{"id":349,"date":"2019-01-28T15:45:13","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T15:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/?p=349"},"modified":"2019-01-28T15:45:13","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T15:45:13","slug":"academia-is-ableist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/uncategorized\/academia-is-ableist\/","title":{"rendered":"Academia is Ableist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There\u2019s a conversation<\/a> happening on Twitter<\/a> right now about accommodations<\/a> in college classrooms for students with disabilities.\u00a0 Many people have articulated beautifully why accommodations are not just a matter of law<\/a>, but of justice, ethics<\/a>, and professional responsibility<\/a>.\u00a0 But there\u2019s one more big piece of this that I think we\u2019re missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institutions of higher education in the United States are inherently ableist.\u00a0 The ways in which we typically assess student learning are predicated on being able-bodied and neurotypical.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Me
Me playing a video game a student wrote for his final project<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not so long since society threw people in psychiatric wards, state-run homes, and sanitoriums for the least expression of common ailments like mild depression.\u00a0 It\u2019s not so long since the state sterilized people after deeming them \u201cfeeble-minded\u201d. It\u2019s not so long since doctors labeled a range of symptoms in women that today we might understand as anxiety, PTSD, or autism as \u201chysteria.\u201d (I actually saw someone throw that term today, aimed at women who were arguing that Al Franken did the right thing when he stepped down.) We still<\/em> live in a society where people who aren\u2019t white are charged with being unintelligent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our colleges and universities are products of that same society.\u00a0 Long-form, written argumentation (using a specific linguistic mode) has long been held up as the only way students can demonstrate they understand literature, history, or political science (to grab three disciplines off the top of my head).\u00a0 But it\u2019s simply one<\/em> way.\u00a0 Similarly, it has long been the assumption in institutions of higher ed that students must be able to physically participate in lab experiments if they want to understand scientific endeavors.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Too often we don\u2019t question that colleges and universities were built for able-bodied people without neurological problems or mental illness, and we repeat the assessment methods of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our colleges and universities are expressions of what wealthy people once decided constituted a proper education.\u00a0 That education excluded women, people of color, Indigenous people, gay people, Jewish people, poor people, immigrants, and more at various points in time.\u00a0 We are still working toward institutions of higher ed that don\u2019t carry the weight of racism, classism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia (and that effort is vastly, unevenly distributed).\u00a0 But we seem hesitant to understand that our institutions are ableist in their very design too.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Students
Students play a board game that a student made for his final project<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a historian.  I\nwrite articles and books (and blog posts and tweets).  But my students do not have to be able to\nconstruct a written argument in order to show me what they have learned. They\ncan give a presentation, or record a short video, or make a zine, or create art\n\u2013 these are all excellent means by which I can assess their historical\nunderstanding.  Because historians don\u2019t\njust communicate in articles and books \u2013 we go to conferences and we perform\norally; we sit together in roundtables; we discuss ideas over coffee.  Why are we so hesitant to extend to our\nstudents the same consideration we extend to ourselves?  (There is another conversation to have here\nabout the demands of getting jobs and tenure, and how much those goals depend\nupon writing, which is, again, ableist, but I\u2019ll get to that another day.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My job is not to insist that mechanisms of assessment that\nwork for able-bodied, neurotypical people are the only methods of assessment I\nshould use at all.  My job is to meet the\nbright young (and sometimes older) minds of my students where they\u2019re at, and\nwork with them to allow them to express their fierce intelligence in ways that\nshow them at their best.  I\u2019d argue that\u2019s\nall of our jobs.  Otherwise we are\nmissing out on the thoughtful, creative, and analytical skills of a whole host\nof people who are owed a hell of a lot better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a conversation happening on Twitter right now about accommodations in college classrooms for students with disabilities.\u00a0 Many people have articulated beautifully why accommodations are not just a matter of law, but of justice, ethics, and professional responsibility.\u00a0 But there\u2019s one more big piece of this that I think we\u2019re missing. Institutions of higher education in the United States are inherently ableist.\u00a0 The ways in which we typically assess student learning are predicated on being able-bodied and neurotypical.\u00a0 It\u2019s not…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinedenial.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}