This post is the third in a series reflecting on events hosted by the UCL Centre for the Pedagogy of Politics (CPP) last year.
The first and second posts discussed, in some detail, ideas raised in our spring panel on ‘Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom‘.
This post offers some more tentative reflections on our autumn panel on ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’. For reasons that will become clear, I shall be oscillating between the usual blog format and the lesser-spotted bleg (this one, not this one…).
My main aim in organising this panel was to bring together educators who have thought deeply about how technology can make higher education more inclusive for disabled and neurodivergent students, and who share a concern that widespread advances made during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic have been lost in the rush to ‘return to normal’.
Initially, my hope was to hear mainly from people who teach politics (understood broadly) and have published their thoughts and reflections in disciplinary SoTL. But I was unable to find much, if anything, in the usual outlets (e.g., those covered in Jeremy’s SoTL round ups) that included a focus on inclusivity gains during the early part of the pandemic and subsequent losses.
This was a surprise because, more generally, inclusivity is a strong theme in our discipline’s SoTL, as is co-production, and most of the disabled students we teach have a clear view on this: according to Disabled Students UK, 85% of disabled students report that they would benefit from the continuation of online teaching and learning options introduced during the early stages of the pandemic.
It seems to me that there are three possible explanations for my inability to find much disciplinary SoTL reflecting this perspective:
(1) not much has been written about it by people who teach politics;
(2) it has and it exists in the SoTL outlets that I was searching, but I failed to find it;
(3) it has, but it exists somewhere else (e.g., perhaps one is more likely to find disciplinary perspectives in certain journals on disability inclusion than one is to find certain disability inclusion topics in our discipline’s SoTL journals).
I would be interested to hear if any readers have a view on which, if any, of these is the correct explanation. Of course, it might be that more than one of them holds, at least to some extent.
‘But John,’ I hear you call, ‘how on earth did you manage to organise the panel if you couldn’t find people in our discipline working on this topic? Please, spare no administrative details!’
Well, I was lucky in two respects. First, two educational technologists who co-authored what is, to my mind, the best general paper on this issue kindly agreed to discuss their ideas and how they might apply to our discipline. One of them, Martin Compton (College Lead for AI and Innovation in Education, King’s College London), has provided a superb summary of his contribution in this previous ALPS post, which I won’t aim to replicate here. The other, Ben Watson (Head of Digital Accessibility, UCL), offered an array of inspirational examples of measures that his team has introduced, while emphasising that there remains more to do. One overarching theme from Ben’s talk was that many of the measures introduced to improve inclusivity for disabled and neurodivergent students have benefited all students. For example, ensuring text is machine-readable, rather than an image, makes it easier to search for everyone.
The second respect in which I was lucky relates to our other speaker. While I was unable to find much disciplinary SoTL on the panel topic, I did find a few publications by people who have experience teaching politics, and several of them (most notably, this) were authored by our other speaker: Miranda Melcher (Educational Technologist, Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD) Department, City University of London). One of the central claims of Miranda’s talk was that inclusivity losses for disabled and neurodivergent students since the early part of the pandemic were not primarily for technical reasons, but rather due to prevalent expectations, norms, and institutional cultures. Other panelists and attendees seemed sympathetic to this analysis.
This is the kind of perspective I was hoping a scholar of politics would bring to the conversation. Framed this way, the topic seems ripe for further analysis by education-focussed politics academics. There are various questions we might profitably consider from different sub-disciplinary perspectives, for example:
From an empirical perspective: What constellations of groups, interests, resources, and discourses explain what happened in recent years? Considering this, what are the most effective strategies for sustainably improving inclusive pedagogy going forward? And what are the most effective things for individuals to do now within existing institutional constraints?
From a normative perspective (more my wheelhouse): What principled arguments were, or could be, given for shifting away from online teaching and learning practices as the pandemic progressed? Do they stand up to scrutiny? Are they, in some sense, ideological? What actions should individual teachers be taking now within institutional and cultural constraints?
From a methodological perspective (empirical or normative): How should we structure the co-production of research and practice in this area given that some of those most affected may never have joined our student populations?
As things stand, this seems to me like a neglected area of potentially fruitful pedagogical research for our discipline. I won’t speculate on possible sociological explanations of any such neglect. Rather, I shall finish, true to form, with a bleg: I would love to hear from others who share my view and might be keen to progress things, perhaps together, in this area. Equally, I would be interested to hear from anyone who can point me towards valuable existing work in this area that I have, excusably or otherwise, overlooked.