Orientations to teaching more accessibly in postsecondary education: mandated, right, pedagogically effective, nice, and/or profitable?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper describes five orientations informing the efforts of postsecondary educators to teach more accessibly, including commitments to accessibility as the mandated, right, pedagogically effective, nice, and/or profitable thing to do. These orientations emerged from focus groups and interviews with instructors and teaching assistants at a research-intensive Canadian university. By attending to these underlying orientations, we can grapple with important, but often unexamined, complexities, such as messages we may be inadvertently endorsing and contradictions between intentions and potential outcomes and their ramifications. We encourage support for educators to reflect on the limitations and complications of their orientations and associated efforts to advance accessibility, as well as cross-pollination with other areas of critical scholarship beyond that focusing on Universal Design and accessibility-specific principles.Points of interestUniversity instructors and teaching assistants seek to teach more accessibly for a number of reasons.This paper describes five reasons – or ‘orientations’ – for teaching more accessibly informed by: (1) legislative or university requirements; (2) equity and social justice; (3) effective teaching practices; (4) kindness; and/or (5) profit.Paying attention to these orientations for teaching more accessibly is important because they may impact which accessibility practices are implemented, when and under what conditions, and for whose benefit.Some orientations may also promote negative ideas of disability, such as disability as costly or a burden, even while they encourage teaching more accessibly.We reflect on the challenges and limitations of applying ‘accessibility’ language and principles broadly to ‘all’ students, instead of intentionally focusing on reducing barriers for students with disabilities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it