October 6, 2022 Chronicle of Higher Education Article
Excerpt:
Disabled students make up 19 percent of U.S. undergraduates, yet some of our conventional teaching practices make their educational lives needlessly difficult.
It’s time to set those practices aside.
You might not realize how embedded in your teaching some of these habits are, even if you are an excellent and beloved teacher. Many of us cling to unnecessary logistical hurdles because it’s the way we were taught when we were students, and the way we were taught to teach: punitive attendance policies, strict deadlines, suspicion of disability accommodations, refusing to share class recordings and other materials.
Don’t freak out. I’m not saying you should stop taking attendance. I am saying you shouldn’t punish a student for missing class, but rather use absences as a nudge to check on that student’s well-being.
… Kevin Gannon, an advocate for inclusivity and a historian at Queens University of Charlotte, has argued convincingly that there are two kinds of rigor, intellectual and logistical. Intellectual rigor challenges students to explore complex ideas and refine their own thinking. Logistical rigor requires adherence to “strict policies about when and how work is produced and evaluated.” An intellectually difficult course need not be logistically difficult. And it shouldn’t be.
… Jesse Stommel, a writing professor at the University of Denver who specializes in inclusive pedagogy, notes that attendance policies don’t measure students’ motivation or engagement. Instead, he says, attendance functions as a “proxy for the amount of difficulty a student is dealing with in their lives.” That has been my experience over the years since I dropped my punitive attendance policy. All of my persistently absent students have been struggling with physical or mental disabilities: chronic stress, burnout, depression, anxiety, chronic illness, addiction, and more. All of them.
… If want to teach your students about deadlines in the real world, you must also teach your students how to ask for extensions. As Sarah J. Schendel, an academic-support specialist at Suffolk University Law School, points out, “Addressing extensions is not about anticipating failure [or] dismissing the importance of deadlines.” Instead, she says, these discussions nudge students to “explicitly examine what it will take to meet the deadline and whether they have frankly assessed both their skill and preparation.”
…As professors, we can choose to trust our students and have faith in them. Doing so will not dilute the intellectual richness of our classes. On the contrary, it will allow all of our students — including our disabled students — to experience, and contribute to, that richness.
Toxic rigor and accessibility cannot coexist. Accessibility demands compassion, trust, and understanding, qualities that are anathema to toxic rigor. Until we prune toxic rigor from our pedagogy, disabled students will bear a heavy burden to soothe professors’ need for control.