10 Moments of Reckoning in Learning and Belonging in Spaces of Postsecondary Education with/beyond COVID-19

Jessica

As an assistant professor at York University, and as I prepared my remote courses for fall 2020, I thought about how I wanted to centre equity and those who have been most affected by historical and current social and health pandemics. I wrote a piece that opens my syllabus and share the beginning of this statement here as slightly edited.

We are all enrolled and learning in this course together, like our public health messaging throughout COVID: “We are all in this together.” But we are all living this course and COVID in different ways based on our social locations and ways in which those social locations are valued or oppressed. For some of you, online learning is tough because it is hard to organize your time, for others you have increased care duties in your home and time to study is limited, for others you have been displaced from your home because of financial impacts of COVID and are struggling to keep moving through your degree. Each one of you is doing your best during a pandemic, and that is OK. These are painful times; many of you have experienced trauma through this pandemic and are living through the effects of this trauma. I have designed this course this semester to meet you where you are at in your journey. Each week on eClass [the learning platform] you will have different options to engage with the reading material for that week: a journal article, an editorial that is easier to read, or a video or podcast you can watch/listen to as you do a chore or have a baby on your lap. I know you are learning in difficult and strange times, and I have designed this course with that in mind; these are not “normal” times, so I will not be teaching like we are in “normal” times. We are going to challenge this idea of normal and how normal wasn’t all that great for many. Why, this time is calling us to construct a new and more just system that centres equity and does not return to the status quo. (Vorstermans, 2021a)

Rosi Braidotti (2020) asks us to think about the ways that structural inequities create the conditions that prevent us from being “all in this together.” This has really been unveiled or revealed in deep and stark ways with COVID-19. As we moved along in the year, I received feedback from students enrolled in my courses that they appreciated the centring of their learning as taking place during the overlapping events of racial upheaval and COVID-19. Teaching from the knowledge that we are not all in this together, and indeed never have been, created a liberatory space that did the work of meeting students where they were at. As I move forward in remote and blended teaching, I want to continue to do this work and make space and opportunity for meaningful co-creation in order to deepen and widen experiences of access for students.

Elizabeth

As I entered fall 2020 as a PhD student, I experienced many barriers, including those related to inaccessible videos and online learning platforms. I experienced a reactive approach to addressing barriers to access rather than a proactive one because accessibility was assumed to be largely built into online learning content. The shift to online made learning more challenging in some ways because of the lack of digital access. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that the shift also created conditions that allowed me to flourish. Notably, the shift to online platforms of pedagogy and assessment created spaces for those who might experience physical barriers to access on campus. From a personal standpoint, moving to the online space meant not having to travel to campus. As a disabled student, it also meant that I could engage in a plethora of activities on campus that otherwise I would not have been able to engage in had I needed to go to campus physically. From this experience, I have learned that we can make a digital learning space possible in ways that are extremely functional for some students, particularly those who have been conceptualized in terms of access.

Together

This chapter is a collaborative piece written by two scholars from different social locations and positions within the institution of postsecondary education. Elizabeth Mohler is a PhD student with a visual disability. Jessica Vorstermans is a tenure-track faculty member in critical disability studies. She is a non-disabled white settler who works within and against the colonial academic institution. We think, write, and work on Turtle Island and recognize that we relate to this land as white woman settlers, and we want to start by acknowledging the land. We both live and currently work in Toronto, the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississauga of the Credit, Anishinaabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Peoples and now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples. As we teach and take up space in virtual classrooms, we are not all on the same land. The way that I, Jessica, have been acknowledging the land, as we are all on different land, is through collective labour. For my graduate seminar class, I ask students to sign up to facilitate the land acknowledgement each week, with one or two students holding each week. They prepare a land acknowledgement from the land on which they live and then, from their own positionality, take up ways in which they are in relation to the land, the treaties that govern the land, justice and resistance led by Indigenous people on those lands, and ways that they are calling for allyship and solidarity. It is a powerful way to start each class and brings different and essential knowledge into the classroom each week.

Reckoning

Early in the pandemic, Sonya Renee Taylor (2020) called on us to reckon with how we might imagine and build more generative futures in our post- or with-COVID world: “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” Her call is to not return to the routines of ableism, racism, oppression, and harm. We ask you to think about this call in the context of how “returning to normal” is reproduced in the space of higher education. This chapter is guided by the work and calls of Dionne Brand and Rinaldo Walcott in how we each take up the struggle for equity, power, and narratives of belonging and care in the space of the neo-liberal university. Brand (2020) asks us to engage with the idea that “the reckoning might be now.” We use this call to assert and interrogate the current and future reckoning(s) in the university to become the liberatory space that it asserts to be. Walcott (2020) reminds us that the university is a site of labour, injustice, and resistance. How do we work to deepen this moment of reckoning that COVID-19 has brought to this site? How do we centre the calls for equity from disabled students, black students, Indigenous students, students of colour, students at all of the multiple intersections of oppression who have been failed by and experience trauma in university spaces? Not a neo-liberal offering of equity, diversity, and inclusion that functions to reproduce the status quo of ableism, racism, and intersecting oppression but a space that affirms and welcomes all students as they are and how they learn (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2021). A space that recognizes the richness that all students bring with their lived experiences that allows them to engage in a critique of neo-liberalism that is rich and textured and gestures to the world that we want to build collectively beyond the reckoning.

The Entanglement

Here we take up tangible examples that engage with complications of how the roles of student and faculty (which at the graduate level can be embodied in one body) are affected, using a lens of relationality and ways that inequity is lived differently but also in tandem. We use this chapter to think through where collectively we can take these moments of tension in terms of creating meaningful access for all students and faculty. Can this kind of critical engagement push against the neo-liberal university’s individualized equity, inclusion, and diversity framework that leaves it up to individual instructors to enact change? In other words, can this critical engagement move us beyond accommodations? Through our experience, we argue that the university is failing both faculty and students and that collaborative work together inside this site of labour, oppression, and struggle is the only path forward. How do we do this relationship work of building in an environment that does not lend itself to this kind of work?

This chapter engages in the entanglement of the student and professor roles and how they are both affected by neo-liberal logics that constrain them in liberatory practices in the university and can work in collaboration in resistance to these logics. COVID-19 has unveiled the deepness of inequity in our systems (Cherry et al., 2021), a deepness that many students with lived experiences of oppression have already known and called out. Cheuk and Ignagni (in Chapter 7 of this volume) take up materializing access and how power is organized in higher education spaces. Access needs deemed not feasible or non-essential before are now common because of the pandemic; classes are streamed online and recorded; there is increased flexibility in pedagogy and assessment, making access possible for those unable to engage in this space in pre-COVID-19 times. As noted in the foreword, we collectively moved toward more expansive ways for students to learn. Will postsecondary institutions maintain this kind of access beyond COVID-19? How do we work collectively to protect these access points and push this moment of reckoning into more just futures within universities?

Who Does the Labour of Creating Access?

Dolmage (2015, 2017) invites us to consider access and accommodation not as boxes to check off but as places in which to start thinking, doing, acting, and moving. Under the banner of Universal Design, efforts have been made to integrate proactive and inclusive approaches in universities and colleges, approaches that aim to create various flexible strategies that address the needs of all students. Such approaches were designed to challenge the ableism that traditionally has structured access, accommodation, and learning, but Dolmage (2015) documents how Universal Design has become a buzzword that forms part of reductive formulas and checklists. University administrators are not engaging with this approach in a critical or active way (Dolmage, 2015, 2017). This checklist approach to dealing with access and accommodation undermines the rhetorical objective of Universal Design as a form of action and activism (Dolmage, 2015). Invariably, the push toward the universal necessitates the conceptualization of space as “multiple and in-process”—a specific pattern of engagement and effort (Dolmage, 2015, p. 2).

The design component of Universal Design sheds light on the importance of inclusivity in the production of space and indicates how students must play a central role in this negotiation (Dolmage, 2015). If Universal Design is approached in a formulaic way, then it undermines such opportunities. Dolmage (2005, 2009) has pointed to the importance of linking Universal Design with principles of usability to achieve a more iterative pedagogical design that addresses the needs of students in a more tangible way and offers them more room to participate in the process of negotiation. In Chapter 8 of this volume, the authors consider Hamraie’s (2016) thoughts on Universal Design and stress the importance not only of Universal Design and usability but also of user-centred design practices, such as participatory design. However, this participation should not equate to the downloading of responsibility to students in the neo-liberal university since this presents a unique set of learning challenges for disabled students. For instance, one of the first representations of disability is typically seen in a legal statement at the end of a syllabus that informs students of their responsibility to secure the required paperwork for their course in their own time. Here is a vignette of how this challenge can play out: Student: Could I please have the syllabus for this course? Instructor: I just got hired! I’m precarious! I don’t have it yet! Student: Here is how that affects me: I don’t have access to the course outline, which makes it difficult to attain information about what modules are on offer in my course. I cannot make a choice if I do not have the information to do so.

These moments are complicated since the neo-liberal university has moved to a model of contractual, precarious teaching labour. Contract faculty are often told that they will teach a course weeks or even days before the term begins, and contract teaching does not provide a stable or viable income, so contract faculty often work at multiple jobs, contracts, and institutions. Women and BIPOC contract faculty are over-represented in lower-income categories, and the precarity and instability of contract labour have disabling impacts on mental health (Foster & Birdsell Bauer, 2018). This reliance on precarious labour creates barriers for disabled students because the labour conditions are not set up in a way that allows for early access to syllabi, reading lists, and online learning materials and accommodations such as extended assignment deadlines and alternative assignments that can be seen as extra and onerous labour.

Following Ramirez (2019) in this paragraph, we note that alongside the fact that disabled students might be physically prevented from accessing vital information is the issue that, even for disabled students who can self-manage, there is often a lack of information about existing supports to assist them in managing their access needs. In this sense, it becomes apparent how, from the beginning, disability is constructed as a negative, legal, and medical concept. The offloading of responsibility to students with disabilities also extends to expectations of managing their own accommodations and access needs. Many universities conceptualize the accommodation process through discourses that emphasize the importance of self-advocacy among young adults while providing few resources that students can access and learn from. As part of the accommodation process, students must engage with university administrators and college professors, many of whom are largely unfamiliar with disability.

The hurdles experienced by disabled students also pertain to the extensive paperwork required for accommodation. Although universities might offer disability services that assist with this accommodation, such services often use high standards that can be problematic for newly diagnosed students who might be unfamiliar with accommodation lingo. There is also the issue of the limited number of accommodations that often do not align with their individual programs of study. Some students might need to access the resources and devices that they require to succeed in the postsecondary educational environment, but more often than not the process of accommodations serves as another Kafkaesque hurdle that disabled students must overcome. Ultimately, this process is accompanied by roadblocks that can be overcome depending on the tenacity of the student. For instance, disabled students must have a strong support system, the backing of their professors, and medical practitioners willing to provide support in the form of a legal note for the process of accommodation. Amid these unique challenges experienced by disabled students, accessibility is widely conceptualized as an individual responsibility as opposed to a collective one.

Difficult Conversations and Ways Forward: A Collective Responsibility

The emerging literature on the rapid and unexpected shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the disparities in how students experience higher education. Sublett (2020, p. 1) reminds us that “higher education is unmistakably stratified by race.” Of course, this predates the COVID-19 pandemic, which we can understand as more of an unveiling (Brown, 2017; see also Cherry et al., 2021) and deepening of the stratification of inequity. The interconnecting systems of racism, ableism, patriarchy, and classism, which structure higher education, are on full display but nothing new, and students and faculty living at various intersections of oppression have made this known well before the pandemic. Research on students’ experiences of teaching during the pandemic shows this unveiling and deepening (Gillis & Krull, 2020). The shift to online learning has meant a reliance on digital proctoring solutions for online exams, as Dolmage notes in the foreword to this volume. For authors such as Siddiquei and Kathpal (2021, p. 812), these solutions are necessary because, in an online learning environment, an educator is not present to “make the student vigilant.” However, these solutions rely on algorithms steeped in racism and ableism to monitor and identify who is cheating.

There have been reports of digital proctoring systems instructing students of colour to move to more well-lit areas (Watters, 2020) and penalizing students who are neurodiverse or students with autism through software that tracks how often one’s eyes move from the screen (Swauger, 2020). These digital surveillance systems enact pedagogies of punishment, a “eugenic gaze,” and are increasingly relied on as higher education occupies space online (Swauger, 2020). Swauger (2020) reminds educators that we have an obligation to “object, resist, and subvert these systems, to push towards a practice that embodies justice, liberation, and love, and to remain vigilant for the next technological ‘solution’ that promises to ‘fix’ students or education.”

Fuentes and co-authors (2021) set out considerations for enacting equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) through the course syllabus, framing the course as a welcome to all students who have been marginalized in university spaces. They take up intersectionality, EDI in learning outcomes, diversity statements, decolonization of the syllabus, and making the syllabus family friendly. Noticeably missing is a consideration of access as a key piece of a welcoming syllabus, providing essential information on access points and ways that access is enacted. Abney and Conatser (2020) take up ways to make virtual discussions engaging, effective, and equitable. They invite instructors to have an open conversation on the differences in virtual discussions (versus in-person discussions). Naming the differences and sitting with them comprise an important step in the process of making sense of spaces and entanglements with (in)equity but do not go far enough. We need to centre and name the complexities of access to in-person spaces, the complexities of reproductions of ableism and other oppressions in virtual spaces, as we engage in discussions about building spaces.

Reinholtz and colleagues (2020) document seven strategies that they used in the transition to remote pandemic teaching to encourage equitable participation. Although they come from an interdisciplinary community, they take the strategies up in the context of teaching biology. The strategies re-establish norms, using student names and breakout rooms, leveraging chat-based participation, using polling software, creating an inclusive curriculum, and cutting content to maintain rigour. Their research did not show differential gendered or raced impacts on students’ participation, and they concluded that “as instructors became more comfortable with the technological tools they suddenly had at their disposal—polls, reactions, chat, breakout rooms, and whole-class discussion—their use of mechanisms for students to participate proliferated. Of course, these tools do not necessarily promote equity, but when they are used in intentional ways (such as scaffolding the breakouts or elevating the chat participation), then they become powerful tools in service of equitable teaching” (p. 12). The intentional labour behind enacting equity is foregrounded here, and their work highlights the importance of a community of practitioners as central in their mobilization of equity.

The literature on remote and online teaching that has come out of pandemic times as we collectively experienced a sudden shift to remote teaching in March 2020 has not (thus far) centred disability justice as a site of struggle and a path forward, although it is relevant to note that there has been work to document pedagogies informed by care ethics and trauma (see Bozkurt, 2021) as well as anti-oppressive pedagogies (Migueliz Valcarlos et al., 2020). However, without a centring of disability justice (Sins Invalid, 2016), we will not unmake a system that harms and oppresses bodies and minds. A centring of co-creation or a participatory approach as in Chapter 8 seems to be essential to note here: that is, asking students which types of pandemic pedagogy work best for them as we chart what online learning looks like in a post- or with-COVID-19 world and then creating access together, as students and faculty. Jay Pitter, a black place maker and urban planner, talks about a growing emphasis on equity and lived experience of those most marginalized in conversations on urbanism. She talks about revealing one’s own vulnerability in these conversations from those marginalized and targeted. And she claims that this can be done in a healthy way that respects boundaries and one’s own narrative: “Your vulnerability is a gift, it isn’t owed to anyone” (2021b). Pitter encourages folks to “protect parts of your story that are especially tender or unhealed” (2021a) and asserts that “equity-seeking groups should not be made to perform their pain to punctuate a point or to advance change” (2021b). The co-creation of what access needs to look like in our learning spaces in our post- or with-COVID-19 world should be guided by Pitter’s reminders about vulnerability and be mobilized only when there are institutional commitments to change. Co-creation without safety, without respect for personal narratives and stories, without a commitment to actually building what is being called for is exploitative and harmful. We need to make sure that we are not just “plugging leaks” in neo-liberal ideologies (Grant-Smith & Payne, 2021).

A discourse reproduced in many EDI spaces that I, Jessica, have been a part of at my university as a faculty member is that online spaces are less than or not as effective as in-person spaces, without meaningful engagement with a discussion that in-person spaces are also inaccessible and not effective for many disabled, BIPOC, queer, and targeted students. This is the discussion that we need to have, and it needs to be rooted in disability justice praxis (Sins Invalid, 2016). It is not an either/or discussion but a nuanced discussion that takes up how learning in higher education, whether in-person or online, is a site of oppression for targeted students and how reckoning with this is our collective work within the confines and constraints of the neo-liberal university. And then we must chart the way forward using disability justice as an organizing principle (our praxis informed by our intersecting identities and where we are called to work/be/lead), led by those living with disablement in the university.

Collective Futures: Disability Justice, Co-Creation, and Trusting Students

In this chapter, we have unpacked some challenges of accessible teaching and learning for disabled students in the context of neo-liberal universities. Invariably, such universities are predicated on specific ideals of the individual, such as Cottom’s (2017) “roaming auto-didact” able to succeed through their own effort and determination. The promotion of this ideal means that, in the postsecondary educational context, asking for help invariably becomes understood as a problem. Disabled students are produced as the problem instead of the institutional barriers inherent in the neo-liberal university. Reid and Shanouda (Chapter 1 of this volume) take up this ideal student and the implications of this reproduction for a pedagogy of care and radical love born at this time of pandemic upheaval.

Access to learning for disabled students can be improved if it is perceived as a collective responsibility. A collective approach would produce novel frameworks and practices that aim to ensure that all individuals have access to learning. We respond to Dionne Brand’s (2020) call for COVID-19 as a moment of reckoning with our own complicity in the oppression of the university (this looks different for each of us based on our positionality) and a moment to hold each other close as we unveil the harms and oppressions of this site of struggle (Brown, 2017). Principles of disability justice (Sins Invalid, 2016) can guide a collective approach centred on those most targeted in all of the spaces of neo-liberal higher education.

Understanding how the social organization of disablement functions in the university allows us to understand how those living at various intersections experience oppression (Gorman, 2016), how racism and ableism intersect and bear on specific bodies in specific ways. The explosion of wellness rhetoric and services for students on campus are often rooted in an assumption of whiteness. Counselling services are not safe for all bodies and minds; some are offered care, whereas others might be surveilled and put at risk. Gorman’s (2016) Disablement in and for Itself: Towards a “Global” Idea of Disability was born from campus organizing at the margins of race and disability, a collective concerned with how disability justice is being appropriated by the mainstream. These concerns must guide our reckoning, and our analysis must meaningfully engage with disablement and disability justice.

We posit that a collective responsibility in this context would be a start to imagining the plural ways that collective approaches can be stitched: rooted in the 10 principles of disability justice (Sins Invalid, 2016), co- created by faculty and students in co-conspiratorship, and embedded in deep trust of BIPOC, disabled, and poor students and faculty so that we can move away from gatekeeping and surveillance in our classrooms and other institutional spaces (Kim & Stommel, 2018). We echo Stommel (2016; also this volume): “Start by trusting students.” Trusting students needs to be held at the centre of our pedagogy—trusting that they know their own access needs, their own accommodations, their own ways of accessing learning best. One of the 10 principles of disability justice is leadership of those most affected: “We are lifting up, listening to, reading, following, and highlighting the perspectives of those who are most impacted by the systems we fight against” (Sins Invalid, 2016, p. 23). In the space of higher education, this means that EDI discussions should be led by those most affected by racism, ableism, and other intersecting oppressions. For example, those most affected by surveillance in the classroom should be at the table when institutions make decisions to purchase digital surveillance software or institute academic honesty policies.

We think about this co-conspiratorship by students and faculty as if they are traitors to the neo-liberal university. We use the idea of traitors in the way that Alexis Shotwell (2020) asks white folks to be race traitors. Eugenia Zuroski (2018) calls for academic allyship, for white-identified faculty to join BIPOC faculty in building a new institution that deserves those whom EDI purports to serve, and to do this from the margins, foregrounding knowledge built outside centres of power. Sami Schalk (2021a, 2021b) reminds us of the massive toll that this kind of labour takes on BIPOC faculty, in this particular case black faculty. In response to the police killing of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio, Schalk’s university asked faculty to make space for students to speak about it in class, extend deadlines, and accommodate them. Although she acknowledges the importance of this, what was missing was an institutional acknowledgement of how black faculty are also living this trauma, and supporting students at the moment is a more difficult and different kind of labour. So the collective co-creation must be meaningfully supported by institutions, acknowledging the disproportionate labour among BIPOC and disabled faculty to enact anti-oppression work within the institution.

Students collectively have taken up access work as a site of flourishing. They have also co-created spaces within which they hear and learn from one another. Research shows that students have begun to express interest in taking up participatory and active roles that permit them to work and interact collaboratively with educators (Bovill, 2020; Dollinger et al., 2018). Students should be seen as active and invaluable participants included in co-creation processes in which their opinions, feedback, intellectual capabilities, and personalities can be leveraged and integrated into institutional resources to offer value for both institutions and students themselves (Dollinger et al., 2018). Strategies of co-creation include the utilization of student resources through student organizations or unions, or through student involvement in the design of learning environments, and students have created university-related content through the leveraging of social media platforms (Dollinger et al., 2018). In more participatory approaches, students are playing a role in the design and development of initiatives, including the curriculum (Bovill, 2020; see also Chapter 8 of this volume).

Co-creation of the curriculum, in particular, enhances shared reciprocity, responsibility, and respect among staff and students (Bovill, 2020). Co-creation of the curriculum means that students have some control through significant engagement in curriculum design in conjunction with faculty and through sharing control over some areas. Through negotiations, faculty can assume ownership of some dimensions of the curriculum, including quality assurance, but opportunities are still created so that students can have shared responsibility for decisions that affect what and how they learn. The opportunities for co-creation affect not only students but also faculty because reciprocity and respect for beneficial and innovative ideas emerge, with both actors learning from each other. Goldrick-Rab and Stommel (2018) remind educators that we need “more, not fewer, ways to listen for the voices of students reflecting on education,” working our pedagogical approaches to serve the students whom we have in our classrooms and not the students whom we wish to have.

This co-creation must take into account disproportionate labour on BIPOC and disabled students and faculty, and be meaningfully co- created, not downloaded labour to those already disproportionately living with harm in the institution. I, Jessica, recently completed with my class a graded assignment in which students looked at academic honesty (a space that disproportionately can police and punish BIPOC, disabled, and poor students) using a structural analysis of why students breach academic honesty, some reasons being poverty and language barrier. The second part of the assignment was to come up with advice and ideas for students on how to navigate these structural failures, kind of an exercise in mutual aid. Then I made it into a living crowd-sourced document that I posted to our online class website for students to share, and I will keep adding to it as I teach the course each term (Vorstermans, 2021b). This is an example of co-creation that is meaningfully recognized (in this case graded and therefore compensated through grading), centres knowledge created at the margins and aims to serve future students to protect them from targeting by mechanisms of control in the neo-liberal university.

We began with Sonya Renee Taylor’s (2020) powerful call not to return to the before times. Those times in higher education were times of oppression and trouble for many students and faculty living at different intersections. As we move into a post- or with-COVID-19 world, we have to collaborate to protect the pedagogical gains of the pandemic: the recorded lectures, the move away from large exams, the end of graded attendance, all parts of learning that can reproduce ableism, classism, and racism. Taylor asked us to dream of new, more just, and radical spaces of liberation, to create a new garment that “fits all of humanity and nature.” We end with our desire to work at co-stitching this new garment in the space of learning in higher education. We acknowledge that it will be a struggle, that it will not be easy, but it will fit all of humanity and nature only if it is meaningfully co-stitched, centring and trusting the plural voices of students and faculty who historically have been at the margins.

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