I recently used a pretty weird metaphor in a community organizing meeting when I was explaining to a staunch advocate of law enforcement that we shouldn't invite police officers to our community events since we want to be inclusive and welcoming to our immediate neighbors. I likened this concept to a dining scenario that we …
Tell it like it is
We can learn to talk about inaccessibility and ableism without fragility. When we are told that something in our course or program is inaccessible, it's not meant as a personal affront. We may feel embarrassment or shame about the room for improvement in our course design, but what’s most important is how we keep our …
Language Matters
The language we (language instructors, researchers, testers, etc.) use to describe language learners of marginalized identities matters a great deal. My colleague Robert Randez and I recently collaborated on a piece for a critically needed special issue of Language Testing to, in part, illustrate for applied linguists the importance of making purposeful and informed language …
Access finds hope in language learning
I know I talk (and write) a lot about ableism in academia, and in language learning specifically. It's important that I do, because it's really there and it's a real problem. One year ago, I wrote about how "best practices" in language teaching can erect barriers to accessible learning. I stand by what I wrote …
A real question: attendance in language learning
I have a real question. What’s the relationship between class attendance and success in the learning outcomes of a course? Why does attendance really matter that much? Do we really have to control it to the degree we think we need to? Instead of failing (or reducing a grade for) students on the basis of …
Continue reading "A real question: attendance in language learning"
AI in language learning: making lemonade
I was recently asked to participate in a panel on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Academic Writing on Michigan State University campus. In my talking points, I drew some connections to the challenges of machine translation for language educators in the late 2000s. Google translate was born in 2006, and as early as 2008, I was …
The myth of fairness
Sometimes unintentional ableism bubbles up in the shape of myths that society tells us about what a learning experience needs to feel like for students across the board. One hesitation I hear often from educators is their concern about fairness to other students when considering what accommodations are "reasonable" for their disabled students in the …
Navigating group work when one member is disabled
A colleague asked me a really excellent question last week. How should an instructor scaffold group work expectations when there is a disabled member in the group? There are a number of ways to approach this, and how you proceed will depend on the needs of the students, your relationship with them, what if any …
Continue reading "Navigating group work when one member is disabled"
Can “best practices” in language teaching create barriers to accessible learning?
Here's a doozy of a question I encounter often in my work: is it possible that any learning barriers for disabled language learners are actually erected unwittingly by language teaching strategies that we consider "best practices”? Unfortunately, I think the answer is yes. One example is how the visual turn has manifested in language teaching …
Continue reading "Can “best practices” in language teaching create barriers to accessible learning?"
Progress, not perfection
Remember, when we're trying to improve accessibility and disability-inclusion in our courses it's good to aim for progress, not perfection. On the one hand, anything less than 'perfect' might be inaccessible, yes. But don't overwhelm yourself thinking you have to fix everything overnight, particularly if you don't have a lot of institutional support. If you're …
