Adrienne Shaw on Accessible Online Teaching by Design

How can we build accessible online courses in the middle of a pandemic?

More than just a call to reproduce in-person teaching in digital environments, this pivot to online education has a powerful potential to help us reshape higher education for the better, to ensure it embodies the racial, gender, and disability justice principles those of us in the interdisciplines have long championed. But that takes rethinking some of our most basic assumptions about what education means and who it is for. 

In episode 115 of Imagine Otherwise, host Cathy Hannabach interviews Temple University media studies professor Adrienne Shaw, whose approach to the classroom provides a variety of ways educators can foreground accessibility in their daily work. Cathy and Adrienne's conversation illustrates some of the more practical aspects of what it means to do pedagogical and scholarly work in quarantine, as well as the kinds of work/life blurriness we’re all navigating now.

In the interview, Cathy and Adrienne chat about building assignments and course structures that enable students to participate in diverse ways; why online teaching is often more accessible for faculty with chronic pain and other disabilities; how administrators can better support teachers and mitigate uncertainty; and why creating accessible education systems by design rather than exception is key to how Adrienne imagines otherwise.

Transcript and show notes: https://ideasonfire.net/115-adrienne-shaw