Myth 1: Accessible ≠ Easier
This is the first in a series of blogposts tackling common myths about access and disability in learning. While this series will delve into special education, it is designed for both general and special educators.
While I’m not known for breaking any land speed records walking around town, if you know me you know I’m pretty active. I teach, travel, take walks, play with my kids. However, recently I had a minor knee procedure done that I was just not bouncing back from as quickly as I had hoped. My family had plans to go to an amusement park and I knew my struggle to walk for long distances, let alone stand for any length of time, could not be more badly scheduled.
As we headed toward the front gate the morning of our amusement park visit, I was already exhausted from the walk from the parking lot, and it was painful to put weight on my leg. I knew before we passed through the turnstile that the day was either going to involve me sitting on a bench while the rest of my family raced around the park going on rides and seeing attractions, or I was going to need to get a mobility aid. As I considered these options, I found myself struggling with my inner voice telling me that I should tough it out and I was just being weak and lazy if I decided to use a mobility aid.
Then another voice came into my head, that of disability activist Imani Barbarin who has said that when a person becomes disabled, even if temporarily, the voice that first shows up in your head is your ableism talking. Oof.
I would never think of another person using a mobility aid as being weak or lazy or tell them to tough it out. Yet here I was immediately connecting character flaws with my own struggle to move easily and well. I was ashamed of my own ableist voice ringing in my ears. I decided then and there to head to the help booth to get a mobility aid. I went on to enjoy my day at the park with my family, going everywhere with them, instead of being stuck on a bench by myself all day, or toughing it out in a way that took away the joy from all of us.
Where’s the Rigor?
The whole amusement park experience made me do some serious reflection not only about myself and the negative connotations I had about access that I didn’t even know I had, but also others. It's not uncommon when I am speaking with educators or caregivers about ways, we can increase access for student learning to hear someone say, ‘But isn’t that making (fill in the blank) too easy? Isn’t that taking out the rigor?’ And while I have long had a practiced answer for that question, that day in the amusement park gave me a new level of understanding for their question as well as a fuller and more practical response.
You may or may not have a class with students with IEPs or 504s. But the truth is, even without the documentation of a learning need or disability, most students will hit a learning obstacle, or several, throughout their schooling. And often this obstacle has very little to do with the actual task at hand, but rather the expected way the task is set to be done. The point of me going to that amusement park with my family was to have fun and spend time with each other, not to get my steps in or to hit some exercise goal. Yes, I have done that in the past and I know others do too – I have seen more than one fellow park goer exclaiming over their Fitbit stats in the popcorn line. But the reason most people go to amusement parks is to have fun, be entertained, experience thrills and spend time with the people we came with, not exercise. Yet, I found myself debating skipping all the rides and attractions and sitting by myself somewhere because walking had become slow and painful for me, temporarily losing track of the real reason I was there. It took me a minute to realize that it did not matter if I walked around the park on my own power the whole 14 hours we were there. What mattered was the family and fun.
Fed is Best
The way school tends to go in a lot of places is that materials are chosen, curriculum developed, activities planned, and grades given, by centering the most typical or grade level performing students. These tend to be chosen based on standards or learning targets a school is trying to meet – but those chosen activities are not the purpose – the standards or learning targets are. And often, when or if a suggestion for making the tasks connected to those targets more accessible is made, say offering the option of an audiobook or use of a fidget, it’s not uncommon to hear:
Is that fair?
Doesn’t that make it easier?
What if everyone wants to choose that (writing tool/ fidget/calculator/memory aid/ access point)?
That might work for this assignment but what will they do with ______ (a test/high school/a less understanding teacher)?
When I consider these common reactions by gatekeepers to access, I first recall Ms. Barbarin’s wise words – those questions are internalized, but perhaps unconscious, ableism talking. And I also consider just what the idea of accessibility in education really means. Whether we are defining it using the Universal Design for Learning framework, differentiated instruction or other models that prioritize equity and inclusion, one thing becomes immediately clear: we need to clarify who and what we are prioritizing before we can even entertain these questions.
In other words – I need to make sure I am not putting emphasis on places that are not the priority of my teaching. Will students get what I really want them to get (key content/fun at the amusement park) if I insist on other factors that could be nice for some but could get in the way of the learning for others? If I really want students to understand the concept of symbiosis for example, it probably doesn’t really matter how that happens, if they leave my classroom understanding symbiosis. This is true, even if it would be simpler for me or just feel more rigorous, to use the textbook or a digital worksheet.
This focus on the end result, and having flexibility on the pathways there, can feel uncomfortable when so much of the way school is done is almost an academic version of hazing. Students are often set to laborious tasks that include actions that have no clear connection to the task at hand. Yes, there are many ways that skills can be applied across curricular areas, but if the pathway to learning is not what we are explicitly teaching and focused on in that lesson, those requirements to transfer without explicit transference teaching can prove to be obstacles to our true instructional aims.
Another way to look at it is that it can be very easy to overvalue the learning modality over the actual learning since there has traditionally been so much reward offered to students who can academically perform in specific ways (neat handwriting, class discussions, essay writing, test taking). However, lately I have taken a page from the pediatrician’s handbook – the phrase they tell new parents fretting about breast versus bottle feeding: fed is best. Whether a student learns through lecture, worksheet filling, discussion, or projects, fed, or learned is best. It does not matter what path we took to get there.
Reflecting on Priorities
In order to reach a level of clarity about instructional priorities to help us move forward, I think it is also wise to habituate asking these, or similar, questions whenever planning for teaching, learning and assessment:
What is the core objective?
Who is advantaged by the current design of this experience? Who is disadvantaged? How?
What could be obstacles to the learning or expression of learning in this task?
When and how might this work be transferrable? Are there ways to explicitly support that transference?
So for example, I was planning a very simple activity where students watch an engaging and age-appropriate video that is meant to share some information about the relationship between food and energy for humans as part of a larger unit on nutrition. Two common ways to give students access to processing time as well as be able to get a quick gage of student understanding, is to ask students to either talk with a peer or to write a quick reflective response. But before deciding on whether to go with one option or another or something different, I can run through those questions:
What is the core objective? For students to understand that food affects energy levels in humans
Who is advantaged by the current design of this experience? Who is disadvantaged? How? The video has a lot of supportive visuals, verbal explanations, and captions. It’s short so we can watch it together more than once. Most students in my class will do well with the video component. My more extroverted students would do well with talking with a peer to process. Many of my more introverted students would do well with writing their reflections. But my students who have fine motor needs or struggle with print-based expression might find writing distracting to the point of not processing the information.
What could be obstacles to the learning or expression of learning in this task? It’s possible that students who have a range of relationships with food might find this video difficult. Also, for students who need to produce something after watching the video in a modality that is difficult for them, it might be an obstacle for their comprehension.
Is there a way to remove or reduce those obstacles? Yes. I can give students choices for processing: talk with a peer, write a reflection or sketch and label the reflection
When and how might this work be transferrable? Are there ways to explicitly support that transference? This video is part of a larger unit of nutrition. I can make sure to connect the content in the video to future lessons, as well as refer to the energy and nutrition connection when food comes up in class conversation. I can also make sure students have access to this video to view and refer to as needed.
Access is Not the Easy Way Out
While I had a great day at the amusement park and learned a ton about myself along the way, I was also reminded of another truism – making something accessible does not make it easier. To make my way through the park there were times where I had to take elevators or a shuttle when an escalator, staircase or simply walking would have been more efficient and yes, easier. So no, I wasn’t burning the same number of calories as most of the parkgoers as I used various access points, but I was also not experiencing things as efficiently or as quickly. It was fine for me because I was relieved to have access at all, but at no point in the day did any of my family members wish they could take the alternative routes I needed to take.
When people ask me if allowing a student to use a tool or scaffold or to choose a different modality to complete a task could be tempting for some kids who want to take the ‘easy’ way, I have to pause. In a fully accessible world there would be no reason for my kids to take the stairs while I take the ramp. There would just be a gradual decline that all of us could take together – each of us using the modality the works best for us (running, walking, rolling, gliding).
Secondly, most of the time if there is no gradual decline, the stairs are fast and more efficient than the long and winding ramp. It is the same way with school tasks. Voice to text is slower going than typing. Memorized math facts are faster than a calculator. For some of us, offering those pathways are the only way we can get access to those all-important instructional goals. For others, who face fewer obstacles, those pathways would be less efficient and cumbersome. While the novelty of an access point might be exciting at first, people tend to settle into the pathways that are most efficient or productive for them.
Ideally, all of us would make most, if not all our instruction UDL aligned by removing as many obstacles as possible. But until that happens, our next best option is to offer access points that will allow our students to get to the good stuff.