“Foreword” in “Troubles Online”
Foreword
Jay Dolmage
As Collins, Smith, and Jeffery (Chapter 4 this volume) put it so succinctly, “amid a pandemic, universities sought financial survival by quickly moving almost all curriculum and services for students to emergency remote digital platforms,” but this pivot has been seen as “a temporary solution during the crisis for classes that are designed for and intended to be delivered in the face-to-face classroom.” In disability studies, borrowing from the disability rights movement, we readily recognize such temporary, forced solutions, especially in higher education, and we call them retrofits.
To retrofit is to add a component or accessory to something that has been manufactured or built already. Often the retrofit allows a product to measure up to new regulations, and often it is forced or mandated. Thus, as a building is retrofitted to accommodate disability, a ramp is added to the side of the building, or around the back, instead of at the main entrance. Such retrofits often locate disability as supplemental to society, as an afterthought or imposition.
We are all becoming much more aware of retrofitting in the COVID-19 era. Our restaurants and businesses have Plexiglas walls built, and tables and chairs are now a measured distance apart. There are new laws and regulations designed both to make spaces safer and to allow them to remain open. Perhaps rightly so, these retrofits have been criticized. Some are wise and well thought out, but others seem to be simply performative, like a mask over one’s mouth but not over one’s nose. For students, faculty, and staff with disabilities, retrofits often put us in difficult positions, having to ask over and over again for small adjustments, knowing that they might not help us, that we might be denied our requests, and that we might be stigmatized for asking.
One way to think about how retrofits for disability function in higher education is to look at an image recently posted online by a student named Sarah-Marie Da Silva from the University of Hull. She posted the picture on Twitter, showing how she is forced to take in her zoology lectures. When she arrives at the lecture, there is only one place for her to sit, in the doorway at the back of the room. That doorway has a push-button entrance and an automatic door, allowing her to get into the room. But when she gets in, there is nowhere to go. There are stairs immediately in front of her, and they lead down to an amphitheater in which other students are seated at tables arranged one after the other, descending every three steps. Whenever anyone enters or leaves the room, Sarah-Marie needs to move. This is what so many of not only the physical but also the curricular and cultural layouts within higher education actually look like: disabled students might be able to get into the rooms, but their access is clearly an afterthought, and their participation is already minimized. No wonder we are losing so many disabled students.
Twenty-seven percent of Canadians have university degrees. But only 17.6% of Canadians with “mild or moderate” disabilities have postsecondary degrees (Statistics Canada, 2012). Although recently more students with disabilities are enrolling than in previous eras, “nearly two thirds are unable to complete their degrees within six years” (Smith, 2014). A very modest estimate (based just on students who get accommodations) suggests that 10% of people with disabilities leave postsecondary institutions before obtaining their desired credentials (Canadian Human Rights Commission, 2017). I think that it could be much more like 30% if we extrapolate from the number of students with self-declared disabilities who never seek help. In the United States, some studies show that two-thirds of college students “don’t receive accommodations simply because their colleges don’t know about their disabilities” (Grasgreen, 2014). Disabled students are also likely to have up to 60% more student debt by the time they graduate (Mohamed, 2014). It is not just that we have inaccessible environments, so many barriers for disabled students, but also that, when we try to create more accessibility, we do so very ineffectively. As so many of the contributors to this volume show, our transition to emergency online education replicates this lack of planning for disabled students.
Figure 1. Zoology student Sarah-Marie Da Silva sits at the back of a University of Hull lecture hall, 2020. Source: Sarah-Marie Da Silva.
Even before all of us were forced to make a pandemic transition online, we knew that more and more students were taking online courses for credit (Donovan et al., 2019; Ostrowski et al., 2017). Nearly all postsecondary institutions were offering fully online courses, and in Canada in 2019 one in five students took at least one online course (Donovan et al., 2019). But as McManus et al. warned in 2017, despite the increasing prevalence of students with, for example, mental health–related disabilities in postsecondary online courses and programs, limited research had examined factors affecting learning for this population in the online setting. We were already planning an online future that seemingly did not include disabled students.
COVID-19 has magnified aspects of higher education that are not working (Cherry et al., 2021). As a result, I think, we might be paying slightly more attention to some of these barriers faced by students. As a recent Maclean’s article on students with disabilities and COVID-19 concluded, “barriers have changed” (Loeppky, 2020, para. 7). The Toronto Science Policy Network (2020) reported that, according to a survey that it conducted in 2020, “around three-quarters of graduate students reported that Covid-19” and the pivot to online courses and research settings “negatively impacted their ability to conduct research,” and “graduate students increasingly reported experiencing anxiety, depression, feelings of helplessness, loneliness, or being overwhelmed compared to before the pandemic. Seventy-two percent indicated that these feelings increased as a result of Covid-19. Twenty-six percent of respondents are now considering taking a long term leave of absence” (p. 5). According to the Ontario Council of University Faculty Associations (2020), since COVID-19, “among faculty, a full four in five agree that the university’s pandemic response has had a ‘negative impact on my teaching ability or ability to convey important learning material to students,’” (p. 13) and faculty report significant negative impacts on their own mental well-being. Moving online, we see a different relationship between disability and teaching, one in which I hope we can better understand the disabling impact of education. But none of this should come as a surprise: we should have seen the possible disabling impacts of a shift online, just as we should have been planning for the presence of disability.
Unfortunately, though we acknowledge that our students come from different places, and that they are headed in different directions, this does little to alter the vectors of our own pedagogy. Most often the only time that disability is spoken or written about in class is in the final line of the syllabus, when students are referred to the Office of Disability Services should they desire assistance. The message to students is that disability is a supplementary concern, not the teachers’ concern, not really a part of the course; rather, it is at the back door of the syllabus. The nature of the “retrofitted” accommodation requires that we make no lasting changes to our pedagogy or to the culture of the university. Many times retrofits are rhetorically and concretely constructed in ways that actually enhance and rationalize exclusion; they perpetuate an ideology that appears to be neutral or objectively true (Friesen, 2012).
Retrofitted accommodations, as shown with the example of Sarah-Marie, lead to nowhere. More than three-quarters (76.3%) of the accommodations offered at North American schools are the same: extended time on tests and exams (Furrie, 2017). If, like me, you do not offer tests or exams very often, and never in a timed way, well, then, good. However, if you keep working with Disability Services and it keeps offering this accommodation, then you are short-circuiting the process. We need a much broader repertoire of accommodations. In writing classrooms, like the one in which I work, where I rarely give tests and lectures, I know that I must work to expand the range of accommodations that can be offered to students. Many other teachers argue for innovative teaching methods that move beyond lecturing, testing, and rote learning. But continuing to work within this narrow range of accommodations while advocating for a broader range of literacies and modalities is problematic. The accommodations remain stuck in a Fordist educational regime in which rigidity and uniformity and timing reign supreme and values of independence, self-determination, and economic gain are entrenched. This brings us closer to what we might call malicious compliance, in which following the letter of the accommodation law will hurt the student.
Emergency online education has been no different. For example, we have seen a series of angry responses from students forced to use technology-based proctoring solutions such as Respondus and its “lockdown web browser” to take online exams. Students at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, for example, were told that they needed to buy an external webcam and tripod in spring 2020 despite a global shortage and the rising expense of this technology (Hazlewood, 2020). To set up the camera and use it during an exam required a ridiculous series of instructions and stipulations on camera position, how a student could move, and even how and when a student could go to the washroom. All of this was just so that the instructor could give a test not properly adapted to online learning. This was a move toward governmentality within online education, which situates students as potential cheaters rather than potential learners, community members, or co-constructors of knowledge. These technologies and their expense and use are offloaded onto students, a perfect distillation of the ways that we have responded to emergency online education: retaining, maintaining, and adding to the barriers faced by students rather than trying to remove them. As Stommel and Morris suggest in Chapter 3 of this book, we need to invest in faculty and students rather than remote proctoring solutions and plagiarism detection services. Imagine which accommodations might be offered to a student using Respondus at home? The Disability Services office would have to take weeks to figure out a workaround. I argue that our time and energy need to be used much better.
What was once an accommodation or a retrofit has become a decisive way forward through the pandemic. Of course, there is some irony that the ableist demands for physical attendance and participation that teachers used to cling to so tightly have now been so easily left behind online. Asking to have a grade converted to credit/no credit rather than a numerical grade, requesting an extended deadline, getting extra time on a research grant or a tenure deadline—all of a sudden anyone who wanted these things could have them. Disabled people can hardly count the number of times that they were denied these things and stigmatized for even asking about them before the pandemic. Of course, most of the ableist demands of academia likely will slide right back into place, though others might be gone for good. The advocacy of actual disabled people—unfortunately based on the patterns that we have seen—is unlikely to be what determines this future if we do not advocate now. We need to make sure that emergency online education does not become the status quo and that accommodations, from attendance to credit/no credit solutions, remain the norm.
That said, if expanded access is being called for, then let us ride that momentum.
For example, as we were forced to pivot online, we might have learned how to caption videos, or how to provide transcripts, or how to share these things so that students could access them any time. This was an uphill battle, to be sure, but one that can now stand as accessible infrastructure. In a study of engineering students with disabilities at the University of Illinois, results from 303 responses from 49 different courses showed that students with disabilities were asking, well before the pandemic, for video-recorded lectures, transcripts of them, and course textbook and instructor notes/slides that they could engage with offline (Amos et al., 2021). Literature on teachers’ perspectives during the pandemic has shown the importance of accommodating both asynchronous and synchronous approaches (Cherry et al., 2021; Kovacs et al., 2021). These are all things that we began to offer broadly during the pandemic, that many instructors learned how to do for the first time, and that might now stand as accessible infrastructure in our courses. Let us keep doing this, even when we move back into the physical classroom; let us see these things as the baseline for online access.
That is just a small place to start. But it is a place to start. 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 these things? What have you changed in your teaching online since the pandemic that you could keep doing in order to increase accessibility?
My challenge to you is to think again about the barriers that students might be facing right now and to explore how they get accommodated. As Hamraie (2018) notes, critical access theory can help us to facilitate disability justice better; we need to incorporate critical digital access into how we think about online education. What are the workarounds? How have we built accessibility into our pivot to online learning? How will we need to retrofit our teaching in ways that remove barriers when we finally do return to campus (knowing that some of us already have)? How will they sync with our own access needs, our own safety? I will make some suggestions of my own.
To begin with, as Arzu-Carmichael shows in Chapter 2 of this volume, “the factors that make online education the primary or only choice for many students are important for scholars to understand.” Students will continue to need the right to learn online. Likewise, as Arlene Kanter (2022) of Syracuse University recently argued, “while discussions of the future of remote work have been a ‘hot topic’ during the pandemic, … given the current realities of the post-pandemic workplace, remote work is a reasonable accommodation for qualified disabled employees,” and we will need to lobby for changes and amendments to the current regulations and policies “to re-envision remote work as the future of disability accommodation.” Our current workplaces, we need to admit, are much riskier than ever before. This risk disproportionately affects disabled people. We also need to admit that the ways in which universities approach risk have always been highly problematic. Either we actively advocate for our rights now, or we stand back and watch them disappear. We should understand online or remote learning and teaching as a right.
Another example is that, during our forced pivot to teaching online during the pandemic, we came to understand attendance and participation in radically new ways; we were forced to create more expansive ways for students to learn and to show what they learned outside the 50 to 80 minutes that they were in classrooms with us. Let us never assess again their involvement based only on being in the classroom or in 50-minute chunks. In Chapter 8 of this volume, Stevens and McCall suggest that we see students as being involved in “participatory design” in our online classes. Vorstermans and Mohler similarly put forward in Chapter 10 pedagogical suggestions that prioritize active co-creation in the classroom, reminding us that “this co-creation must take into account disproportionate labour for BIPOC and disabled students and faculty and be meaningfully co-created, not downloaded, labour.” We cannot count attendance again, and we should begin to see “participation” in a way that shares ownership within our online spaces.
The Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo, where I teach, was told by the associate dean to pull back on assignments in spring 2020: that is, to assign less. This allowed me and many of my colleagues to teach more, to connect with students more, and to assess less. Why should we ever go back to a system in which instructor labour is devoted too much to grading students and too little to communicating with them or sharing authority and space with student voices? As Reid and Shanouda argue in Chapter 1, “decentring the expert is not just good teaching practice, or a clever way to manage or eliminate overwork for the instructor, for it creates a more caring and just teaching and learning space by acknowledging everyone’s possible contributions.” As they show, if we assign less and assess less, then we can make space to share access work in the classroom, to facilitate difficult conversations, and to recognize and respect student resistance; we can avoid steamrolling through content, and we can open up space for reflection and genuine learning.
In winter 2020, despite their centrality to educational culture, we were asked to find alternatives to timed, in-person tests and exams. Well, they were never good ways to assess student learning (Cherry et al., 2021), and despite the lore that supports their continued use there is no research that shows that students learn more, retain more information, study more effectively, or even properly reveal what they have learned when a test or exam is timed. Still, we spend almost all of our accommodation budget and time on granting extended time on these ineffective instruments. That is absurd.
Testing in higher education is a significant creator of barriers, in particular for people with learning disabilities and mental health–related disabilities. And it does not make sense to think that these students will experience anything like these barriers in the environment outside school, where high-stakes testing is extremely rare. There will be other barriers for our students when they reach the world of work but nothing like the barrier imposed by a timed test. Likewise, the accommodations that these students will need in a professional capacity are unlikely to look anything like the accommodations that they get in test-heavy classrooms. That is not only a huge problem but also a huge wasted opportunity. We halted timed exams once. Let us push to eradicate them as much as we can from online teaching.
We know that there are accommodations that can really help students, including help with note taking and record keeping and technological solutions for communication and memory issues. Online, some of these provisions are easier to create for students. But solving the problems of higher education—whether in-person or online—cannot be done by tools alone. We need to be techno-critical; as Friesen captured back in 2012, the idea that technological progress alone drives educational change is a myth. Instead, we need to plan for and with disabled students. But I also want to suggest that, if we plan for more disabled students in our classrooms, both online and in-person, then we could really change the shape of higher education. This is an innocuous but a revolutionary question: what if we allocated all of the energy that we spend on adapting to an old educational regime based on timing and testing to building a new one in which disabled students do not always need to ask for accommodations since their needs are expected and centred?
I think that we all agree that before this pandemic our schools had too many unnecessary barriers in place for both students and faculty. COVID-19 has provided new reference points for evaluating long-standing social problems; we can see old issues from new perspectives (Sherwood et al., 2021). If we want to avoid constructing our current push toward online education as just another temporary retrofit, then we need to build something much more accessible, much more sustainable, and this collection offers a series of excellent, provocative, practical places to begin.
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