In thinking more about accessibility, pedagogy, and technology, I’ve been thinking explicitly about dis/ability and privilege and their relation to different technologies. While reading “Utopian Pedagogies” by Elizabeth Losh, I couldn’t help but feel that some of the points she was addressing were very engaging, but also possibly not fully embracing the many differences that accessibility can take. I also wondered about how she is considering teaching from the margins specifically, given the title. However, Losh definitely addresses some interesting points around subversion and utilizing digital technologies as enabling creative and alternative forms of learning. I like her approach of subversion through digital technologies: “These are also pedagogies that draw attention to the procedural character of learning in ways that are potentially deeply subversive” (431). Although, my first question here is subversive for who? But I do agree that utilizing digital technologies has subversive potential. She continues saying, “Rather than present such procedurality as a set of predictable linear and hierarchical processes in which learning outcomes and assessment methodologies emphasize prescribed prerequisites and goals that are hard-wired into paths of sequential steps to success of failure, such pedagogies invite questions about rule-making and rule-breaking by facilitating activities that bring operational logics to the forefront.” Losh here is thinking about how technology can reorient pedagogical strategies in different directions by having students critique the very technology around them and begin to see the underlying logics functioning in these devices. And I’m particularly seeing this subversive pedagogy in connection to how access happens with these technologies. I would also definitely take her class on digital poetry.
Disability has a particularly interesting relationship to accessibility. As humans interact with the structures of materialized technology, dis/ability has a way of complicating and reassessing this relationship to it. How does the physicality of a body interact with technology? So for instance, how might someone who is blind or has low vision be able to use digital resources? What becomes of the usefulness of a screen when someone’s vision is impaired? Everyone has different ways of engaging and accessing technology, which largely goes overlooked when thinking about the physical design or structure of a website or platform. This recognition between user and platform becomes a way of also addressing and highlighting ability to then begin to possibly subvert ableist approaches to understanding digital technology.
Hastac.org has a list of different class activities, which I looked through and found one on disability (https://www.hastac.org/blogs/merylalper/2014/02/07/03-disability-and-defamiliarizing-smartphone-class-activity). The exercise is a very clever and simple way to have a class reassess their relationship to technology that they are familiar with. Meryl Alper, who designed the exercise, explains it as “Disability and Defamiliarizing the Smartphone,” where they break into small groups and explore the accessibility options on their phones. She explains that some students cut on the voiceover feature, where other students can hear their text messages, which causes them to feel very vulnerable and exposed. This exercise struck me also because the students aren’t necessarily put in a position of problematically imagining themselves with a disability, but instead are thinking about the how accessibility is structured on a device that they think they are feel familiar with, which makes them reassess their own relationship to not only technology, but their own abilities.
