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Troubles Online: Conclusion

Troubles Online
Conclusion
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“Conclusion” in “Troubles Online”

Conclusion

Lisanne Binhammer

We are not returning to the “before” times, and as we release this book technology is changing rapidly. This is the central trouble of our times as we continue to grapple with academic ableism and its evolving forms.

I was invited to co-edit this collection when I was a graduate student at Carleton University. I had just completed a thesis on entanglements between autistic girlhood and virtual reality, entirely online. I started and graduated from my program during COVID-19. Everything was remote; classes, department socials, and coffees with my cohort were all online. I was in Toronto. Most of my peers were a four-hour drive away in Ottawa, except for some who were entirely elsewhere. There was a woman in Spain who’d show up bleary-eyed on screen, joining lectures before dawn broke, and another in India who was similarly seemingly out of place and time.

I began reviewing the collection by reading Chelsea and Fady’s reflections on their roles as teachers in an evolving landscape of digital pedagogy—at times critical, at times not. Because this is a collection about critical access in teaching and learning, I want to occupy space here; I want to share my story.

I made a conscious decision to study during the pandemic and applied for my program in the early days of lockdown. I was not ushered online like many whose educational plans were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. I wanted to be online. It felt like the right time. While the world was coming to a shuddering halt, I could start something new and get something important done. And I could do my graduate work at home.

Studying during the pandemic made sense to me because I, like the students in the chapter by Collins, Smith, and Jeffery, believed that I was more suited to online education. Gone would be the difficulties of my undergraduate degree, in which generalized anxiety made it hard to get to class, let alone to be in class. Goodbye, confusing and challenging small talk. So long, crowded hallways and noisy lecture halls. I firmly believed that this would be better. I knew that, if I felt too overwhelmed during a class, I could shut my laptop. If a conversation with a professor felt too daunting, I could reschedule it. I could manage myself, and my needs, without needing to involve anyone else. Studying online made sense, I made sense, if I was—to borrow a word from Chapter 4—invisible. Of course, there was a sense of practicality in distance learning for me, as there was for Arzu-Carmichael in Chapter 2. I could remain in place while still studying with scholars whom I admired. But the truth be told, this was not the reason. Rather, I gravitated toward online learning because I saw myself as someone who didn’t quite fit into traditional f2f learning environments.

This isn’t to say that remote education didn’t work for me; in many ways, as Mohler muses in Chapter 10, it “allowed me to flourish.” However, this wasn’t because of my neurodivergencies. Rather, the online environment regulated and rendered my disabilities invisible much the same way as an in-person one. Instead of hiding in bathrooms on campus, I was doing the same at home. Instead of meeting with professors to talk about accommodations in an office, I was asking for them over Zoom. For me, so many of the expectations of f2f learning were still there. The problem was never my disabilities; the problems were and are structural and institutional. These problems couldn’t be solved with a move online.

Yet this is the trick that technology often plays on us. For Abdelnour (2015, p. 205), this is “an issue of techno-saviorism—the promotion of technology as a panacea … as having an incredible agency to solve complex social and environmental problems.” The notion that technology can act as a balm or even a solution to deeply nuanced realities is something with which I am intimately familiar, having spent the decade prior to my graduate studies in the technology industry as a product designer. Techno-saviourism plays out rather evidently in the educational arena; for example, the One Laptop Per Child project from the MIT Media Lab stemmed from the idea that, if every child had their own laptop, then education would become accessible and attainable. However, since the unveiling of the project back in 2005 (Kraemer et al., 2011), One Laptop Per Child has struggled and shrunk because, according to University of California, Irvine Professor Mark Warschauer and Stanford University PhD candidate Morgan Ames, “it ignore[s] local contexts and discount[s] the importance of curriculum and ongoing social, as well as technical, support and training” (Kelleher, 2016, para. 5). The project has been critiqued in ways similar to the troubles articulated in this book: technical solutions, with their blanketed approach, can never provide equitable futures.

In the introduction, Jones and Shanouda distill the work of the contributions to this book as well as their lived experiences as students, staff, and faculty in higher education to point to the seven troubles of online teaching and learning. These troubles are points of tension, of complex truths that simultaneously reveal the concerning isms (ableism, racism, sexism) of higher education and show us where to begin our collective resistance to them. The chapters in this volume have told stories about these troubles and shed light on what an accessible critical digital pedagogy can look like now and in the future. Throughout the book, and in my own narrative above, the first trouble—that online pedagogy is or should be seen as a solution to the problems of inaccessible higher education—is established. When we teach and learn online, education is not suddenly made accessible; rather, as Collins and co-authors point out in their chapter, the same “neo-liberal ableist expectations about learning” tend to persist.

There is a misconception, to touch on the second trouble, that digital classrooms are universally accessible and available. This is proven false by Kathie’s words in Chapter 6: “Due to my dyslexia, the words in e-books swim by on the computer screen.” This is proven false yet again with the pedagogical quandaries faced by the authors of Chapter 5 at Utah Valley University. Content is another point of contention in assuming accessibility and availability in an online classroom. In Chapter 1, Reid and Shanouda discuss teaching difficult knowledge digitally and how it differs from an f2f learning environment. Teaching online isn’t a matter of transferring content, or “neatly pour[ing] it into an online class,” as noted by Stommel in Chapter 3. The way that this content is brought online matters. Online teaching and learning require, as Reid and Shanouda observe, a pedagogical approach politically rooted in care, love, and justice. Access and availability are active and interrelational; they depend on the how and what and who is teaching and learning.

The third trouble—that individuals are at fault when new modes of digital praxis fail—is at odds with the notion that teaching and learning are interrelational. Kendall’s poem in Chapter 6 puts it simply: “Students should not only strictly depend on themselves.” In Chapter 5, Garcia and Johnson relate feeling overwhelmed when they faced the provost’s office: unending resources, training modules to complete, and frantic email after email. Although faculty training has been noted in this book as an important part of online teaching and learning, there is often a disproportionate burden placed on teachers and students. The pandemic-related shifts, as the fourth trouble notes, pushed this further by putting online teaching and learning in crisis with an unreasonable expectation of recovery. COVID-19 shuttered us all inside in unfamiliar situations and deeper precarity. The phrase “new normal” was meant to obscure the strangeness of it all and assumed that things would be manageable, even successful. Indeed, Garcia and Johnson speak to “quick changes” that they had to make “without any meaningful say in those changes.” COVID-19 added, as the fifth trouble states, to the already unresolvable complexities of online teaching and learning. In Chapter 7, Cheuk and Ignagni observe the tension between “disability access as love … and the university’s desire for access as capital through the inclusion of a greater quantity of students.” A similar tension can be found between the existence of radical hope in higher education, as Reid and Shanouda describe, and the nature of learning that happens through a learning management system (LMS).

Morris and Stommel, in “If bell hooks Made an LMS,” speak to how learning management systems—with which we all became intimately familiar during COVID-19—are “a symptom of a much larger beast …: the rude quantification of learning, the reduction of teaching to widgets and students to data points” (Stommel, 2017, para. 7). EdTech products tend to favour efficiency and automation of learning experiences. The sixth trouble expands on the role of online education in maintaining divides and reproducing structures of power; online teaching and learning are often falsely presented as apolitical and ahistorical, resulting in the erasure of crip, neurodiverse, and other digital creators’ world making. As Reid and Shanouda put it in Chapter 1, online classrooms are not “spaceless and landless but … spaces where systems of power exist and unfold” and are “mobilized and exacerbated.” In Chapter 7, Cheuk and Ignagni similarly highlight that framing online classrooms as “anytime anyplace” abstracts them from their social, historical, and political contexts. They unravel the narrative of their physical university; this narrative exists and is translated into the online environment along with the obscured but never neutral algorithms that bring an online world into existence.

The above are six of the seven troubles. They are and should be troubling enough to move us into the final trouble: the invitation to cause trouble online through active resistance to and reimagining of our digital futures. The chapters in this book provide a set of practical places, as Dolmage says in the foreword, about where to begin, how to push back, resist, do things differently, and become co-conspirators in cripping the university.

Before addressing this final trouble, however, I want to trace our current positioning, much like Jones and Shanouda do in the introduction. In the midst of writing this conclusion, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 no longer to be a public health emergency. The pandemic is now endemic. But, as Stommel notes, “our work has fundamentally changed” even as we attempt to “pivot” back to in-person education. We’ve realized new things in the past few years, we’ve found new ways of working, and we’ve discovered new tools. In the foreword, Dolmage asks “what did you do in your research environment in order to keep your research program going during the pandemic? Did some of these things increase access more generally? Can you keep doing those things?” Dolmage points to an infrastructure that we have started to build. We can’t lose it now. We can’t suddenly remove things that were working and are working.

This is particularly important to think about now as the landscape of online pedagogy is changing yet again. We are at a new moment of reckoning. Artificial intelligence (AI), though it has been a part of our lives for some time now, has stepped more visibly into the public arena. In 2023, the Khan Academy—an EdTech non-profit that boasts 137 million users across 190 countries (Herold, 2022)—announced the soft launch of Khanmingo, an AI-powered learning tool meant to democratize student access to individualized tutoring and act as an assistant to educators (Singer, 2023). AI is here. Online teaching and learning are changing, and we are at a crucial moment. In The Sentient Syllabus Project, a substack authored by academics about the age of AI, they note that it is shifting paradigms in pedagogy within a matter of weeks; we can’t rely on past research or even current research because everything quickly becomes outdated (Steipe, 2023). This is hard. The sense that we are beginning again is hard: there are new tools, new expectations, and new ways to think about access.

But I’d like to suggest that we aren’t beginning again. In response to dealing with new pedagogical disruptions driven by AI, we should remember that “we have only one thing to go on: experience. And we have only one thing to work with: creativity” (Steipe, 2023, para. 3). Our collective experience in dealing with the pandemic, the troubles identified and the stories told in this volume, are part of a history directly transferable to how we deal with things now. The critical access-related themes in this book—disruption, care, and cripping—must influence how we respond to AI-powered pedagogy.

The final trouble in this book, like the first six, is woven throughout the chapters. The way that the authors speak about causing trouble online through active resistance to and reimagining of our digital futures speaks of a path forward as we navigate through the haze of AI. One such place in which to begin is offered in the very premise of the book and echoed clearly by Arzu-Carmichael in Chapter 2. We need to “ ask questions not only about which students are served by online education but also why,” which calls attention to the rhetorics that shape our ideologies. This can look like questioning and examining guidelines and policies that existed prior to the pandemic or those being reinstated now. We must reflect on who and what is holding current power structures in place. If we don’t do it now, then things will only become more entrenched. In Chapter 8, Stevens and McCall nod to Dolmage’s work in 2017 that examines how higher education has viewed disability within the medical model. This viewpoint is indeed at risk of being further cemented with AI; Lillywhite and Wolbring, in their examination of how disabled people are represented in AI and machine learning literature, note that, “given the lopsided quantity of clinical/medical/health versus non-medical/clinical/health role, identity, and stake narratives related to disabled people present in the literature, one can predict that AI technology will learn a biased picture of disabled people” (2020, para. 56). We must resist ideologies about online learning that serve only to perpetuate deeply flawed assumptions.

From questioning and examining what is, we can move toward creating—or co-creating—digital spaces that embody pedagogies of care and love. Time and time again in this book, different authors have proposed what Stommel acknowledges in four words—“start by trusting students.” Centring the lived experiences of those directly affected by higher education allows us to avoid the pitfalls of UDL creep and encourages students to become full participants in their education. Stevens and McCall speak to involving students actively in course design through goal/intention setting, frequent usability check-ins, and presenting course content in multiple modalities. Echoing Karpita’s thoughts in Chapter 9, these are all examples of saying to students “Tell me about yourself. You take the lead. You tell us what needs to be said and done here.” This sentiment is repeated in regard to surveillance EdTech in Chapter 10: “Those most affected by surveillance in the classroom should be at the table when institutions make decisions.”

The student voices in this volume give us clues about where to begin; for starters, we can accept work in multiple formats or choose a single platform for submissions, as Kathie points out in Chapter 6. Of course, those most affected go beyond students and include faculty and staff. As noted in Chapter 3, there is an institutional responsibility to trust teachers. Morris provides the example of a new chancellor who started a “listening tour” during which she had open Zoom sessions to chat with and learn from staff and students. In Chapter 9, Grimard remarks on working with accessibility consultant Juan Olarte to create the MAM course: “We were using online accessibility checkers … but then Juan—who has lived experience and expertise—would tell us … here are some of the challenges, and here are some of the ways it could be better.” Instead of top-down approaches or assumptions about lived realities, participatory approaches to online pedagogy can make space for us to avoid retrofits, as per Dolmage, and encourage the spirit of crip technoscience and collective access. As Newman-Griffis and co-authors (2022, p. 10) comment in “Definition Drives Design: Disability Models and Mechanisms of Bias in AI Technologies,” “top-down technologies that impose a particular worldview of disability can reinforce and worsen existing inequities.” It is important to note that a participatory approach, as Reid and Shanouda propose, “does not take place at one point in time but is ongoing, constantly in motion.” Our commitment must be ongoing as we attempt to reimagine the ever-more-complex realities of online higher education.

In The Sentient Syllabus Project, the authors envision how AI will deeply unsettle higher education (Steipe, 2023). Importantly, they speak to the promise of personalization. With access to vast amounts of user data—such as academic records, assessment results, learning behaviour, and preferences—and through the use of pattern-detecting algorithms, an AI system could create custom content and provide individualized tutoring all through an interface much more intuitive to use than any LMS that exists today. It’s easy to imagine that AI will resolve many of the troubles in higher education. It’s also easy to imagine that new advances—with AI or other technologies—will only continue to abject those with bodymind differences. It has been happening in higher education for some time. Back in 2014, the UK Home Office accused thousands of international students of cheating on the Test of English for International Communication. An overwhelming number of students—2,500—were forcibly removed, and 7,200 more left the country (Gentleman, 2022). But the accusations by the Home Office were based on flawed data from a voice recognition algorithm (Morse, 2019). Vulnerable populations were thus harmed and continue to be harmed because of insufficient technological oversight (Grimm et al., 2021). Another problematic example of AI’s use in higher education is mentioned by Casey Boyle (University of Texas) in “How ChatGPT Could Help or Hurt Students with Disabilities” (McMurtrie, 2023). Boyle notes that some instructors have moved from take-home assignments to in-class timed assignments to prevent students from accessing ChatGPT. For Boyle, this is an instance of “increasing the slope” of the uphill work that students with disabilities are made to do (McMurtrie, 2023, para. 7). The presence of AI shouldn’t remove the infrastructure crucial to access that, as Dolmage notes, we must “keep doing.”

As Sherry Turkle noted back in 1991, technology challenges our understanding of the world and our place in it; computers “draw attention to how we have drawn the lines and in the process call them into question” (p. 227). In the context of online education, these lines—though always there—have become more apparent to everyone because of the pandemic and our collective and sudden saturation in everything digital. These technologies were revealed to be inaccessible, and the built-in ableism of online teaching and learning was made clear. The role of accessible critical digital pedagogy, as this book has established, is to politicize and centre access in the face of uncertainty and hope.

The seven troubles of this book, as articulated by its authors, offer up more than what is currently problematic or challenging with online pedagogy. As Jones and Shanouda note in the introduction—drawing from work by Cherry and colleagues (2021)—the purpose of this book is to move beyond critique to resistance. That is perhaps what drew me to it in the first place: it takes up the necessary if difficult work of examining how things are and exposing how they could be. As we continue to navigate the ever-changing landscape of higher education, we must continue to resist the notion that online pedagogy is the solution to academic ableism. Like this volume, we need to spend time untangling the current narratives told about pedagogy, technology, and bodymind differences and instead offer ways to retell these narratives, paving a path toward ongoing justice and collective liberation.

References

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