Accessibility is a gift
Clark College, in Vancouver WA, invited me to give a talk at their 2023 Fall Faculty Focus. The focus was on accessibility, a topic I haven't spoken on before, and I was hesitant at first. Knowing that my work connects to accessibility isn’t the same as saying that to a roomful of educators and administrators with conviction!
So while accessibility is not my area of direct experience, I agreed because educators need to think about accessibility differently, not as a requirement, but as a gift. Creating and exploring ways to make education more accessible to more people can be an excellent learning experience for any educator. I want us to embrace this aspect of our craft joyfully, with a full spectrum of curiosity and imagination.
After learning from my first keynote that I should never write and deliver 45 minutes of me talking, I landed on a format that includes roughly 15 minutes of my voice (total), and 30 minutes of guided conversations for listeners. We didn't record during the live event, this is a studio recording done a couple of weeks after, but the prompts are included in the video and text.
I’ve included the text (because auto-captions can be funny) and the video. I am so proud of this talk and thankful to Lindsey, who both opened the door and insisted I could make it through.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW
Introduction
Vancouver WA, where we are, is on the traditional lands of the Cowlitz people. Thank you to the historical caretakers of the land both here, across all North America and beyond.
As we gather today, I ask that we remember so many of our friends, families, neighbors, the earth and all of her denizens, people, land, and animals suffering around the world. In my mind today are Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Sudan, all facing violence, devastation, and the suffering of hundreds and thousands of people, while the land itself faces upheaval and disruption from earthquakes, bombs, and climate disaster.
Lastly, before we begin, let us acknowledge these last several years, and the grief we carry, from so many sources. We cannot rush ahead, pretend we are well, and expect a different future. This is part of our collective work, to not shy away from our grief or deny its existence. These opportunities when we are together are a gift, a place to share our pain and fears, in balance with moments of joy and release.
Accessibility is a gift
Access to education is a human right. As educators, we have been given the honor, the responsibility, for crafting educational paths accessible to all people. This is our gift, our purpose.
Expanding access to education makes us better – better at our craft, in how we think and feel about ourselves, our colleagues, our students. All the ways we make education both available and accessible strengthens US as learners, enjoins us to more complex and innovative approaches, to growth as humans. It deepens our capacity for care and to end cycles of educational trauma and harm.
We are complex, curious, and adaptive beings, capable of incredible generosity and courage.
Even more should that describe us as educators. In a time when we witness constraints and barriers being erected and fortified at every turn, we are called to remove barriers, tear down gates, and widen pathways.
Accessibility encompasses the devices and methods and structures we do or don’t use, and reaches further; it is a way of feeling and being, of believing in the promise of education and learning. It is holding the certainty that everyone deserves access to education, and our responsibility as educators is to do - and be - everything we can to ensure that access
Learning, and our ability to learn, is foundational to our existence as a species. How we learn, integrate knowledge, and relate to the world informs and shapes our existence, regardless of formal structures and systems.
Embracing accessibility brings us to both the content and purpose of education. Formalized education and its systems are useful in many ways, but access to education only begins in those structures. We also want to build strong, capable, confident learners, and strengthen our own ability to learn, adapt, change, and engage with complexity.
But denying people access to education is harm, made worse through our own disinterest, or ignorance. In these ways, we also dehumanize ourselves – denying the rich variety of pathways and openings into learning, protecting the gates that protect our comfort, that feel familiar.
Educational trauma can undermine our confidence in our ability to learn, but trauma is deceptive. It doesn’t actually stop us from learning, but keeps our ability to learn confined to survival, limiting our belief in and access to the range of gifts, skills, and tools we have for visioning and creating different futures.
Every time someone integrates knowledge, our futures are graced with the potential for newness, discovery, creation. Our work as teachers is to hold space for that emergence, to connect it with our shared realities.
Author and scientist Dacher Keltner, talks about the eighth wonder of life as epiphanies. He says “epiphanies unite facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding (Awe, p 18). While we may not speak or think directly about epiphanies, learning, integrating that knowledge, then making choices based on what we’ve learned is how we become our fullest selves and create lives we enjoy living.
But this process is predicated on us believing in ourselves as learners, having confidence in our ability to learn, change, and grow. All unresolved trauma has some impact on the brain – how we think, consider, and react – and those effects can linger across our lifetimes. Educational trauma may have an outsized impact because it can compromise our belief in our ability to learn.
Limiting ourselves as educators to only what we know, afraid to venture into unfamiliar terrain, is one way we perpetuate cycles of educational trauma and harm. We obey these self-imposed limitations because we too have been subject to learning-related harm, and our own ghosts and scars accompany us into our classrooms.
But these painful remnants are not permanent. We have the capacity to look into our own hearts, examine our experiences, and reflect on how satisfied we are with ourselves, with our practice. We have the chance to make new choices, grounded in new understanding.
Our learning experiences
What was a particularly impactful learning experience for you?
Why was it so impactful?
How did that experience shape you as a learner? As a teacher?
Removing the gates
Educational gatekeeping has brought us to this point, creating narrower and narrower openings into the pathways of education.
Systemic racism and ableism are two of the most powerful gatekeeping weapons in our arsenal, and I use the words of war with intention, as we so often fight to maintain our privilege, and against our students’ right to education; for their right to learn in the ways they need and want to learn.
When we are asked to extend ourselves, we remain motionless, frozen by anxiety and apathy, paralyzed by perfectionism, terrified we won’t be up to the task.
We forget that we are also learners, refusing the challenge to engage in more complex and innovative ways. We refuse to acknowledge, to feel, the harm we do to ourselves, and to others.
Trauma and accessibility
Because trauma is such a huge umbrella, let’s refine our understanding of trauma, and look specifically at what kind of harm we are discussing.
Trauma changes not only how we think and what we think about but also our very capacity to think. It disrupts our ability to make meaning, build connections with other people, situate events on a timeline, and engage critical thinking, reasoning, & long-term visioning
Educational trauma, defined as the emotional and spiritual wounds inflicted during the process of learning (Gray, 2019), as students are shamed for HOW they learn – is almost certain to embed itself at our very core.
This harm often translates into “you are a bad person because you cannot learn in this specific way, or to this particular standard, regardless of your needs as a learner,” and becomes a moral judgment of who we are.
It can erode confidence in our ability to learn, grow, and change, cause us to believe that we are bad people if we cannot learn in certain rigidly defined ways. One of its most devastating impacts is that people become convinced that they are unable to learn, and lose confidence in themselves as strong, capable learners.
If, on a deep and unconscious level, we have been conditioned to believe that we cannot learn, that HOW we learn is wrong – that WE are somehow fundamentally wrong – why would we continue to try? People will do almost anything to avoid feeling shame, and that includes shame around learning, so why keep trying something that so often makes us feel ashamed?
Looking forward
Accessibility is about expanding those openings, inviting and welcoming all people to engage learning on their terms, not ours, interrupting the internal monologue of disbelief.
But if education is to have a future, it must be expansive, and accessibility is about all the ways we take down the gates to learning, to leave behind our role as gatekeepers. Our past and our present do not have to be our future. We all have the ability to learn and grow and transform.
We are all capable of change, and of changing the world around us.
It is easy to underestimate the power of BEING differently, of bringing a more whole and compassionate self into learning spaces. It is easy to forget that people ALWAYS remember how they were treated, whether that was with dignity and care, or scorn and cruelty. How we are treated and treat others is where education and learning live and breathe.
Trauma-responsivity is a throughline, a common denominator, a thread that weaves together intersections of oppression. It understands and feels current and past hurts, is committed to ending educational harm.
Although intellectual understanding and acknowledgement is necessary, it is incomplete until we remember and honor the grief and pain we all hold in our own hearts and bodies. It is incomplete until we rediscover the well of courage that exists deep within each of us.
Trauma-responsiveness, at its core, is about harm reduction. It is about meeting people where they are, meeting our own selves, with gentleness, with an invitation to extend trust. It holds us all in our common humanity, our shared desire for liberation and joy.
(re)Building trust
Understanding how trauma, generally, can impact learning is necessary, and building a practice that works to counter those impacts is desirable. But where we can make a more direct effort is understanding how EDUCATIONAL harm happens, and committing to ending that cycle of trauma – IN OUR CLASSROOMS.
I believe the crucial first step in educational harm reduction is (re)building trust in the self, in others, in education and learning.
When people are harmed during learning, they lose confidence in themselves, as well as in the process and act of learning, and in their teachers. This mistrust continues until and unless we prove ourselves trustworthy, and that means also trusting ourselves.
Our own capacity for trust may have been abused during education, but we are now learning that we can rebuild that trust in our own hearts and minds and bodies. Relearning for ourselves gives us insight into how we bring our personal sense of renewed trust into learning spaces.
Next steps
What does it mean to trust our teachers?
What does it mean to trust our students?
To trust ourselves?