Definition of Ableism by Talila Lewis

Resources for Practicing Anti-Ableist Pedagogy

On Saturday, November 5, 2022, I had the privilege of conducting a pedagogy workshop at the American Studies Association conference, with my esteemed TLH colleagues and mentors, Cathy Davidson, Shelly Eversley, Christina Katopodis, Javiela Evengelista, and Jason Hendrickson. 

Anti-ableist pedagogy is a topic we’ve taken up in our TLH seminars over the past two years as another way to promote equity in the classroom. Anti-ableist pedagogy isn’t just about accessibility—making sure that all of your students can access and understand materials you use for teaching and that they can participate equally in the classroom—it’s also about recognizing and critiquing the harms caused by ableism in society and in our educational systems. It’s about accepting disability as part of human diversity and a positive identity marker, as opposed to a deficit, a reason for pity, or a justification for low expectations. Anti-ableist pedagogy is about radical acceptance of intersectional identities, unconditional respect, and a commitment to making everyone feel that their contributions are valuable. 

In the workshop, we borrowed an exercise from Dr. Jamila Lyiscot, who led a TLH workshop last year. The rules of the exercise were to first choose a whistle-blower or gatekeeper to enforce the requirement to only speak with words that have 2 syllables or less. The question was, “please describe your research (or work).” One of our participants reported being so preoccupied with following the rules that they completely missed out on the content. This simple yet powerful exercise can demonstrate how people who learn differently or English language learners might be missing the most important parts of the conversation. 

Turning to theory as another entry point into understanding ableism, we also explored models of disability, or the way that we conceptualize disability. The most commonly cited models are the medical model (defining disability as an impairment in the body in need of a cure) and the social model (defining disability as a social construction due to society’s failure to adapt to disabled bodyminds). While these models are necessarily at odds with each other, a universal model acknowledges that we have to acknowledge and accept different forms of impairment as a part of the human experience, while reforming the way that society responds to disabled people. Part of undoing the long history of oppression of disabled people starts with considering that disability is not unusual and it’s not a fixed state of being (anyone can become disabled at any time). Instead of creating separate spaces and policies for “accommodating” people with disabilities, we should be working to adapt our social environment to include everyone.

From there, we turned to defining ableism. For me, the dictionary definition falls short in describing the range of insidious behaviors towards disabled people that have been normalized by society, or the use of ability itself to undermine people based on other parts of their identities. Here, I turn to the work of activist, Talila Lewis, who concisely defines the term: 

“A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism and capitalism.

This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy based on a person’s language, appearance, religion and/or their ability to satisfactorily [re]produce, excel and “behave.”

You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.”

a working definition by Talila “TL” Lewis*; updated January 2021

In taking a critical look at our built and social environments, it’s not hard to find areas where this system of placing value on individuals has been used to create structural inequalities for disabled people in our society, a fact that is especially apparent in our education systems. This can be taken literally when looking at architectural barriers or information barriers, or figuratively, when considering policies and rules that subtly (or not so subtly) discourage disabled students from succeeding.

In addition to talking about how disability is defined and the harms of ableism, we ended with some ways to practice anti-ableist pedagogy:

  • Learn more about disability history and ongoing struggles for access to all parts of society. For example, much of the built world has been improved by disabled activists through what is known as the curb cut effect
  • Voice your support within your institution for spending money on structural access and information access. Accessibility is often an afterthought, given attention only when it becomes a problem, and deprioritized in budgets. 
  • Strive to create accessible learning environments through Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
    • Understand that accessibility is often a negotiation between competing needs and therefore a process. Strive for an adaptable environment that can accommodate the people in your classroom.  
    • Consider giving everyone the most commonly requested accommodations (usually extra time for assignments and tests). This takes away the stigma associated with requesting disability accommodations and helps all students.
    • Work with your campus accessibility office to make sure your course materials are accessible (text that is computer-readable is also flexible to accommodate people with a variety of vision disabilities and can be used with annotation tools that benefit neurodiverse students as well).
    • Add an accessibility statement to your syllabus to signal to students that they can talk directly to you about their access needs. Be open to suggestions for improvement. Talk about disability and access as a normal part of the college experience.  
  • “Crip” the curriculum, or incorporate disability into readings and course content. Question ableism in literature and media, social policies, or other topics. 
  • Most importantly, practice “radical acceptance” of everyone for who they are (and meet them where they are). 

Other resources from the session: 

Our slides

Padlet asking participants WHY and HOW can the classroom be a radical space for antiracist action? 

Small Axe/Acts (brainstormed with session participants) 

Additional Suggested Readings on Anti-Ableist Pedagogy:

Articles:

Transformative Anti-Ableist Pedagogy for Social Justice, by 2021-2022 TLH Faculty Fellow, Dusana Podlucka

Anti-ableist pedagogies in higher education: A systems approach, by Juuso Nieminen and Henri Pesonen 

Books:

For a good primer on disability, I recommend Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to Be an Ally by Emily Ladau.

For more theoretical approaches to disability and intersectionality, see Disabled Futures: A Framework for Radical Inclusion by Milo W. Obourn and The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability by Elizabeth Barnes

Recap of Respect the Process: Examining Our Social Justice Perspectives with Dr. Bettina Love

On Wednesday, October 12th TLH hosted the Zoom workshop “Respect the Process: Examining Our Social Justice Perspectives in the Classroom” with Dr. Bettina Love. TLH  Faculty Co-Director Dr. Shelly Eversley introduced Dr. Love, and shared her quote, “Education can’t save us, we must save education.” This set the tone for the event, as Dr. Love shared how we must transform our classrooms into sites of healing. 

Dr. Love shared a quote from James Baldwin’s 1963 speech, “A Talk to Teachers,” in which he articulated how antiracism will be met with resistance as we are in a revolutionary situation. She discussed how many students come to us in “survival mode,” highlighted in her book We Want to Do More Than Survive, and revealed how we must heal and enlighten them, that this must happen before learning can occur. Continue reading

Creative Commons Workshop Recap

On Thursday, October 6th, TLH’s Research Assistant and Librarian Grace and CUNY Scholarly Communications Librarian Meg hosted a workshop on Creative Commons licenses for the Fall TLH Fellows. They shared a brief introduction to Creative Commons, which provides a standardized way to share work and grant permission for others to use your work, relevant for TLH Public Knowledge Projects, different academic works, and creative content more broadly. There are several different CC Licenses, (some allow for remixing works, some require noncommercial use, some require the same license be applied) and it’s best to review all the options and decide if a CC license is appropriate, and which is best for your given project. Important considerations include licenses cannot be revoked or changed, and you can specify how you want others to credit you. Meg emphasized it is important to communicate to students that they automatically own the copyright to their work, and from there can decide how and if they want it shared. Grace discussed how it’s important to be clear with students and collaborators on how work will be shared, and to choose together the right license before making a project public, whether it be on CUNY Academic Works, CUNY Academic Commons, or other spaces. Fellows brought interesting questions related to their own past collaborative work, and the group parsed out the differences between public domain, fair use, and Creative Commons. Meg emphasized how granting public permissions to share work can determine what maintains relevance long-term by nature of being allowed to be copied and disseminated. While librarians are not lawyers and copyright in practice is largely shaped by different court case decisions, it is helpful to discuss with librarians and research your rights to your work in order to make informed decisions on how to best share it. 

Teaching Resources from TLH Fellows Asrat Amnie and Anita Cheng

TLH Fellows work to foster equitable, creative, student-centered pedagogical methods throughout CUNY. We’re delighted to share these resources developed by fellows, Asrat Amnie (Hostos Community College, Fall ’22) and Anita Cheng (Hunter College & Brooklyn College, Fall ’21) that address the use of educational technology in the classroom.

Universal Design for Learning: Fostering Neurodiversity, Equity, and Inclusivity Through Educational Technology

Pulling Distance Learning Tools Into In-Person Classes

New College Classroom: Changing Ourselves, Changing Our Classroom, Changing the World! (Event Recap)

by Kelsey Milian Lopez

This recap was originally published on the Futures Initiative blog

On Wednesday, September 7th at 3:00 pm, CUNY and collegiate-wide affiliated participants gathered at CUNY Graduate Center’s Skylight room to discuss Cathy N. Davidson and Christina Katopodis’s new book The New College Classroom. In-person tickets were sold out. With nearly 400 attendees over zoom, this turned out to be one of CUNY’s biggest in-person events since the beginning of the pandemic. Both the CUNY Chancellor and GC Provost stayed for the entire event.

Left to Right: Cathy N Davidson, Chancellor Felix Matos, Christina Katopodis, GC Provost Steve Everett.

You can watch the full event recording here and view slides here

Continue reading

Fellow Project: Singing in a Strange Land

Organized by Glenn McMillan (Medgar Evers College) with his students. 

In this recorded forum, students discussed an opera arranged by Professor McMillan and the importance of black music around the world, especially for nonmusic majors and lovers. McMillan led a discussion about why Negro Spirituals were so important to the founding of jazz, gospel, and hip hop, and music’s important role in the Civil Rights movement. The forum highlighted student projects on “Soul Train,” “Women in Jazz,” and “Has Gospel Music Changed?” and concluded with some closing remarks on “Four Little Spirits,” and then students were given an opportunity to ask Prof. McMillan about his work. 

Glenn shares on the project, “Stressing unity between the sacred and the profane allowed the students him to embrace all aspects of African American culture, and jazz, blues, and gospel performers. These student based projects combine the music of today with the historical significance of the Middle Passage.  Students share their academic experiences from the global community representing all aspects of musical life.”

2022 TLH Summer Institute Recap

On June 7th TLH held its Summer Institute with the 2022-2023 Faculty Fellows.

Grace Handy (TLH Research Assistant and Librarian) kicked off the institute by introducing TLH leadership with one fun fact about each. You can read more about TLH staff here. Faculty Co-Directors Shelly Eversley and Matt Brim then shared their pedagogical biographies—how and why they arrived here as teachers. This is a great warm up exercise for students, who can submit answers to the prompt “How and Why Did You Come to Be Here?” on a Padlet for all to see and read or in conversation with peers on the first day of class (see example from one of Matt’s class). In addition to sharing their stories about why they became teachers—Matt learning how to teach vis a vis Poor Queer Studies and Shelly embracing love in her classroom to teach with “radical openness”—and what it has been like to teach at CUNY during the pandemic, Shelly emphasized that to choose to love one’s students is a political act and fosters an environment of belonging, value, and care in which the best kind of learning can be made possible. 

Next, it was the Faculty Fellows’ turn to share in a low-stakes collaborative, community building exercise facilitated by Christina Katopodis (Associate Director of TLH) using Mentimeter. Shelly and Matt asked the fellows to share their visions inspired by the “ecstasy” and “teaching and learning without limits” bell hooks discusses in Teaching to Transgress (pp. 201-208). The prompt for the entry ticket was, “In your classes, what makes possibilities happen?” to which the fellows could respond up to 5 times each. Below is the word cloud of their responses. 

This transitioned into a deep listening exercise led by Pedagogy Co-Leader Jason Hendrickson: the fellows were put into breakout rooms with 2-3 people and took turns speaking without interruption for 2 minutes (with a timer set). While one fellow spoke, the other(s) focused on being silent but active listeners. The prompt was, “What is your educational/pedagogical biography or genealogy? How did you get here—how did you arrive here as a teacher?” Following this deep listening exercise, the fellows reflected on the experience of deep listening in a metacognitive activity using Jamboard: 

Fellows also reflected on the exercise in the Zoom chat, some sharing it was too short as they had more to share and connect on with their partners. Next, Jason talked about why deep listening matters and reflection as a means to self-discovery. Then we stopped for a 10-minute break. Meanwhile, Grace played part of a podcast on (Re)Mapping Knowledge created by some of the Spring 2022 Faculty Fellows as their public knowledge project. 

After the break, Jason led us in a Creative DNA exercise inspired by Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, asking us, “How do we find and bring our creativity into our work and life?” Jason shared a clip from The Five Heartbeats and his own creative process: he often finds “valuable thoughts from music, movies and the trash,” which he then can put together and revise. Then we all engaged in five minutes of writing practice, responding to these prompts: 

  • Describe your first creative successful act. 
  • When you work, do you love the process or the result? 
  • Who regularly inspires you? (And why?)

These reflections were just for the Fellows to have for themselves. Next, Shelly shared the reason why we choose these particular books for this year’s TLH curriculum, “to creatively think about how we teach,” and introduced the fellows to Bruce Mau’s 5-Minute Manifesto exercise adapted for teaching at CUNY with the vision of transforming CUNY and higher ed more generally. The fellows worked in a collaborative Google Doc in batches to respond to various writing prompts and begin to construct a collaborative manifesto—one that we will return to at the beginning of the seminars in the 2022-2023 academic year. One fellow described it: “The interface looks kind of like a bunch of worker bees collaboratively/concurrently building a rainbow colored colony!” 

Afterwards, Shelly and Matt reflected on the activity and TLH’s mission for the coming year and beyond. Shelly has used this manifesto activity with her students, and fellows in the 2021-2022 cohorts likewise used this activity in their classrooms (read an example collaborative manifesto project here). Some fellows also shared their thoughts and contributions aloud:

  • Trusting students is most important
  • We can lead our students to do the same thing to share their thoughts
  • Revision means to see it again, re-doing and re-learning is important to our students and ourselves
  • We are learners and always learning
  • Instead of talking about success and failure, we should rethink the meaning and process of learning itself
  • We could think more about how to inspire students to believe themselves rather than focus on their grades and homework 

During the break, Grace shared two slides about TLH’s impact at CUNY and beyond in the first two years of the grant. 

We then played a short, inspiring video by Cathy N. Davidson (Founding Faculty Co-Director of TLH) who talked about the efficacy of active learning in the classroom and her reasons for starting with pedagogy, especially why she uses an anti-hierarchical model in her classroom: to make higher ed more equitable, just, and inclusive. Christina then led a follow-up activity, asking fellows to respond to this question in the chat: “What language do you use to introduce students to anti-hierarchical teaching methods? How are you thinking about upending hierarchies in your own classrooms?” Some responses included:

  • Co-production of knowledge
  • Understanding the classroom as a community
  • Students’ own grading of their performance
  • I use language influenced by Freire, hooks, and Zinn, as examples
  • I ask my students to create a Community Agreement and then ask them for help to improve the whole class
  • Talking with students about standardized English in classrooms and academia — and how languages are hierarchized in these contexts
  • I like to start with a literacy map that traces their important literacy events in life. Then we reflect and discuss them. A question I pose is – did your map reflect standardized testing or a grade?
  • One of the first things I do to show (if not explicitly tell) is to respond to the same introductory discussion prompt I give them (thinking of hooks here — “I do not expect to…share in any way that I would not share” p. 21)
  • Developing own questions and converting them into students’ own assignment
  • I begin by telling them that no person is illegal
  • Peer revision, students teaching one another
  • I have students do three reflections. In the first, they answer the question “How do you define history.” They return to the question at the midterm and the final. There is not a right or wrong answer—they track how their own ideas develop.
  • Tying the learning/knowledge to our everyday lives and critically interrogating our own positionalities

Before breaking into small groups to begin brainstorming potential public knowledge projects inspired by anti-hierarchical transformative teaching methods, Christina introduced some of the logistics about how the projects work. Examples of prior projects on TLH blog: https://transform.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ The fellows then broke out into their public knowledge project groups and worked collaboratively on Jamboard.

Jessica Murray (TLH Director of Digital Communications) followed this activity with an explanation of how TLH uses CUNY Academic Commons groups to facilitate communications between fellows and their cohorts. The main site is Transformative Learning in the Humanities. Grace then shared an example CUNY commons website that one Spring 2022 fellows group created with their students as their public knowledge project—a good example of the versatility of the platform and how it supports collaboration. After Christina answered some questions about the public knowledge projects, the fellows went back into their groups to share syllabus and teaching ideas and discuss how they can practice student-centered, empowered teaching and learning in the coming academic year.

Incoming Pedagogy Co-Leader Virginia Diaz made several announcements about upcoming events in TLH events. The institute was a great opportunity for the Fellows to meet and connect, and begin thinking through their collaborations on transformative teaching and active learning.

Fellows Project: Engaging Thoughtfully in Public Discourse: An Examination of Unconscious Bias

Organized by Sarah Bishop (Baruch College), Susan Kuhn (Queens College); Victoria Perez-Rios (John Jay College), and Amy Traver (Queensborough Community College). 

Unconscious bias is a human reflex to make assumptions about people that aren’t necessarily true. This tendency affects society as a whole, limits our understanding of others, and holds us back from achieving the best possible outcomes across all fields of discipline, ranging from business to sociology, communication to criminal justice. As educators in the liberal arts, the four of us were interested not only in the effect of this phenomenon in our respective fields, but also how it affects our classrooms, our students, and our communities. We wanted to study this in partnership with our students, in the hope and belief that real change is possible when deeply rooted in thoughtful and inclusive educational practices.

As teachers, we recognize that true learning takes place when knowledge is absorbed, engaged with, and applied. We undertook this process together with our students through a series of structured, scaffolded learning opportunities. On April 1, we attended a book talk via Zoom, sponsored by the University of Buffalo Gender Institute, featuring Jessica Nordell, author of The End of Bias: A Beginning – The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. In our individual classrooms, we continued the discussion as it pertained to our disciplines, and then invited students to produce short videos of themselves sharing some of their unconscious bias experiences or learning outcomes. Our ultimate project was a one-hour, student-led live panel discussion on this topic, with a supporting student audience, held at John Jay College on Thursday, April 21.

The local television show presented here represents a compilation of the taped student panel discussion (including audience participation) and the video uploads. The content is entirely driven by the concerns and voices of our students at Baruch, Queens, QCC and John Jay. They share personal stories and reflect on how unconscious bias affects them in their families, neighborhoods and perspective careers. The show was edited, produced and directed by John Jay graduate student Masha Wickramasinghe. We professors, having ignited the discussion, are now audience members learning from our students.

Our CUNY motto states “The education of free people is the hope of humanity.” All of us involved in this project have learned a great deal about unconscious bias, and we believe the conversation has only started. We hope you enjoy learning more about this too, and that from this hope blooms change. Enjoy the show!

*A link to view the TV Show is forthcoming, it will be added to this blog post this June!

Fellows Project: (Re)Mapping Knowledge

Organized by Kimberley D. McKinson (John Jay College of Criminal Justice), Tatiana Nuñez (Graduate Center and City College) Micheal Rumore (Baruch College) and Stefanie Wess (Lehman College, Hunter College and Queensborough Community College).

(Re)Mapping Knowledge is a student-faculty collaborative podcast project that showcases the creative scholarship of CUNY students and also serves as a critical pedagogical tool for the wider CUNY community. Featuring the creative scholarship and storytelling of CUNY undergraduate students, this four-episode podcast series highlights innovative and radical pedagogical approaches as well as the possibilities that emerge from incorporating student-produced and student-centered knowledge in the classroom.

Drawing on the writing and research of student-scholars, episodes 1-3 of the project highlight different pedagogical approaches to (re)mapping knowledge in the classroom. Episode 1 interrogates the relationship between self, community, language, and textuality. Episode 2 discusses classroom strategies for confronting the coloniality of literary traditions. Episode 3 uses student autoethnography to center embodied knowledge as decolonial pedagogy. Episode 4 of the project features a moderated conversation between the three Faculty Fellows on the themes, teaching tools, and strategies illuminated in Episodes 1-3. In this way, Episode 4 not only serves to frame Episodes 1-3 but also serves as an accompanying teaching tool in its own right, including a discussion of innovative approaches to teaching and reading canonical texts.

(Re)Mapping Knowledge provides CUNY students and teachers the opportunity to problematize the notion of the canon and also allow for meditations on the radical ways in which knowledge can be produced by students in the classroom. The episodes capture student scholarship in a rich way. As a pedagogical tool, (Re)Mapping Knowledge provides an example of how faculty can embrace podcasts as a means by which to embrace different sensorial teaching tools that can complement more traditional written texts.

TLH Fellows Project: Creating Across Communities

For our TLH community-facing project, we created a shared site for our classes on the CUNY Academic Commons, centered around the concept of “writing with and for a community.” Each of our courses has a two sub-page on the site: one of which gives an overview of the course and some background, and another of which has blog posts by students, usually with contextualization by faculty members. Then students from other classes read these blog posts and commented on them, sometimes even creating new imagery or artwork in response. In this way, we hoped to foster an intercampus conversation about space and place.  

Notions of audience, place, and identity–as well as the use of images–are woven through our courses. Carrie Hall’s Composition II course (NYCCT)  focused on how students can best choose and produce in a genre to reach a particular audience. Marta Cabral’s class, Art in Elementary School Education (CSI) learned  how to teach art to third and fourth graders. Erica Richardson’s students in Literatures of the Harlem Renaissance (Baruch)  blogged  about a trip to the Met. In Belinda Linn Rincon’s class, Latinx Street Literatures (John Jay) students watched and blogged about the film La Ciudad, often including images in their blogs. Dominique Zino’s class, Cultural Identity in American Literature (LaGuardia), read literature that address issues of dislocation/relocation, identity formation, and alienation and wrote blog posts about space and power.  

The project was, in many ways, a success: students gained a great deal from seeing what is happening on other campuses, and it made their projects feel more real to have a live audience for their blog posts. Carrie Hall’s class had the option of writing a unit with a fourth grade audience  in mind, and the respondents, Marta Cabral’s class, were in training to be fourth grade teachers which allowed for  vibrant visual feedback. It was also a great benefit also to have a variety of course levels so that beginning writers could see what upper level students are doing, and upper level students could take on a mentorship role and reflect upon how far they’ve come.  That said, we did also have our struggles.  Much of these had to do with scheduling and planning; we struggled to find anyone to assist with web design and needed to do it ourselves. Also, because we didn’t have our project in play until well into the semester, we didn’t have time to seamlessly plan in a way that would best benefit the project and the students. That said, this is the type of project all of us would be happy to do again with the benefit of experience.  

While the public-facing project is mostly the website itself, we will culminate the project early next week with a brief online discussion between the five of us about the website and the benefits and difficulties of intercampus collaboration.