We’ve all seen them— the posts can be found littered across various social media platforms. They promise help for how to handle online schooling during a pandemic. Which, in and of itself isn’t a bad thing to want to help with. We’re all facing the pandemic together— why not try to band together to help? The issue, however, lies in how they go about presenting the information, along with the advice they offer.
First, these posts present their ideas like they’ve never been thought of before. “Have a planner,” they quip, as if that idea has never crossed anyone’s mind ever before. No mind that there’s a high demand for them to be sold at almost any retail store, and if those don’t cut it for you— you can order specially designed ones from online stores like Etsy.
So thanks, you’ve provided the basic first step that most people take when they want to make sure they’re doing their best to make the most of their time. Whether that’s including work, school, errands, or whatever— it’s a pretty intuitive thing to figure out on one’s own. So to pretend like you’re providing sage advice is both disingenuous and downright condescending. You’re not listing off anything that hasn’t been brought up before, and acting as though you are to a general audience that likely already has thought of that will only turn them off from you.
Second, these posts are rank with societal embedded ableism. To tell someone to just turn on captions for videos to better understand the material completely negates the fact that some students are blind. Or even that some videos don’t have captions— making the point null and void.
How about the idea of just turning the video speed up to get through the videos faster? Completely unhelpful to those that have auditory processing issues who now can’t even understand what the professor is saying. But say they have captions—somebody might not be able to read them that fast, meaning they’ll have to go back and rewatch that part anyway, again negating the supposed helpful effects. And in this same grain of thought- some people just can’t process that information that quickly. Which is fine, and why video material that they can come back to can be helpful. But to pretend like all people can operate on the same functioning spectrum to begin with— let alone in a pandemic, only serves to further harm the disabled community.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with being disabled or having a disability, regardless of what it might be, and some of these tips might even help. Captions can definitely be useful, when they’re available, to better keep a student’s attention(They could also potentially hinder another student’s learning—but that’s why they can normally be toggled on and off) but that’s not where the issue lies.
The issue lies in that someone writes this list and sends it out into the world and thinks “I’ve done a good thing.” And maybe they have— maybe they’ve opened even as small a number as 1 or 2 people to a new trick they weren’t aware of before. But in turn— they also sent this out to a likely even larger number of people that were aware of these options, or weren’t aware but didn’t need them, that maybe they don’t even really think about. And this even larger amount of people now have the idea reinforced in their mind that there’s tons of resources for people out there so why are people clamoring for accommodations? They personally don’t need them and they’re doing fine— and if these people do need them, there’s all these options available to them. Look— there’s a list right there.
But it does matter. It matters because accommodations might require new software or a completely different way of teaching, both of which can require time and money to be poured into them. This leads to frustration when society as an overarching whole already wants to point at neat lists and go “but here’s how to do it!” And why wouldn’t they? Nobody’s taught them differently up until this point.
So, as a final parting thought: I recognize the lists aren’t coming from a place of malice, in fact, I imagine they come from the opposite. However, regardless of intent— they still represent a society that acts as though disability doesn’t exist, and when it does, shouldn’t be included in lists that offer “helpful” advice. Instead acting as though disabilities should be handled in the dark. Which in and of itself is something that society as a whole needs to keep in mind and continue to strive towards improving.