About this Blog: “But Normal Sucked…!”

There was a period when a common canard from faculty and students was: “I can’t wait for things to get back to normal.” To which most disabled people I know reacted by thinking/saying/screaming: “But normal sucked.”

This project, an interview series and a supporting website of resources and artifacts, emerges from that dialogue. Drawing on “How to Teach with Text,” and building on Care Work and the Critical Design Lab, It aims to center the voices of disabled teachers and especially writers in describing how their embodied knowledge as disabled people and their cyborg selves as users of technology can lead the way to a collectively accessible and radically caring university “post” COVID.

See below for an example interview, with the Modifier Keys curator T. K. Dalton. Tim was interviewed by Seema Suri, a curriculum specialist at CUNY’s K-16 Initiatives.

The question set here is the basic question set to be used with all interviewees:

  • asking them to position themselves, in terms of what embodied knowledges they’re bringing to this conversation;
  • their approach to access in the classroom generally, how it’s explained on the syllabus, how it influence their use of ‘cheap things’ (to riff on Jason Moore and Raj Patel) available in any classroom like care, time, space, plans, and choice;
  • the way technology has shaped that before and during the pandemic;
  • how all that connects to their engagement with collective access, to use Aimi Hamraie’s term, and abolitionist pedagogy, to use Bettina Love’s term;
  • how all of the above interacts with and is shaped by happening at a university, a site where access is often framed as an adjustment of an existing design as a reaction to an individual’s request to have their legally enforceable civil rights respected RATHER than a design goal that should be the first thing any of us think about.

Occasionally, the team here at Modifier Keys runs contributions by nondisabled allies. Today, educator Seema Suri of CUNY’s K-16 Initiative spoke with T. K. Dalton, a disabled writer who has taught at the college level since 2005. Tim also worked as an American Sign Language-English interpreter for seven years, which comes up in their conversation below. They start out discussing disclosure, academic ableism, and the embodied knowledge that disabled writing instructors bring into our classrooms.

Seema Suri: Could you tell me your name, where you teach, and what you teach, just to check our sound? I’m also curious–off the record if you want but it’ll shape my questions a little–if you identify as disabled, and if so, how publicly (ie: with your students, in your writing, with HR, etc)? Feel free to say as much or as little of that as you want on the record. 

T. K. Dalton: I’m Tim, I teach at the City University of New York at two campuses. One is Lehman College where I work as a graduate teaching fellow, and I teach writing. I also teach writing at City College as an adjunct assistant professor, also in the English department.

SS: And do you identify as disabled, and if so, how publicly?

TKD: All this can be on the record that’s fine with me. I received minor accommodations through HR. I had to kind of browbeat them a little bit for those. I identify as disabled with my students, occasionally, it kind of blows their mind sometimes and then they also forget about it right away because they’re sort of like, I can’t compute my professor has a brain injury, like what do I do, like this doesn’t make sense. And then in my writing, and my teaching, the teaching material I often will use in class often will have disability as a feature. It sort of is everywhere in my work, but certainly I don’t teach disability studies I teach writing. and I very much like teaching writing. It definitely is central to how I teach, but it isn’t what I teach.

SS: We’re starting each of these interviews by asking people to describe how access informs their teaching, both before but especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. What does access (or another term like accessibility, or accessible design or collective access) mean to you in the context of higher education?

TKD: That’s a really great question. Each of those terms mean something a little different to me. I really like the term collective access right now because I think it incorporates a lot of other critiques of more traditional pedagogy. It gives the Disability Justice kind of spin to it without co-opting arguments about antiracist pedagogy or decolonized syllabi. Since we’re reforming our teaching to be antiracist or our curriculum to be decolonized, we’re also looking for places where things have barriers built into them. Collective access is how I think about access right now. Access, as something that is in dialogue with and responding to critiques that are being made by activists of color, by queer of color critiques of the university and other systems. Disability Studies has often been critiqued for being too white, and it’s a rather sound critique. But that said, accessibility is the ground floor. And it’s something that we don’t always really even achieve in universities. I know this from having worked as a sign language interpreter over a period of seven years during which I was also teaching. I saw it from the side of the room as an interpreter and from the front of the room as a teacher, the ways in which we were sort of failing to be fully accessible because of a bunch of things that you can’t blame on one person. And so similarly problems with access are not going to be solved by one person, they’re solved by a lot of people. 

SS: And so thinking about that, what are some ways that you work in the classroom that design for access and how would you bring some of those ideas into your own classroom?

TKD: Right, so as one person right (laughs). Since classrooms are run by individual people, people are ultimately going to be responsible for executing their part of the bargain. So in a classroom of my own. I think I do a couple of different things and they definitely draw on being a disabled person myself. One of the things that’s important to me is to not have a lot of deficit thinking. This is one of the ways in which disability and collective access align with pedagogical theories like trauma-informed pedagogy and care-based approaches to learning. Some students have been labeled a certain way, as deficient or deficit thinking or pathologies and all those sorts of things are part and parcel of many disability experiences, and they’re also embedded in sort of racist structures in Pre-K-12, public education systems. Students have gone through and been traumatized by this system, and they arrive in college pretty cynical, in a way that I don’t think I arrived in college, cynical. I was excited to arrive in college and to be transformed by the experience in first-year writing. And I think a lot of students arrive in the first-year writing classroom, and they’re not looking for that so I think that deficit mentality that disability to folks with disabilities sometimes experience.

I try to reframe that sort of generally. My accessibility statement on my syllabus, for example, says, Listen we all we all learn in different ways, and whether or not you have a documented disability, it’s my job to match whatever you can articulate to me as your best way to learn. I have to match my teaching to that. So we have to have a conversation about that continually over the course of the semester. And to me that’s a big way to design for access. 

There are plenty of other ways to design for access through that kind of dialogue. Some involve technology. I know we’re going to talk about that at some point. Some ways, though, just involve meeting students where they are and articulating what one is doing as well as doing it, and building in—particularly in emergency remote teaching—a lot of community building and redundancy and chances for students to circle back and if something didn’t work the first time they can try it again. If it did work, they can do it a different way or take a risk! That kind of recursivity can really make a difference for disabled students, but of course it also works for nondisabled students. That’s the big idea: collective access is both built for disabled students, but also built for students for whom school hasn’t worked because of the way it’s been designed, in ways that have nothing to do with disability alone but relate also to race or class.

SS: So it almost seems the deficit thinking almost seems like questions that are a way of thinking that you’re constantly kind of asking yourself and checking yourself with?

TKD: First-year writing is where I spend most of my teaching time and energy. I talked about that transformation that I experienced when I went to a public university as a disabled student. I had to undergo a shift, and my students, disabled or not, also have to undergo a shift from high school to college. You have to feel comfortable to fully make that shift, and you have to ask questions because you’re not going to figure out how to make it [otherwise]. Collective access has to do with just creating an environment where people are accountable to each other and where people support where each other is at and try to get people to that next place. 

SS: And what are some of the technologies that might enter a classroom as accommodations that you’ve used or my use for broader consumption as tools for nondisabled students? 

TKD: A lot of what I’ve just been talking about aims to create dialogue and connection and to reduce cynicism and to fight deficit mindset. That might not seem to be technologically relevant questions; they also might not seem to be disability related connections. I definitely see them as both of those things.  People make connections through repeated interactions and for plenty of 18-year-olds in 2021, the most frequent kind of repeated interaction they have with peers is through electronic means. Digital tools are really how an instructor builds trust, that is, a dynamic made out of routines and predictability and stability. [Trust creates] an environment where learning can really authentically happen, an environment that draws on the very rich existing knowledge that students have about digital rhetoric.

That’s the technological question: how can teachers find the best tools to build trust? 

Rebecca Sanchez and Mara Mills [and Michele Friedner] talk about is “platforming down” as a sort of disability pedagogy. The idea as I understand it is to ensure that those trust-building connections are happening in an environment that is low tech enough that everybody is able to access it, even from a cell phone. What Kathi Berens and Lauren Sanders call “cell phone scholarship,” has, at CUNY for the last 14 months, been the only thing most students can call “college:” accessing class via cell phones and tablets and hotspots and, you know, data networks. We’re on Zoom right now on computers with video on because we have stable wifi and OK computers. That’s not working for most students in a stable worthwhile way for what they’re getting out of it. It’s not a good use of bandwidth or battery, in any sense of those words….Technologies that enter the classroom as an accommodation can build connections. Platforming down is one of those ways–chat boxes and Google Docs and screenreader-friendly discussion boards and blogs. 

The other big idea is open pedagogy, which to me includes student-centered approaches and open education resources (and whenever possible, open access and open source materials). The two materials I’ve sent you for your site are a unit on podcasts with transcripts and a set of lessons using alt-text and image description. Both of these are access-tech based lessons that build on OER. The image description uses some open access technology, in CUNY Academic Commons.

So first, the podcast with a transcript. Obviously a transcript is an access technology. It’s there for deaf and hard of hearing people so they can get the most out of Serial. But it’s also a site where my students can engage in conversation via annotation software. (I use Hypothesis). The transcript is a site where my students can experience a redundancy, where if life is really stressful, if they’re really tired, if there’s lots of noise in the apartment that has two bedrooms, and 11 people in it, they can pull on their phones and earbuds, they can read the transcript on a phone while listening to the episode for our next class. If they have a tablet or a netbook, they can highlight things using Hypothesis (which seems kind of crappy on phones, unfortunately). That’s an access technology being deployed in a way that creates equity for students who are on that other side of the digital divide from their instructors.

SS: And in what ways do those technologies create opportunities to do radical kinds of pedagogy—antiracist, trauma-informed, care-based, decolonial, student-centered, problem-posing, anything like that? 

TKD: There’s a way to do student-centered pedagogy on a Zoom call with a transcript and with some captions, where you can throw kids in breakout rooms and ask them to use a platformed-down Doc and have a conversation, and report back in the chat. That’s one way to think about it. 

But if you’re trying to take a face-to-face pedagogy like a live book group. That’s student centered but it costs money and bandwidth. Both podcasts are also very current and they cost $0. The transcripts helps them stretch out over time. 

And to your point about the conversations about politics and culture that students are immersed in outside our classroom, podcasts engage those issues wonderfully, either directly or indirectly. For example, we had a group in my Lehman class listening to Floodlines, a podcast about Hurricane Katrina, which is of course a very different kind of disaster but one was obvious parallels to COVID, in the sense of a government responding to an emergency in ways that we’re not totally effective or equitable, and in terms of systemic racism, right, because there’s obviously a lot of systemic racism that over a long period of time that led to New Orleans, experiencing the hurricane and its aftermath. Access pedagogy creates a site for students to slow down and have those conversations on their own time at their own pace. Not with no deadlines, but with options for how and when those deadlines are met, with built in processing time for different types and modes of thinkers, readers, writers.

When I am able to explicitly talk about a course material as designed to [create a certain kind of time for them to work], it creates space for them to use it in that way, or not, if they don’t need to. The folks who have commented on it are more likely to say I appreciated this, and I used it, and I felt like had permission to do it. I’ve never had anyone say, “I wish you wouldn’t talk about how this is here to help me.” 

So also: writing as a content area of its own, right? You have to learn the content of like, Oh, this is what a transition entails in a college essay, or it’s also like there are these skills and modes of writing like description. The knowledge of what content is involved in writing and the skills of like how to develop  an idea are both things that access technologies reinforce. 

When I design things for students to say Google Docs   I’ll design documents in an accessible way for screenreaders like on the, in the event that I have a student, using a screen reader. And I’ll often say like, “Oh, you guys notice how I made this heading one heading to initial outline off to the side. This is one way to organize things that I make sure it’s clear to me. I don’t usually skip through this but some people who use screen readers do skip through it in a certain way. They use these headings to sort of get later in the document if they want to get to a particular point on page like 10 or something.”  I say, this helps me organize my stuff for you guys and for myself. So if this is a tool that’s going to help you organize your papers, I would encourage you to use this outlining feature. That’s an access technology. It’s formatting. It’s not sexy. But, it teaches organization, it teaches a knowledge area in writing. 

Access technologies in a writing classroom, and also teach skills. Description is a great example. If you have an image–and we often will try to encourage students to work multimodally, like, whatever it’s 2021 be digital, use GIFs, right. But in fact, like, students both know more and say less about what they’re doing with multimodal work. One way around this via an access technology is to use image description. And this can take a couple different forms at a basic level, you could use alt text in Docs or WordPress and just be done with it. Like: yes, you should write as if a visually impaired person may want to read your work someday.

But you can also take it a step further, which I sometimes do so after I’ve taught them how to do alt text. The alt-text lesson is like “You have an obligation to imagine a disabled audience,” and imagining and expanding audience is part of the knowledge of a writing classroom. Once we establish that, I assign a few pages of the website of the Perkins School for the Blind. They’ve got this whole protocol of like, well, what’s this image for, what do you use it for, what’s the purpose, is it just to illustrate, or is there information in there because you’re going to have to describe that in a different way, depending on what the purpose is… 

It’s total rhet-comp gold. To pin down for a student or to have a student have to articulate and say in a peer editing session, what the image is for–that’s huge. 

Access technologies are sites to do all the things that we try to do right as good teachers in 2021. There also of course sites to get students to be the leaders, as they make progress through the things we’ve always been trying to teach them in ways that aren’t always totally student centered, and in ways that don’t always make the most of the skills that they come to classes with in excess.

SS: Often access technologies at University are framed individually as compliance issues and accommodations for specific students whose privacy precludes their broader use. How can collective access pedagogy in regards to technology confront this mentality, or other systemic issues and universities.

TKD: I don’t know the answer to this question, except the one I heard from these two brilliant scholars and disability activists, Aimi Hamraie and Mimi Khuc. I’ll sort of paraphrase them here from my notes, and I think this was Hamraie talking: “creating structures to meet needs is a respect is a collective responsibility.” Later in that same talk, Khuc said, “You don’t have teaching if you don’t think about everyone’s needs and access you have something very different. It’s not, It’s not teaching. It’s a form of gatekeeping.” 

So, what they kind of said over the course of like this long really interesting sort of conversation. A couple of months, a couple. I guess two months ago, is they were kind of like we’ve spent a long time as individuals and as collectives within universities, trying to like nicely explain all the benefits of collective access and they’re sort of like the “access is in your interest” argument actually doesn’t work. “They don’t give a shit,” I think is how they put it. What does work, per Hamraie, is emphasizing crip ways of knowing. “Disability knowledge and technology and design gets people’s attention,” she said. “Bringing the political arguments in and showing disability as a culture is really really persuasive.” So that’s the basic effort here. To make this a moral and ethical argument about how to design the technology used anywhere in the university in such a way that eliminates every possible barrier. 

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