how would they see that alt text?

[00:12:27] Ann: Right. You are absolutely correct on that. I think that’s part of issue, is that it depends on what you’re using. People have different phones, and people have different browsers. In some instances, if you’re on a desktop depending on the browser you’re using, if there’s an alt text, sometimes you’ll get a little a little black box at the bottom that says alt that indicates that. When you’re on mobile sometimes, at least for me, for iOS, there’s no real way of knowing if the alt text is actually there. I have two or three strategies for this. What I end up doing is either I use the accessibility features on my iPhone to do a voiceover.

I voiceover the image to hear if there’s an alt text there. If can’t at that point, what I will do is there’s an alt text bot, and there are many of them and there’s one that I use, and if you send it to the tweet, then what the alt text bot will do is that it’ll read out alt text that’s there and send it out as a separate tweet. If there is not, then it will return a no alt text with a sad face. More often than not, I get the no all text as a sad face. Then if I’m on a desktop, I just use the inspect function, and sometimes I can see if there’s the image alt text on there. You’re absolutely correct that there’s different ways to go about this, and none of them are very intuitive.

[00:13:54] Bonni: What should we be thinking about– We’ve been talking about it as the creator or the poster of whatever it is. If I’m going to post, I mentioned the graphics, then I should include alt text in whatever medium it is I’m using. What about though just as someone who’s sharing other people’s content, what should we be thinking about there?

[00:14:13] Ann: People have different ideas on this. I’ll share what my philosophy is, which is that you want to model. You’ll notice that if you go on my Twitter, I never share anything that doesn’t already have an alt text because I don’t want to perpetuate that information inequity. If it’s something that I feel that folk really need to know, so sometimes early on in the pandemic there was some COVID information that was really important without alt text. I will write the alt text and send it out and say, “There’s no alt text on this image. This is what it says.”

I really don’t share content that doesn’t have alt text, just like I wouldn’t share like a video without a caption because I don’t want to perpetuate that. Now, people have different frameworks for that. Some folk will do it and then write the alt text for the person, and that’s one way that you can certainly go about that. My philosophy is that. I do know, I do this because I just want to model well. I want to show that if you’re putting content out there, I don’t want to share with my 2,000-some-odd folk because I want it to be accessible to all 2,000-some-odd folk. That’s the way I go about it as my practice. Other people might have different ways of doing it.

[00:15:35] Bonni: Yes. We’ve been getting the edges of your values, but I’d like us to center ourselves on them for a bit. As you think about accessibility and your experience and knowledge, what are some of the core values that come to mind for you that you like to be contemplating both in the long term but also on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis?

[00:15:58] Ann: Ethics has been really a large part of my research and the work that I do and my work as an educational developer for a very long time. Anyone who knows me will know that I often say that a lot of the values in the ethics that I have or things that I really got from my maternal grandfather, who was really just a fantastic human, and he taught me everything that I need to know about being a fantastic human. For me, my ethics really started with this idea of an ethics of care coming from Nel Noddings, where it’s all about relationship building, where it’s all about just really listening to others in a way that makes sense and amplifying but also modeling what you would like to see.

We’re going back to alt text, if it’s just making sure that information is accessible to everyone, then that’s great, too. To me, it just comes down to inclusion. Who do you want to include in this discussion? Your answer should be everyone. Who is being excluded by whatever practice is being put into place? For me, those are some things that I think about as I try to like navigate, not only the Twitter space but my own work and research as well.

[00:17:20] Bonni: Would you share a story about your grandfather that you think is emblematic about his values?

[00:17:25] Ann: Oh, dear. My grandfather was the kind of guy that would help anyone with anything. He’s such a goodhearted person, and I feel that I’m that way, too. If someone, their car broke down or whatever, he would rush over and fix it. A lot of this stuff will center around cars because he was always in a truck. Somebody ran out of gas or whatever, he would go and like help them do that. He was very much like that with the family, too. If the family needed anything, he would help. He also taught me just like really just good land stewardship as well.

He had his little garden in the back and to respect the land that we’re on and how to grow things to help nourish the family and those kinds of things. A lot of those stories really stick with me as I get older. Pretty old now. I really remember all of the things that he taught me. He’s a really great guy.

[00:18:28] Bonni: You mentioned Nel Noddings. His name’s been mentioned a couple of times before on the show. I’m not super familiar with his work. If you’re going to try to introduce people to his writing and his work, what would you point us toward to learn more?

[00:18:43] Ann: Nel Noddings, her, is a feminist. She has a book, the foundational book is called Caring, and it’s come out in a couple of different additions. It was basically like an approach to ethics and moral education. Nel Noddings’ work is very much about how do we navigate our educational spaces in an ethical manner. Going back to the how do we build those relationships in ethical manner as well.

[00:19:19] Bonni: Are there favorites of hers that you would point us to to get started, a book?

[00:19:26] Ann: Yes, I think Caring would be the book that I would suggest that’s pretty much the foundational text. I think it was published by UC Berkeley Press or something like that.

[00:19:39] Bonni: You’ve shared a little bit about your values and how they have been shaped. Are there other values that come into play as you think about your day-to-day work when it comes to accessibility?

[00:19:50] Ann: Just thinking about the people that have influenced me and I think my thinking. Another person that comes to mind is a dean that I had in my previous previous work. Her name is Maureen. She might actually be listening. Hi, Maureen. Maureen was really great because we used to have a lot of conversations about EDI. The acronym is different in the States, but in Canada, we say EDI. We used to have a lot of conversations around EDI and about what was happening in institutions around that. She’d say things like “Ann, they don’t know what they don’t know.” I love that line. I carry that line with me. Again, we were talking about the ethics and what we carry.

I try to carry that with me because I always remember what Maureen was saying. It is true. Sometimes, folk just don’t know what they don’t know. I want to try to maybe help guide them to some of the accessibility practices that will help them know. She was also someone who was thinking about asking me, “Who’s in the room, and who isn’t in the room? Who’s part of this conversation, and who isn’t part of this conversation?” Those are also some things that really resonate with me when I’m in my work as well.

[00:21:14] Bonni: That definitely comes out in your work. I try to be cautious in terms of my own learning because I’m aware that I don’t want to be expecting other people to educate me. Yet, on Twitter, you can get a lot of education just by being very quiet. [laughs] I have Twitter lists set up. For example, as a Twitter list, I set up with people that are in the disability community. They don’t have to be purposefully educating me. I’m not asking them to spend any additional time that they wouldn’t otherwise be spending on that platform, but I have really been able to glean so much. I love that. You really do have both a gentle spirit about you while also an incredibly righteous in a good way.

This is the right thing. I see you being angry in what feels like very real, raw ways because you want us to be better. Yet, you are incredibly gentle as a teacher, and I consider you to be someone I have just learned so much from. As a teacher, I’m appreciative of that. I’m thinking we could spend a few minutes then since you are investing your time and you’re here anyway. [laughs] You’re talking to thousands of teachers now. As we think about the classroom, which of course the classroom can look a lot of different ways, lots of spaces and places where learning might be taking place, what are some of the key areas where you would like us to do better when it comes to accessibility?

Where should it be? If we were going to do a self-audit it, and we only got to audit a few things, what would be some of the low-hanging fruit where you just assume that we don’t know what we don’t know?

[00:22:52] Ann: Thanks for that question. In my role, I was hired to help support universal design for learning. I have a lot of conversations with faculty around that. The really great thing about universal design for learning is that it intersects well with some accessibility practices. Also, the good thing about thinking about those accessibility practices is that also intersects well with the ideas of trauma-aware and trauma-informed. I know you had Karen Costa on not so long ago, who does really great work in that field. For me, one of the things that I would think about– There are a few things. Choice models.

Accessibility is how are you building in choice models in your assessment strategies and in your activities? Are all of the activities and all of the assessments premised on a single thing? Are they all text-based? Do they all assume that folk will be able to participate immediately in a conversation for five minutes sustained without any prompt or practice or whatever? Because that’s certainly not doable for a lot of people. Choice models are one thing. Then that goes into modality as well. How are the students showing that learning, and then demonstrating that learning? Are you open to different ways that that learning is being shown?

Can they submit a podcast because they feel much more comfortable talking to a camera for 20 minutes than writing an essay? Both of those things will hit the same learning outcomes. Then there’s just space considerations. I know that we think about our classroom spaces physically. There’s some things you can do, just look at your classroom space, are there things that are in the road? Are there bags on the floor that people could trip over? Those kinds of things. You could always ask like, “Hi. This is an alleyway. Can you maybe just move this over so there’s some clear space?” We also can do these space audits in our virtual spaces, too.

Are you doing a live course over Zoom or whatever, maybe you’re using Teams. Is captions available? If captions are available and if they’re automatic captions, being aware of the fact that those automatic captions and transcripts are sometimes not great, and you need to go back and edit them for them to be usable for anyone going forward. There are a lot of little things. There’s things about documentation. The way that you present the information to the students in terms of having headers and word documents and tagged PDFs. Those things that can be part of the preparation of your pedagogy, the preparation of your curriculum over the year. That if you start getting into a routine of doing that, it’ll just become second nature, and this is a thing that you just implement in your classes.

[00:25:56] Bonni: If we could talk a little bit about the headers and Word documents. I know that our first intent should be for accessibility purposes. [chuckles] If you could talk more about that but also the side benefits. If we go and we use headers and subheads, et cetera, there are some side benefits that make it, to me, worth the time even if we didn’t care about accessibility. Would you talk a little bit more about that?

[00:26:20] Ann: Oh, yes. Sure, absolutely. When you create a Word document and you use the header function, say, in Word, it helps guide the reading. Oftentimes, if you’re tabbing through your document, those headers allow you to see both what the big headers are and then the subheaders, and you can tab through. You can use that to create a table of content, so that something is a lot more easily navigation-able. To your point, it’s not just about creating a document that’s accessible. It’s about creating a document that’s accessible, but it’s also creating information that’s a bit easier to navigate, and it will get you to the information as quick as possible.

[00:27:07] Bonni: We were working on a report with some colleagues recently. The other thing that’s really nice is, specifically in Word, although this also shows up in web writing that we do as well, is that if you change your mind or APA changes their mind and all of a sudden, it’s not italics anymore, now, it’s a different font size or whatever it is, those changes can cascade throughout either an entire webpage through what’s called CSS or on your Word document through what are called styles. Once people get that, now it’s good for everybody. Then we can carry that forward across to save us time.

You could redesign an entire website, for example, and say, “Now, this is going to change the size,” or whatever across all of your Word documents, change some of the styles that get applied. There’s a lot of really good things to dig in there. Would you speak similarly about PDFs? Some things that people may not realize about accessibility as it relates to PDFs specifically.

[00:28:13] Ann: PDFs have a little bit of a mixed review. Some folk like PDFs because you can use Adobe voiceover and go through the document if it’s been formatted properly. If you format from a word to a PDF using save as and make sure that everything is selected, and you end up with a PDF that you can go through, like I said, with that Adobe voiceover. Some folk like it. Again, like with anything when we have conversations about accessibility, when we have conversations about disability, one is not always the size for all. There are some real accessibility issues with PDFs with some folk. Some of them come from the fact that, if I have a low bandwidth, a PDF is a lot larger than a Word document.

If I am accessing my course from the Wi-Fi at a fast-food restaurant, it’s going to be a lot easier for me to get that information on a Word document than it would be on a PDF. That’s one. Then, just from an accessibility point of view, EPUBs are becoming more and more common and also are becoming the more accessible option for folk. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of books, for example, and even articles when you look at academic articles that are both in PDF and in EPUB. This goes back to that choice. For some people, this is going to work really well.

For other people, this other option will work really well. We really need to get into the mindset of like, “This is a thing that we can do, yes. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this particular thing is going to work for everyone.” We need to be open to the fact that this might not work for someone, and we need to support that.

[00:30:01] Bonni: I know one of the tensions out there, Ann. I’d love to hear you reflect a little bit on if we do have our values aligned, we do want to do this stuff right, but it can really feel overwhelming, especially for people who don’t have a lot of confidence around their technological skills, which they perceive as really being intertwined with this stuff. I find that sometimes then it translates to, “It’s just too hard, so I’m just not going to do it.” You spoke to that earlier as far as just setting up habits, and I’ll tell you that it has really helped me get over the hump a little bit, where it’s just, “Transcripts, they’re going to be on everything. Captions are going to be on everything.”

Then you do start to develop a rhythm. A lot of the technologies are making it easier and easier to go in and make those adjustments like you talked to. Would you speak from both your experience and also working with so many faculty of how do you navigate this tension, and then how do you advise others to navigate this tension between the all or nothing mindset? How do you deal with that?

[00:31:07] Ann: It’s important, I think, just to start somewhere. Also, knowing that it’s an iterative process. If you start somewhere, you don’t have to do all of the things all of the time right off the bat. If you start, again, getting into those habits of doing things slowly and starting one semester with something and one semester with another thing, you’ll get into those habits as well. Because I really do want to acknowledge that there’s a lot of folk that have been asking things like, “When is this going to happen?” With the pandemic, there was such a rise in all of these accessibility supports that happen.

We saw captions happening. There were events with CART captioning even virtually. It was great because these were things that folk in the disability community had been asking for forever. It is sad that it took a pandemic for that to happen, but it’s important to start somewhere and to also just be cognizant of the fact that somewhere someone is waiting for this. Somewhere someone needs this, and if you don’t have the space or the capacity to do that right now because of workload and all of that stuff, maybe flag that and see if there’s someone else that can help you with that. Start somewhere. Because, like I said, someone is waiting for it, and they really need that to be able to engage with what you’re putting out there.

[00:32:32] Bonni: This is actually a good time to transition into the recommendations segment because I have something that I’d like to extend in terms of starting somewhere. I have been really inspired by John Warner in so many ways. He’s been on the show, and such important tools for us to help ourselves become better writers and to facilitate others doing the same. He has a wonderful newsletter, which I have recommended in the past, where you can send in the five most recent books that you’ve read. Then he’ll write back on his Substack, what he thinks would be good places for you to start next. I haven’t ever written him the most five recent I’ve done.

I have so much fun lurking on his suggestions for other people. One of the things that he’s done through that is he’s set up a bookstore, an affiliate relationship on bookshop.org. All the books that he’s recommending, as well as he’s got other lists up there of his favorite reads for different years and things like that. By the way, bookshop.org is a way that we can support independent bookstores, either as a whole, or we could go in and specifically identify, for example, this Black-owned bookstore that is near me, I would like to support or what have you. I’ve had this on the Getting Things Done methodology calls The Someday/Maybe list. It’s been on the someday, someday, someday [laughs] maybe list.

I just haven’t moved forward on it. You were mentioning about starting somewhere, and I did a little bit of that. I’ve had a really busy week. Sometimes I think it’s okay to allow ourselves to procrastinate with something fun like this. I’d been sitting on it for so long because it felt so big, and then I thought, “How long would it take just to set up an account?” Not that long, so I did it. Once I was in there, I was like, “Oh, okay. I could set up my little affiliate thing,” and then I realized I had to get it approved. Then now, there’s a Teaching in Higher Ed affiliate thing, which by the way, I’m not recommending today because I have some work to do. I’m trying to start small and start somewhere, but I just started playing with it and all of that.

What I am recommending today is that people go over and visit John Warner’s account on bookshop.org. Hopefully, I’ve got some of you curious that I might have something for books that are recommended on this podcast. It does really come back to what you said of just starting somewhere, and sometimes starting somewhere means from this point forward.

[00:35:04] Ann: Correct.

[00:35:05] Bonni: If you haven’t been doing captions, and that’s something that you ought to be doing, commit, “From this day forward, I am going to have captions on all of my videos.” When you get that rhythm going, then we can go back. By the time you go back, a lot of times you probably need to re-record that video, anyway, it’s probably been a while.

I just wanted to echo what you said, in general, about starting somewhere in lots of different ways. Speaking of which, by the way, my intent on doing this is to support bookstores that are local or bookstores that are specifically Black-owned or that represent my values better than some of the larger bookstores [laughs] that I have linked to in the past.

I have close to 400 episodes. I am not going to go back to every single one of those pages right now and redo all of those links, but I’m excited about the possibility for, from this point forward, doing something. This, I feel really good about. I just wanted to echo that recommendation. I have a couple other things I’ll share just really quick as far as recommendations go for the episode. I have a post I’d like to recommend from Kate Rose Guest Pryal, and the post is called Can You Tell the Difference Between Accommodation and Accessibility? It’s a really good read, very short but really powerful. One of the things she writes is about the accommodations model.

I’m quoting from her now, “Requires us to disclose our disabilities. It requires us to explain, to give up secrets we might not want to share. The accommodations model depends on invasions of privacy to work.” Very powerful post.

Closely related to that, there is a Twitter thread that I’d like people to go read, from Dr. Cait S. Kirby. Oh, this one just right in the gut. There’s been so many good conversations about extensions, and I don’t have all the answers. I suspect Ann and I could probably do five episodes just on this topic alone and only be getting started. This particular point that she’s trying to make is, and I’m quoting her here from her tweet, “Some faculty say, ‘They should tell me what’s going on, then I’ll consider giving them an extension.'” She continues, “Would you share with a professor that you were pooping blood? Five professors, someone you hope will write you a recommendation letter? Would you share with a faculty member that you were hearing voices?”

She goes on, and since I didn’t set us up, there’s some really heavy topics that I didn’t prepare us well for for this conversation. I encourage us to go and read this and honestly ask ourselves if we would be willing to disclose some of the horrific things that she describes next in this thread. I will tell you, there’s a lot of heavy, heavy content. If you’re ready for it, go over and have a look at that and really just ask ourselves the question, and I would even say we should be having these conversations with each other. One last thing, and I’m going to pass it over to Ann, and that is just lots of other discussion around deadlines as it relates to, yes, great for those of you that have a nice, tidy, little teeny-tiny courseload, and you’re teaching 40 students for the whole semester.

There are no easy answers with this, but we do need to be thinking hard and specifically about any kind of policies that would require people to disclose things, acting as if, “Hey, it’s just me. Of course, you should be willing to disclose that.” We really have to have some serious conversations around this. I hope this will just be piquing people’s interest in continued conversations on Teaching in Higher Ed. Yes, Ann, [laughs] I’m going to pass it over to you.

[00:38:58] Ann: Thanks for that. I would also echo that you should follow Cait on Twitter. Because Kate also has a really great thread on do you know how the accommodations process works in your institution? That was also a very powerful thread because a lot of folk don’t. Cait’s a really great advocate for a lot of things, and I would strongly suggest everyone follow her on Twitter. My suggestion is this lovely book, which is massive, yes, I know. It’s called Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach, and it’s by Evans, Broido, Brown, and Wilke. As I say, it’s pretty massive. It’s like a textbook, it’s 500-and-some-odd pages.

It’s really great because it talks about the history of disability studies, it talks about different student populations and things to think about in terms of pedagogy. If you haven’t read anything, if you haven’t read any critical disability studies work or anything like that, and you’re just looking like, “Give me a foundation,” that’s your 500-page foundation. [laughs] There’s that, that was my first thing. Then I was thinking there was another thing that I could suggest, and I’m going to suggest a thing, it’s a thing, but it’s not like a book or website or anything.

My second recommendation is call your friends. We are all so busy in this pandemic, and some folk have a lot of familial and work and other kinds of responsibilities. I feel like we haven’t had a time to connect with all our friends and some of us may have lost some friends over the pandemic. In the interest of being trauma-aware and trauma-informed, you need community. Call your friends. Not all of them because that would maybe be a lot and annoying. Maybe call a couple that you haven’t heard from in a while and see how they’re doing.

[00:40:55] Bonni: Thank you so much, Ann Gagné, I’ve been delighted to get to have this conversation with you today, and I want us to continue it both on Twitter, where we get to mostly connect, but also have you back because I feel like we’re just getting started. Thank you so much for both what you do for me and so many others there and also now contributing to this community.

[00:41:15] Ann: Thank you, Bonni.

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[00:41:19] Bonni: Ann Gagné, thank you once again for being a guest on today’s episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. The show notes are over at teachinginhighered.com/393, you can also subscribe to the weekly update for Teaching in Higher Ed over at teachinginhighered.com/subscribe. Once you do that, then you’ll be signed up for the weekly email that comes out with the most recent episode’s, show notes, and recommendations, and some bonus recommendations that don’t show up in the episodes, and also quotable words. I hope you’ll go over to teachinginhighered.com/subscribe and beyond that weekly update. Thank you so much for being a part of the Teaching in Higher Ed community. Thank you, Ann Gagné, once again for encouraging us to start somewhere. See everybody next time.

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[00:42:21] [END OF AUDIO]

The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning. 

Teaching in Higher Ed transcripts are created using a combination of an automated transcription service and human beings. This text likely will not represent the precise, word-for-word conversation that was had. The accuracy of the transcripts will vary. The authoritative record of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcasts is contained in the audio file.