Orientations to teaching more accessibly in postsecondary education: mandated, right, pedagogically effective, nice, and/or profitable?

Abstract

This paper describes five orientations informing the efforts of postsecondary educators to teach more accessibly, including commitments to accessibility as the mandated, right, pedagogically effective, nice, and/or profitable thing to do. These orientations emerged from focus groups and interviews with instructors and teaching assistants at a research-intensive Canadian university. By attending to these underlying orientations, we can grapple with important, but often unexamined, complexities, such as messages we may be inadvertently endorsing and contradictions between intentions and potential outcomes and their ramifications. We encourage support for educators to reflect on the limitations and complications of their orientations and associated efforts to advance accessibility, as well as cross-pollination with other areas of critical scholarship beyond that focusing on Universal Design and accessibility-specific principles.

Points of interest

• University instructors and teaching assistants seek to teach more accessibly for a number of reasons.

• This paper describes five reasons – or ‘orientations’ – for teaching more accessibly informed by: (1) legislative or university requirements; (2) equity and social justice; (3) effective teaching practices; (4) kindness; and/or (5) profit.

• Paying attention to these orientations for teaching more accessibly is important because they may impact which accessibility practices are implemented, when and under what conditions, and for whose benefit.

• Some orientations may also promote negative ideas of disability, such as disability as costly or a burden, even while they encourage teaching more accessibly.

• We reflect on the challenges and limitations of applying ‘accessibility’ language and principles broadly to ‘all’ students, instead of intentionally focusing on reducing barriers for students with disabilities.

Keywords:

• accessibility
• disability
• universal design
• higher education
• teaching

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank colleagues Michael Agnew and Alyson Brown for their support facilitating focus groups and interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Student Partners Program of the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation and Excellence in Teaching at McMaster University.