Update: I am back in Raleigh, NC! The jet lag and a bug that I probably picked up on one of my flights have kept me from getting this uploaded, but here it is!
At the end of the Ed-ICT International Network Symposium, I asked Jane Seale to let me interview her. Given that she is the leader of this network, I felt that understanding her thoughts and beliefs on this process would be very important in recognizing the effectiveness of this symposium and the potential future possibilities.
⇾ Do you mind if I use direct quotes, or would you rather I paraphrase?
“Direct quotes are fine. I’m not promising to make any sense, Lynn!”
⇾ Why did you choose this line of work, and how did you get here?
“I actually started with an interest in adults with severe learning disabilities, so these would be adults that don’t very often get through primary or secondary education, let alone university. I was interested in what computers could do for them, as an educational tool. This was back in the ’80s when computers were just starting. So, that was my first interest, and I studied that for my PhD: looking at how computers were being used in adult community centers. I don’t know if the US has an equivalent. These would be either health-funded or social services-funded day centers that people with severe learning disabilities would attend. There may or may not be a computer there to support their education or their social skills training.
Then, when I became an academic, my interest shifted to the disabled students that I was working with in universities. Clearly, there was a broader range of disabilities, and that got me interested in accessibility.
So, in the early 2000s, when WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) was just coming out and everybody was doing accessibility training, I was a young lecturer then. I was really committed to the idea of being inclusive with my own teaching resources and materials. I was desperately trying to understand all of this technically stuff about: “You must make your websites accessible. You must do this…” I would look at all the guidance and I would think: “This doesn’t make any sense to me! I have no idea what they’re talking about.” So, that was my first kind of lightbulb moment, that the accessibility people weren’t talking to me, they were talking to other technical people. They just were not taking into account that their language and their whole frameworks were just complete gobbledygook.
That’s when I did my first write about, you know, if accessibility is going to go beyond the responsibility of the tech guys, then what needs to happen? That’s when I first starting looking at all the different stakeholders, and arguing that we’ve got to stop keeping it in the technical work and think about the students, academics, librarians, senior managers, everybody. If everybody is involved in accessibility, then how do we develop a practice that is coherent across all those different communities?”
⇾ What keeps you excited about your work?
“I think it’s the passion that my colleagues in the community have. Every time I start to feel down, it’s just like head against a brick wall. Then, you come up and you meet people like we’ve met in the last two days, who’ve got such passion and such drive, it just reinvigorates you. There’s also an indignant side; I don’t know if it’s a motivation, but it’s a driver. It does not compute in my mind that things should still be so exclusionary and inaccessibility. It’s that social justice thing, that Sheryl (Burgstahler) was talking about.”
⇾ What are your main challenges in this role?
“There’s three: I think there’s a challenge when governments and funding bodies assume that because they gave money once, like 5 – 10 years ago, towards accessibility, that’s it. It’s done. They’ve done that, and they move on to something else. The kind of short term vision, not understanding what we need is sustainable funding, sustainable practice, sustainable resources. So, that’s one challenge.
The second challenge, I think, is with some academics, some faculty. I wouldn’t say all, but there are some faculty that think university is about elitism and that a competent student is one that can cope with the barriers that are put in their way, and that’s what makes them successful and elite. So, it’s about: “Well, if they can’t cope, then they clearly aren’t meant to cope. They aren’t the right kind of student and we don’t want them.” There’s that kind of attitude that is a real barrier.
I think the third barrier is senior managers who see these kinds of issues as something to pass on to one person or one department. It’s their job to take a checklist every now and then, and write a report. That’s it; we’ve done inclusion and we’ve done accessibility.”
⇾ What do you consider the most important issue relating to accessibility?
“I was thinking about this in the last two days, and I think that one of my concerns is that, when we use the term ‘accessibility,’ it’s understood to mean making resources and materials accessible, but more is needed than that. I really feel that accessibility is only part of it, and I’d much rather talk about inclusion. So, I’m going to talk about inclusion, and maybe social justice, too. That broadens it out to think about pedagogy, to think about management structures, to think about services. It’s not just to think about this PDF file. I’m worried that people think accessibility is just about: “Let’s make PDF files accessible;” and that’s where the practice stops, but it’s wider than that.”
⇾ What advice would you give to individuals trying to make their institution more accessible or inclusive?
“Seek out like-minded people who will join you in campaigning. You can’t do it on your own. Target those people in positions who, they may not be the most senior people, but who can help you. Convince them and they might convince others.”
⇾ How would you recommend that students go about getting involved in this field?
Clarification: If we are looking at sort of a bottom-up approach, how do we expect students, who are traditionally in the bottom, the quieter, the more subordinate role, to feel confident enough to speak out and feel their voices are actually being heard, considering normally all of the focus is being put on the upper levels: the professors, the academics, etc.? No one is going to sit there and go: “I’m going to put all of my hard work and effort into this and see zero return, because everyone is ignoring me.” So, how do we sort of get students to realize that their voices matter? How do we push them in that direction so that they can be involved in this change?
“That’s a really important question, and I don’t know if I have a complete answer to that. I’ve been thinking about that, too, during the two days. So, you may recall, I’ve been using the phrase self-advocacy a lot of the time. I think there is something around disabled students forming a community, where they support one another and maybe with support from student-friendly services to develop the confidence and the skills to advocate in powerful, collective voice, rather than quiet individuals. It’s a bit like Oliver Twist going up and saying: “Please, sir, can I have some more gruel?” On your own, you know, that tiny little child, whereas if the whole community… I think with that self-advocacy comes the ability and the voice to target strategically areas of university life that matter.
I don’t know the US system well enough, but let’s just imagine that student feedback on modules or programs really matters, and that faculty, if they get a poor rating and that poor rating has something to do with a lack of inclusion or accessibility, then maybe collectively there’s something around (that professor)… Let’s use that process because it may motivate. That’s the stick approach, isn’t it? Hit them where it hurts, and they may be using self-advocacy and confidence to kind of also develop a carrot approach, where students can identify those committees, those faculty, those senior managers where, if through student reps and other channels, universities recognize.
You can kind of get your voice heard in a two-way dialogue to say: “Hey, we realize on this teaching a learning committee, you haven’t got a standing item on inclusion or accessibility, and we think this is a really good idea.” I’m not suggesting that this is the way forward; I’m actually just brainstorming as you’ve asked me the question. I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s a number of strategies. The main point is about collective community voices, community self-advocates.”
⇾ What are your overall thoughts on how this symposium went?
“I think the symposium went well. Our purpose of the symposium was to push people into uncomfortable spaces; we didn’t want a symposium where we all kind of kept to our own particular viewpoint and congratulated ourselves on how well we were doing. We wanted a space where people could acknowledge other positions, other viewpoints, but also start to reflect on their own understanding and their own practices. I think we managed to achieve that. The challenge for these events is the expectation to come up with all the answers. I don’t think we have, but I’m not sure we should’ve expected to and we certainly weren’t expecting to. I think what we’ve done is: people may not know what the solutions or the answers are, but they may have a better idea of what questions they should be asking themselves.”
⇾ Are there any elements of this first symposium that you would definitely include in the upcoming symposiums? Are there any elements that you would cut out?
“I’m only talking for myself; I need to discuss with colleagues tomorrow about what their thoughts were. So, this is just the world according to Jane. I think the things that went well were the discussions which were more mixed. The thing that we probably need to think about is: “Was all of what we did relevant to the main theme?”
Thank you very much, Jane, for letting me interview you for my blog!
I was going to add this section into my post Ed-ICT Symposium: Day Two, but it was already exceptionally long and I did not want to add even more to that long block of text!