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Troubles Online: 4. Online Social Work Education in Canada: Disappearing Disability in the Academy

Troubles Online
4. Online Social Work Education in Canada: Disappearing Disability in the Academy

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Acknowledgements
  3. Foreword
  4. Introducing Troubles Online
  5. 1. Caring Online: A Justice-Oriented Approach to Online Pedagogy
  6. 2. Virtual Bodies, Material Implications: Black Feminist Epistemology as a Framework for Online Education
  7. 3. Critical Digital Pandemic-Based Pedagogy: A Conversation with Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris
  8. 4. Online Social Work Education in Canada: Disappearing Disability in the Academy
  9. 5. Ethical Challenges of Digital Technology and the Utah Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
  10. 6. Poetic Journeys: College Students with Disabilities Navigating Unanticipated Transitions during the Pandemic
  11. 7. Materializing Access in the Dematerialized Space of Higher Education Online Classrooms
  12. 8. Students as Designers, not Consumers: Framing Accessible, Participatory Learning as a Social Justice Approach to Online Course Design
  13. 9. Making Accessible Media: An Interview
  14. 10. Moments of Reckoning in Learning and Belonging in Spaces of Postsecondary Education with/beyond COVID-19
  15. Conclusion
  16. Contributors

4 Online Social Work Education in Canada Disappearing Disability in the Academy

Kimberlee Collins, Kristin Smith, and Donna Jeffery

In this chapter, we demonstrate how online environments make disappear the phenomena of disablement through reproducing neo-liberal ableist expectations about learning and teaching. First we present some background about online education and the research project from which this chapter stems. We follow this background with a literature review of crip education and online embodiment in order to frame how disabled bodyminds1 are regulated in online social work educational contexts. We then discuss cripping online education in order to consider how the generative disruption created by disability online can shift online learning and teaching. We close with an invitation to attend to this shifting and uncertain terrain that prompts us to acknowledge the complexities, nuances, and contradictions embedded in discussions of embodiment, online education, and disability rather than to default to tidy answers and solutions.

Amid a global pandemic, universities sought financial survival by quickly moving almost all curriculum and services for students to emergency remote digital platforms a temporary solution during the crisis for classes that are designed for and intended to be delivered in the face-to-face classroom. Although our writing of this chapter spans the pre-pandemic and current-pandemic era (from 2017 to 2023), the knowledge that we generated through our qualitative interviews with educators and recent social work graduates was firmly embedded in their experiences with online education, not emergency remote education.2 We invite our readers to reflect on the differences and similarities that exist within online education and emergency remote teaching in relation to disability.

Background

Online education, with its roots in correspondence education (Di Leo, 2020; Migueliz Valcarlos et al., 2020), has been hailed as a cost- saving, flexible, inclusive form of education that has the potential to reach underserved populations such as disabled students, non-traditional adult learners, and Indigenous, rural, and remote communities (Bullock & Fletcher, 2017; Cummings et al., 2015; Kent, 2015; Moore et al., 2015; Murders, 2017; O’Shea et al., 2015). For several years prior to the pandemic, this interest in online education had significantly increased the financial resources spent by universities to promote online learning (Bates, 2018a; Zidan, 2015) as well as raised the number of students enrolled in online education (Bates, 2018a, 2018b; Bullock & Fletcher, 2017; Zidan, 2015). For example, the provincial government funding of eCampus Ontario in Canada coincided with an increase in online enrolment (Bates, 2018a). Despite this increase in promotion, the digital divide as well as issues of digital equity remain. Additionally, disabled students are still under-represented in postsecondary education (Dolmage, 2017; Kinash et al., 2004). However, some universities are reporting higher numbers of disabled students (at least those who have disclosed disabilities) enrolling in their online education programs (Lambert & Dryer, 2018; Verdinelli & Kutner, 2016). Not only are some disabled students enrolling in online programs, but also many have stated that they choose online education because of their disabilities (Cole, 2019; Kotera et al., 2019; Murders, 2017; Verdinelli & Kutner, 2016). Flexibility and the time needed to manage personal lives were often-cited reasons (Cole, 2019; Verdinelli & Kutner, 2016). It is important to note that, though online education can work well for some disabled students, for others their physical institutional-based accommodations are not transferable to online learning (Facknitz & Lorenz, 2021).

Although universities increased spending to promote online learning even prior to COVID-19, the debate about the benefits of online learning remains unsettled and contested, particularly given the ever-shifting terrain of a pandemic and the rise of emergency remote education. Although it is still early (as we move, at the time of writing, through the second year of the pandemic), a preliminary survey of people’s experiences of teaching and learning during these uncertain times indicates that, despite the challenges of an emergency remote education, most postsecondary students would elect to keep the option of online learning going forward (McKenzie, 2021). If the survey results reflect broader desires for online options, then it is possible that universities might extend online platforms, and if so then it will be crucial for postsecondary educators to understand and articulate the ramifications for disabled students. To think critically about how disability plays out in online educational spaces, we must centre the voices of disabled and marginalized students experiencing online education, such as in Hannah Stevens and Mary McCall’s Chapter 8 of this volume, in order to avoid (emergency) online education tendencies that default to neo-liberal logics.

Project Description

This chapter draws from findings and research from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded project called “Online Social Work Education in Canada: What Happens When Critical Pedagogy Goes Online?”. Between 2014 and 2017, this study explored how online education formats are shaping knowledge produced in Canadian schools of social work in which a mandate to promote social justice–based professional practices coincides with significant funding constraints and other restructuring measures found within both social service agencies and universities. For our research, critical pedagogy is viewed as different from mainstream pedagogy since it seeks to disrupt seemingly neutral knowledge by teaching students to address interlocking systemic oppressions, such as anti-black racism and other forms of racism, the effects of colonialism, heteronormativity, ableism, and others. According to Wagner (2005, p. 263), teaching and learning through critical pedagogy enable educators and students to engage with “unsettling” course content often “fraught with tension, emotion and trepidation.”

The project posed three overarching questions:

  • What are the possibilities and constraints for critical pedagogies within the online classroom?
  • How do educators adapt their complex teaching strategies in ways that move beyond matters of technical expertise and narrowed measurements of learning?
  • What kinds of institutional support are required for the successful transfer of critical pedagogies to online formats?

Ultimately, this project considered how neo-liberal university restructuring includes pressures to emphasize cost-containment measures, efficiency-driven management styles, and expectations of labour flexibility and adaptability (Blackmore, 2001, 2002; Brown, 2019; Davies, 2005; Houlden & Veletsianos, 2021; Smith & Jeffery, 2013) and how these shifts reduce knowledge production to a standard measured against economic worth and efficiency while curbing possibilities for emancipatory pedagogy (Newman & Johnson, 1999). In short, the study sought to explore the experiences of students and instructors in a social justice field adapting to an online learning and teaching ethos.

Methods

Twenty-eight participants were interviewed for this study, including 12 full-time faculty members, 10 part-time instructors, and six recent graduates. Each had first-hand experience teaching or learning in distance social work education programs. Participants were recruited using a snowball sampling and through professional networks across two Canadian universities (Bryman, 2001). The audio-recorded interviews were conducted in person or over the phone and lasted between one and two hours. The interviews employed open-ended questions focused on the following four areas: the pedagogical strategies adopted or encountered in their distance education courses, students’ responses to challenging course content in the distance formats, how educators and students make sense of tensions in their teaching and learning practices and how tensions might shape identities within distance formats, and how educators and students manage those tensions in their day-to-day university lives. These recordings were transcribed, and each member of the research team reviewed the transcripts seeking tensions and contradictions within the interviews. These moments were then analyzed by applying Wendy Hollway and Tony Jefferson’s (2000, p. 5) concept of “working with the whole,” in which there is a close reading of participant accounts and attention to the material contexts in which the learning and teaching are situated. Formal demographic data were not collected for this study; rather, identity markers were noted when participants disclosed them during the interviews. Additionally, we present quotations from our participants in an anonymized fashion to protect their confidentiality within a relatively small Canadian context of critical social work education.

Literature Review

Cripping Education

Disability activists and their communities have long been involved in cripping. The activist reclamation of crip, leading with the “disruption that disability creates” (Reid, 2016, para. 8), is used to expose how a corporeal standard of humanness becomes naturalized (McRuer, 2006). Crip theory gestures to how our bodyminds exist and are contested in and through multiple cultural and social locations (McRuer, 2006, 2018). It posits that crip experiences must be central to resistance to neo-liberalism (McRuer, 2018). Crip theory is an intersectional analytical framework beginning from the perspective of bodymind difference that unsettles binaries such as normal and abnormal and gestures to the slippery nature of difference (Chen et al., 2023; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006). Drawing from Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality, crip theorist Robert McRuer (2013) describes the compulsion toward normalcy as compulsory able-bodiedness. Although compulsory able-bodiedness is often taken for granted, for decades disability communities have been pushing back against this dominant understanding of bodymind difference by drawing from “crip” as a term of identification and action that references multiple forms of embodiment (McRuer, 2018). To crip is thus to reject binaries and to position disability as desirable and generative (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019), thereby challenging and resisting compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2013).

Crip theory has also been employed in relation to education and critical pedagogy. For example, Dan Goodley (2014) reminds us that disabled students, by their very presence, crip education through unsettling, disrupting, and exposing the failings of traditional pedagogy and the ideal of the normative student. David Mitchell and colleagues (2014, p. 308) suggest a turn toward cripistemologies in which “crip/queer bodies shift from liabilities to be secreted away into active vectors of insight from which one may engage in classroom models of collective understanding. Through such developments, crip/queer subjectivities become a way of knowing the world; embodiments akin to other forms of discredited knowing such as femininity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on (yet, importantly, containing all of these differences at the intersection of what makes bodies crip/queer).”

More recently, scholars have noted how the pandemic exposed the inaccessibility of higher education and how the exhausting, time- consuming nature of emergency remote learning mirrors the experiences of disabled students and faculty attempting to receive institutional accommodations (Bones & Evans, 2021; Samuels & Freeman, 2021). Andrea Goicochea (2021, p. 69) reflects on the nature of emergency remote learning in which cripping time recognizes “the fluidity of participation in remote learning and viewing time differently, relinquishing authority over time and participation.” Crip time has been referred to as an explosion rather than an expansion of time since it changes our understanding of how long things can and should take and how these understandings are rooted in normative ways of being (Kafer, 2013). This shifting and unpredictable nature of crip time has been described as itself a form of resistance (Price & Kerschbaum, 2016). In pre-pandemic writing, we considered changing conceptions of time in online learning in which flexibility allowed a slowing down of institutional time (Smith et al., 2018), whereas the increased pace of digital learning and teaching blurs boundaries between work and home (Smith et al., 2020). Then, in the wake of COVID-19, we expanded this focus by considering how many universities modified faculty and instructor deadlines as well as mandated or advised flexible (unknowingly crip time–inspired) deadlines and accommodations for students (Samuels & Freeman, 2021). Below and with this changing context in mind, our discussion on embodiment online and disability gestures toward how disabled bodyminds are regulated in the online social work educational contexts.

Embodiment Online and Disability

Discussions of online embodiment are ongoing and contested. From Megan Boler’s (2002) assertion that the body is represented in a stereotyped and reductive form online, to Danielle Stern’s (2011) suggestion that online educational spaces create a “queered classroom” through the ambiguity of bodily performance, the terrain is unsettled. Offering a reframing of this debate, Seweryn Rudnicki (2017) suggests that, rather than disembodied online, we are, in effect, translated. Rudnicki argues that, ontologically speaking, translation grapples with the contrasts and similarities between the “physical body and its digital representations” and thus “reflects the specificity of ‘virtuality,’ its simultaneously immaterial but real, actual and concrete character” (p. 6). In this way, the characteristics of physical bodies are reconfigured to form new objects through translation. This process of translation encompasses a wide range of technologies (e.g., from Zoom to learning management system platforms to WhatsApp), and thus the online sharing (e.g., an Instagram selfie in an introduction post on a discussion board) can be understood as a translation of the material body into digital data.

It is important, however, to contextualize translation. We are translated through technologies that are embedded within and reinforce norms and systems of oppression (Boyd, 2016). As such, technology cannot be considered neutral, and therefore data information and its usage are always political (Green, 2020). It is impossible to separate translated digital data from social structures, power relations, and policies, and thus data information is a social construct and reflects embedded social relations (Jasanoff, 2017; Jasanoff et al., 1995). Moreover, Cheryl Reynolds (2018, p. 183) asserts that the “panopticonised character to participation” in relation to sharing translated data in online education platforms makes students and instructors vulnerable to symbolic and material violence, since these platforms assume certain social and digital capital. Notably, discussions on the levels of surveillance and social capital arose in response to emergency remote learning as institutions and instructors grappled with ethical guidelines on online participation, such as keeping cameras off during synchronous online classes (Finders & Muñoz, 2021; Greenhow et al., 2021; Kovacs et al., 2021; Moses, 2020). As Ellen Rose (2017) suggests, technologies, such as learning management platforms, centred on increasing the social presence in online spaces, ultimately do not address the ethical implications of online learning.

For disabled online learners, institutional moves toward online learning respond to bodymind difference in ways that reflect McRuer’s (2006) compulsory able-bodiedness that pushes us toward normalcy. For example, much of the early discourse speculated that disabled students would be the “early adopters” of new technology and more interested in online learning (Kinash et al., 2004). Thus, online learning has been promoted as a way of increasing access to education and thereby increasing inclusion for disabled students (Cinquin et al., 2019). Although inclusion has been a long-held goal of some disabled communities hoping to access higher education (Porter et al., 1991), inclusion is accompanied by critiques of inclusionism. Inclusionism highlights how institutions tolerate disability rather than address disabling systems and conditions (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015; Shanouda, 2019). Importantly, Chelsea Temple Jones and colleagues (2023) gesture toward the critical tensions and overlaps through the term “inclusion/ist.”

Much like hollow gestures toward diversity, inclusion/ist policies are demonstrated through the chronic understaffing of disability services in universities in which disabled students are included and tolerated but not supported within the neo-liberal-ableist education system. Michael Rancic (2018) suggests that this might explain why some disabled students are not seeking accommodations or are actively choosing invisibility through online learning. For disabled learners, online learning is offered as a pathway toward compulsory able-bodiedness via inclusion rather than as a mode of cripping education. In other words, online environments make disability disappear, along with the phenomena of disablement, by upholding normative expectations of learning and teaching. It is through cripping an inclusion/ist understanding of online education that we can begin to think through some of the tensions highlighted in this chapter.

Alternatively, expanding notions of embodiment through crip theory supports moving away from bureaucratic classification structures such as inclusion or accommodation (Chen et al., 2023), particularly since crip includes non-normative embodiments, forms of illness, trauma, or unwellness, not often included within rights-based systems. However, as m. remi yergeau (2017, p. 87) notes, crip has “privileging rhetors who are critically conversant and academically able,” thereby contradicting crip’s expansive framing of non-normative solidarity. Yet a crip orientation asks us to keep definitions and meanings open, including concepts such as embodiment. Importantly, this requires a collective response to “pushing the boundaries of interpretation” rather than a narrow and individualizing focus on accommodation (Chen et al., 2023, p. 9).

Online Social Work Education in Canada

Choosing Invisibility/Visibility in Online Education

Our research demonstrates that students are making strategic choices about online education. As the literature on online education and disability asserts, some disabled students choose online education since it allows them to complete assignments and participate at their own pace and as a way of avoiding stigma from other students and faculty and staff (Cole, 2019; Kotera et al., 2019; Lambert & Dryer, 2018; Murders, 2017; Verdinelli & Kutner, 2016). Additionally, other disabled students have noted their desire to perform a preferred identity through online learning (Verdinelli & Kutner, 2015).

In our project, a sessional instructor shared a similar experience of invisibility narrated by a student in the online course: “I purposely never spoke about my race because I didn’t want people to frame everything I said from that lens, that I’m a black woman. And so, and specifically talking about when issues of race came up, I didn’t want to be framed as an angry black woman talking yet again about my lived reality.” This narrative highlights an instructor’s understanding of why someone might choose invisibility through online education.

Conversely, one graduate student who identified with a disability found the invisibility of online education difficult:

I’m about as privileged as they come, but you know there are personal elements that I sometimes bring to the discussion, and I kind of got tired of putting myself out there.… On some level, I think having the visual markers can be really helpful because people are more kind of in tune with … [the] experience a person might be bringing into the interaction without having to take the time to write it all.

Indeed, the choice to disclose identity or remain anonymous was noted by a sessional instructor: “[What] I find quite fascinating is the sense of anonymity. You know there’s no visual to the student who is part of the conversation. So sometimes students will disclose[, and] … sometimes they won’t.” Indeed, several students and instructors (faculty and sessional) noted the lack of identity markers in online spaces, unlike what might be “visible” in a classroom, and echoed, perhaps unknowingly, the ongoing debate between embodiment online as stereotyped and reductive (Boler, 2002) or as queered (Stern, 2011).

The decisions that students (and instructors) are making about disclosure in online settings are highlighted in the literature (Cole, 2019; Lambert & Dryer, 2018; Murders, 2017). Although there has been speculation that visibly disabled students might prefer online learning so that they can choose when to disclose (Barnard-Brak & Sulak, 2010), Jay Dolmage (2017, p. 10) suggests that disability is invisibilized on campus until accommodation is granted, and then those with invisible disabilities are “routinely and systematically constructed as faking it, jumping a queue, or asking for an advantage.” Moreover, Fady Shanouda (2019) asserts that the Western colonial university encourages disabled students to “overcome” their differences and accommodate themselves to the university through neo-liberal practices, such as self-management. Similar to Rua Mae Williams’ work on meta-eugenics (2019), Shanouda describes this as a eugenic desire of the university to either mask or eliminate disability, in which the biocertification process of students seeking accommodations is intrinsically violent. Working with Ellen Samuels, Shanouda (2019, p. 8) suggests that we need to consider the consequences of “limiting inclusion to individuals who fit neatly into categories, like disability,” and question the “visibility politics” that enable some people to be visible in the university but not others.

Moreover, within neo-liberal-ableist universities, differences are flattened through inclusion/ist framings in that all instructors and learners are meant to accommodate themselves to the eugenic desire of the university. Through the lens of eugenic desire, disabled students and instructors must disclose their disability via ableist processes to receive accommodations (Shanouda, 2019). However, through cripping online educational spaces, moments of resistance and difference emerge. Crip, through its creative disruption of pedagogical practices and its reshaping of time, brings attention back to the bodymind within translated online spaces. Claiming crip offers alternative ways of being and knowing within online institutional spaces. Importantly, as Nirmala Erevelles (2014, p. 85) reminds us, coming out crip requires a continued commitment to attend to the material conditions that construct disability “in relation to other categories of difference.”

Flexibility of Online Education

Choosing online education is not only about the option to choose invisibility in an attempt to subvert the eugenic desire of the university. For some disabled online learners, the need for balance is paramount. For example, a disabled graduate student noted that

I have some depression and anxiety, and so the opportunity to pace myself and tackle what I could, you know, on any given day, was really critical for my not becoming overburdened and overstressed and therefore sick, right? Like it was huge because I was really, really worried about, you know, I’m essentially doing four jobs now, and how on Earth am I going to do that and not have … you know a relapse, and so the opportunity to work from home and have my kids do their homework on the bed beside me and all of that, and then said I could balance right and not kill myself in the process.

This need for balance was particularly noted by graduate students who were both working and raising children. As one student stated, “I remember I got pregnant, and … I came across some statistics. The number of women who were completing [a degree was] really low, and … my mantra at that time was just I didn’t want to be a statistic of somebody who gets pregnant and then drops out of school because of parenting-related stuff.” Several students with children noted the flexibility of online programs, which meant that they did not have to deal with the organizing and expense of child care to obtain their degrees. Boler (2002, p. 338) argues that the “hype” around online learning only serves further to inscribe traditional roles for women as homebound and the primary caregivers of children. We query how the gendered regulation of online learners might parallel the experiences of disabled students online as educational practices continue to reinforce ableist assumptions that disabled students are unable to compete in the traditional classroom, for it creates a distinction between which bodyminds are deemed acceptable in traditional place-based education and which are not. However, we suggest that this selective choosing of flexible online options is a way for students to crip their online experiences, making the university accommodate their lives rather than accommodating themselves to fit the university.

However, though this flexibility made balancing education, work, and life easier at times, and provided students and instructors with more room for thoughtfulness and reflection, it also came paradoxically with increased demands on time. For example, students and instructors noted the time needed to engage with such a large amount of written text. As one faculty member noted, this increased flexibility also came with the pressure to be “available 24 hours a day.” Another faculty member described flexibility as paradoxically both a strength and a weakness: “I think the strength of online … is that we’re not taking people from community and from family especially from northern Indigenous communities to the south to urban areas.… Then the limitations are [the assumption that] the online schedule … fits within work, family, and community.” In this sense, the flexibility of online education can come with the assumption that it is possible to do it all—full-time education, work, and family and community life. The structures that encourage productivity foster ableist ideals and give advantage to those who can meet the demands of neo-liberalism—thus privileging those “who embody the normative capacities of neoliberal identities” (Mitchell, 2014, p. 3). Online education is no exception.

As McRuer (2018, pp. 14, 16) notes, neo-liberalism establishes “flexible production” often connected to less expensive labour costs and is linked to austerity politics “wrapped up in the rhetorics of emergency.” McRuer was not writing about online and remote education during a pandemic, yet the connections are stark. It is through cripping online education, the disruption that disability creates online, that there can be new ways to subvert oppressive systems and new ways to be together online in the university. Furthermore, as we navigate the ongoing pandemic, crip theory reminds us of the necessity to remain attentive to how new modes of being and micro-activism can be subverted and subsumed by neo-liberalism (Erevelles, 2011; McRuer, 2018). This is particularly important given the potential of the university to make use of this moment of emergency and austerity to consider remote learning as a permanent cost-saving measure and an empty gesture toward inclusion/ist accommodation in addition to a revenue-generating maneuver especially as it relates to international students and the higher fees that they pay. As Iris Young (2011) notes, how we resist and remake ourselves is shaped by the structures in which our relationships are embedded. Thus, though we might attempt to subvert neo-liberal ableism within the university, we are always in danger of reproducing the very inequities that we seek to disrupt.

Slotting Bodyminds Online

As Felicita Arzu-Carmichael highlights in Chapter 2 of this volume, certain bodyminds are more likely to be slotted (and slot themselves) into online education. Although some disabled students enroll in online education as an inclusion/ist form of accommodation, some faculty remain unsure whether they have the skills to support disabled learners in online spaces. For example, Michael Murders (2017) found that faculty in mid-sized public universities in the central United States questioned whether they had the knowledge, technology, and support to handle online accommodations. This finding resonates with our study, in which a faculty member questioned the ability of all instructors to engage pedagogically with online education: “I use the word dedicated, but maybe that might be too strong, but to have—and again I’m not necessarily in favour of streams—but I’m just, I just think it requires a lot on the part of the faculty member teaching online. That they might be able to do a better job, a more effective job if that was their domain.” Although this faculty member was clearly wary of creating streams that would relegate some instructors to online classrooms, their comments suggest a lack of confidence in their ability to deliver and engage in critical pedagogy online. This speaks to the lack of training and comfort in using online learning platforms experienced by some instructors. Indeed, our research found that some online instructors were unaware of which academic supports were available to online students, with one sessional instructor stating that “my understanding was that distance students can access some support from [the writing centre], but I don’t know how much.” Additionally, some instructors believed that online education limited the accommodation that they could provide to students, with one sessional stating that, “If there’s any issues around accommodations, which happens quite a bit in the distance courses because people who are not able to come on campus or are challenged by other forms of abilities, and you know if they have a learning disability or any of those sorts there, it’s, you know, the online space is limiting in that context, you know. There are only so many things I can offer students.” Some universities offer online training modules for instructors, but often they are provided on a short-term basis or are voluntary (Lobasso, 2013). The Ontario Public Service Employees Union notes that many faculty members in Canadian colleges have expressed concern that online education, in fact, is shifting resources away from students and faculty toward management and private corporations, particularly through precarious hiring practices (MacKay, 2014).

This shifting of resources in the university was noted by a faculty member as a reason for disabled students to choose online learning as an accommodation since traditional classrooms would not be accessible: “We’re especially short of accessible classroom space for students with disabilities, particularly students in wheelchairs or students with hearing disabilities who need clear sightlines. So we’re very, very poorly resourced for that. And while we’ve been pushed to teach in distance [education] for various institutional reasons, at the same time there’s been a push to really increase our class sizes.” This statement demonstrates how the cost effectiveness of neo-liberal logic operates within the university to slot disabled students into online courses and programs and leave the inaccessibility of the university unchallenged. In the words of Esther Ignagni and colleagues (2019, p. 315), “the university imagines accessibility, which tends to follow a neoliberal logic of identifying a problem, individualizing that problem, and creating a solution that is motivated by cost effectiveness rather than disability politics.”

The shift to emergency remote teaching and learning in 2020 might have increased the availability of guidance for online engagement; however, it has not increased the time or resources available to instructors, nor is the overabundance of guidance always helpful. This movement online because of COVID-19 has been referred to as “panic-gogy” in which panic fuels pedagogy (Kamenetz, 2020), and we should be cautious in comparing online education and emergency remote learning. Charles Hodges and colleagues (2020) describe emergency remote teaching as “bare bones” course delivery with limited resources and support, so it is not helpful or accurate to compare this form of delivery with online learning, in which six to nine months are usually dedicated to developing an online course (see also Walsh et al., 2021). Vital, rather, are instructor training and support, resources, and additional time for online learning and emergency remote teaching to create a “robust educational ecosystem” (Hodges et al., 2020, para. 13). Importantly, for disabled students, existing barriers to access have been amplified during the switch to emergency remote learning (Pichette et al., 2020), and connections might be drawn between the exhaustive process of seeking accommodations and faculty exhaustion with emergency remote learning, but it is difficult to know whether these lessons will inform university policies moving forward.

Conclusion

To consider how disability generativity disrupts online teaching and learning, we reflect on how neo-liberal logics are sustained through online learning and how, simultaneously, bodymind difference in the realm of online social work education crips and expands our understanding of online teaching and learning. As la paperson (2017, p. xiii) suggests, the university is an assemblage that is “always being subverted.” Online disabled students are embodied and translated; they are enmeshed and entangled in the neo-liberal-ableist university, desiring to be a part of the university and subverting it all at once. Disabled students in online settings both maintain and crip the university. Although this dynamic might leave us unsettled, it offers space for rest, balance, invisibility and/or visibility, translated embodiment, subversion, and all of the other ways in which online disabled students are cripping and surviving the neo-liberal-ableist institution that is the university.

Through centring the experiences of disabled students online—such as in Chapter 8 of this book—we can begin to crip online education. As Goodley and colleagues (2014, p. 982) note, disabled people’s “interdependencies provide alternative ethical maps for living together outside of, even in opposition to, the dictates of normalcy.” In this way, disability politics and crip theory make space for us to rethink and reimagine how to live through neo-liberal ableism. One way to begin cripping the university is to start with the micro-political actions, ranging from petitions to student-led organizations, already being undertaken by mad and disabled students challenging the sanism and ableism inherent in the university (Shanouda, 2019). In online educational spaces, micro-activisms—which have inherent markers of Ami Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s (2019) crip technoscience—can range from mobilizing via Twitter chats, such as with Hsieh and Saleh’s Twitter sisterhood (2021), to course-based private Facebook groups. In emergency remote learning, learners have continued to use technology to subvert institutional norms through similar Facebook groups (Bozkurt, 2021), actions such as claiming unstable internet access and even changing a Zoom name to “reconnecting …” to keep their cameras off or creating a pretense of audio issues by silently miming speaking. These types of micro-activisms unsettle taken-for-granted institutional norms in which students control, even for brief periods, their translation in online spaces (Rudnicki, 2017).

Questions of embodiment in online spaces are not easily resolved, nor should they be, as Jessica Vorstermans and Elizabeth Mohler highlight in the last chapter of this volume. However, by employing crip theory that understands “disability” as both an identification and an action term that references a multiplicity of bodymind differences and is simultaneously affirmed and contested, shifting and ever changing (Chen et al., 2023; McRuer, 2018), we can begin to theorize this unsettled and unsettling terrain. This framing involves attending to differences rather than smoothing them over through resolving the dilemma and gestures toward the need to dwell with embodied yet translated online learning.

Notes

  1. 1   The term “bodymind” acknowledges the intertwined connections between our bodies and our minds and how an ideology of “cure” suggests that the body and mind are separate, “the mind superior to the body, the mind defining personhood” (Clare, 2020, p. xvi).

  2. 2   Emergency remote education refers to courses delivered virtually with students participating in the course without coming to a campus (see Bozkurt, 2021; Hodges et al., 2020). This is viewed as a temporary solution, during a crisis, for classes designed for and intended to be delivered in the face-to-face classroom. Remote courses can use asynchronous or synchronous (real-time) strategies or a combination of them. In contrast, online education refers to courses specifically designed for digital delivery and facilitation. Online courses are intentional, fully online, and intended to be virtual spaces where a variety of digital teaching and learning strategies are employed using a range of learning management platforms.

References

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