 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for the spring institute session for return to campus and accessibility perspectives of disabled instructors. We will start shortly in about a minute as we get more participants coming in. And please note that this meeting is being recorded, and we do have closed captioning available. You can turn it on by clicking on the CC button at the bottom of your zoom screen. And we also have an ASL interpreting today. All right, so we go ahead and get started. Yes, please. Fantastic. So my name is corn Parsons previously defrayed us if you came to the last workshop that our group organized. And I'm one of the two graduate students involved with the project that I will talk more about. Just a moment. I'm a PhD candidate in geography at UBC and also instructor geography at Langara College. I am a white trans man with short brown hair glasses and kind of a brick colored t shirt. We're coming to you today from the traditional unceded territories of the Musqueam Squamish and slave with tooth nations. This land acknowledgement is only a very small piece of what needs to be what needs to be anti colonial work as part of an ongoing commitment to decolonization. We cannot do accessibility and disability justice work without also doing anti colonial work because colonization relies on ableism and ableism grows out of colonial relations. We're here talking about higher education. So we need to be clear about what the role of higher education has been in these oppressions. Institutions of higher education have not only been complicit in these processes, but have been central to devising and legitimating the oppression of indigenous people and disabled people, as well as the disabling of indigenous people. Furthermore, universities continue to be spaces in which disabled people and indigenous people are more often treated as objects of inquiry than we are as colleagues and contributors, and that needs to change. So if you signed up for this workshop in the spirit of accessibility and disability justice, please also be here in the spirit of anti colonization and decolonization. And if you're participating from a further way, please reflect on your relationship to the specific indigenous communities on whose land you live, work and learn. Or for international participants, please take a moment to think about the additional forms that ongoing colonial relations take wherever you are and what you can do to dismantle them. During our time together today, we want to invite you to do whatever lets you attend to your body, mind's needs and be as present as possible. That may include eating and drinking, lying down, stretching, moving around the room, stimming, doodling, etc. We've tried to build accessibility into this workshop, as best we know how, but access is a process. So if there are ways that we can make this or future events work better for you, please let us know. You'd also like to note that the session is being recorded and closed captioning is enabled. And we are also joined by an ASL interpreter who should be spotlighted. So with that, I'm going to hand things over to Ayaka. Thank you so much, Corinne. My name is Ayaka Yoshimizu. Today I'm speaking from the unceded lands of the muslims, kohame, shinsewatu, first nations. I am a non-disabled Japanese cisgender woman and speak Japanese as my first language. I have short black straight hair. And today I'm wearing a black short sleeve shirt with embroidered flowers, which are also black, so a bit hard to see. I am assistant professor of teaching in the department of Asian studies, and I am also one of the facilitators of this workshop. The main part of this workshop is a panel discussion on the return to in-person teaching that took place last spring. But before I introduce the panel, I'd like to note a few things and explain the context. I believe that most of you received an email a few days ago from us with slides and other materials. If you have read the email, this will be a little bit repetitive, but let me just make a few notes very briefly. In this workshop, we take a multi-temporal and multimodal approach. And this practice itself is not very unique. And recently we see this commonly practiced, particularly in the Zoom setting. But we do this with accessibility in mind. So by multi-temporal, we mean that not all the communication takes place within one hour timeframe of this workshop in an immediate and spontaneous way. This is why part of the material was sent out beforehand, so you have additional time to review them and send us questions if you like. During the workshop, you're welcome to post your questions and comments in the chat, but you're also welcome to send them to us later if you want to revisit the material or have additional time to reflect. I'm going to post my email address in the chat. We also take a multimodal approach to facilitate communication between us. So after the panel, we will invite you to share your thoughts, comments and questions. You're welcome to speak by muting your mic or write your comments in the chat or on the public platform that we will share with you later. Also, please note that we intentionally use the term disabled instructors instead of instructors with disabilities. We employ identity-first language, so which would be disabled person, over person-first language, so that would be person with disability. We have explained this choice in the email sent out beforehand, but we believe that identity-first language observes the importance of disability as a social, cultural and political identity. However, we also understand that not every disabled person uses identity-first language and we fully respect that choice as well. So before I introduce our panel, I have a few slides to show, which was also attached to the email you received a few days ago. So let me share my slides. So I hope you see the slides. In the email we sent out earlier, we introduced links to, sorry, we included links to some resources that we produced from a project that focused on looking at accessibility and disabled instructors teaching practices at UBC. And this project was carried out by Shota Iwasaki, Sheldin Oba, Coring Parsons, and myself between 2020 and 2021. And today's panel follows up on this project, so let me provide you with some context. So here you see a list of things we produced through the project. We conducted a UBC-wide survey in March 2021. We saw input from disabled instructors about the university's accessibility and support. And we created a video presenting key findings from the survey. And we also consulted with six disabled instructors about challenges, sorry, challenges they experienced in the everyday context of teaching and working, as well as suggestions for best practices. And we produced a document summarizing what they shared with us. We also produced an annotated bibliography that includes a list of literature that discuss teaching and learning with disabilities and illnesses in higher education. And lastly, we facilitated a workshop called What Would an Accessible University Look Like? Perspectives of Disabled Instructors at UBC as part of CTLT Winter Institute in December 2021. Again, the links to these documents and outcomes have been sent to you. But if you registered for the workshop in the last minute and did not receive that email, please contact me so I can share all of these with you. And now I'd like to quickly draw your attention to one of the questions included in the UBC-wide survey and the response we got from the respondents because it directly pertains to today's topic. So one of the survey questions asked, how is the transition to online teaching impacting your teaching in the context of disability? And the survey was conducted right during that remote teaching period. And this was an open-ended question. So regarding online teaching, about 36% of respondents made positive comments only. 33% made negative comments only. 17% made both positive and negative comments. 5% answered not applicable due to not teaching at the moment. There were two people who did not respond to this question. But taken together, more than 50% of respondents made at least some positive comments about online teaching, and almost 50% made at least some negative comments. And if we look at positive comments, these are what made online teaching more accessible to many respondents, including no commuting, no traveling across campus, no moving around in the classroom, no contending with inaccessible classroom design, presence of tech support for remote teaching, less anxiety and stress caused by being in front of students, flexibility of time management and pain management, especially in recording lectures, which results in better quality lectures, smoother communication with students with mic and text chatting, availability of diverse format of teaching style. And in contrast, these are what made online teaching challenging and not accessible. Longer working hours for course prep, student support and meetings. More fatigue, headaches, I strain you to increase screen time. Hard to manage anxiety, depression, mental illness while working and teaching in isolation and less than clear boundaries between workspace and home space. Sensory overload and greater difficulty reading the room, particularly for an autistic instructor and instructors with cognitive disabilities and lack of mental support. So I'm going to stop sharing and finally introduce our panel. Last February, a university transition back to in person teaching or hybrid teaching in some faculty and students welcome this transition, but others not so much. But what are implications of this return to campus to disabled instructors, what support is needed to make that transition and future teaching more accessible. So in the rest of the workshop, our three panelists will address these questions, and each panelist will present for about 10 minutes. I'm going to introduce our first panelist going portions and he actually introduced himself earlier, but he's a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography, and also social instructor at Langara College, or in the floor is yours. Thank you so much. Okay, so there's so much to talk about. And I think I'm just going to start off by saying, focusing on two groups specifically, when I say that the return to campus misses the point entirely, and the return to normal, even more so. I want to talk about the two groups of people who've been harmed by this framing. First, those of us who have benefited from remote teaching options and who have asked for remote teaching and learning options since long before the coven 19 pandemic. These are especially but not uniquely disabled instructors and students. And second, the instructors and students who are adjusting to a new normal. In many cases, permanently due to long COVID. Some of whom it has to be said were made ill because of institutions of higher education, being willing to sacrifice their health in order to return to business as usual. So, with respect to the first group, I need to start off by stating an unspoken truth, which is that what often passes for intellectual rigor in the Academy is usually just thinly veiled ableism. If rigor mattered, if that was what the university was truly committed to upholding, we would have already taken steps to ensure that all students and instructors have barrier free access to required supports, and that would include remote and hybrid teaching options. We would ask what enables students to learn what enables instructors to do their job, the absolute best of their abilities, and that would include options a range of options for course delivery because the most accessible option is options. What I need people to understand is how much better remote teaching and learning has worked for many of us. We think back to the beginning of the pandemic and all of the stress and uncertainty that everyone is experiencing. And then multiply that many times over for chronic legal and disabled people who were experiencing that same stress and uncertainty on top of being told that we were not only at higher risk of death from COVID. But that care in care rationing scenarios, we would be the ones denied life saving treatment. You know, think back to how ill equipped ill equipped folks felt to adapt so suddenly to online instruction, think about how hard it was to get daily needs met, including basic things like groceries. And what I want to stress is that even in that environment of pervasive fear and chaos, many disabled people were able to teach and learn more effectively than in a traditional in person format. Over the last two years, non disabled people have looked at students and instructors trying to build this proverbial airplane while flying it. And I said, wow, what a mess. I shouldn't be doing this, let's get back to what we were doing before. And meanwhile, a lot of disabled people saw the same thing and said, wow, what a mess. And it's still somehow even better than what we were subjected to. How can we improve this, how can we build on this, how can we make it work better for people. And it's been disappointing to see that that second approach hasn't been taken up more broadly by many institutions. I started teaching my first solo course in fall of 2020. It was a bit of a gamble. I was struggling at the time to even keep up with basic TA commitments. But one of the instructors at Langara strongly encouraged me to apply. So I did. And I was pleasantly surprised teaching an online course has allowed me to be more energetic and intended attentive as an instructor, and has allowed me to be more productive in literally every other part of my work as well. While teaching online, I've been able to be a part of this project. I've been able to publish two book chapters, I've been able to submit and win grants. I've been able to produce an anti ableism resource for my department. I've been able to speak on several panels to participate in professional development workshops to engage in public scholarship, all while being a better instructor for my students than I had been and a more rigorous scholar in my own work. And again, this this started a time when I couldn't reliably get groceries, but I was still getting more of my needs met as a scholar and as an instructor than it was pre COVID. I don't think that even I had appreciated how taxing in person teaching and learning can be for so many of us. I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is among other things an energy limiting, limiting condition. So I have less energy overall than most people and the same tasks have a higher energetic cost for me. I also have more demands on my energy as a disabled person. This includes, you know, sunk costs like doctors appointments. And also includes ableist impositions like accommodations process and navigating ableism and interpersonal interactions and navigating a built environment that doesn't anticipate bodies like mine. So leaving home as a disabled person just take that much more work and it comes with a much, much higher mental load than non disabled people understand or appreciate. So I'm always in the position of needing to do more with less and suddenly remote options. I have had just much more to work with. So it's been heartbreaking to see these options being rolled back. And it's been offensive to disabled people, frankly, that the rationale being given is that remote teaching and learning is inherently inferior across the board. When, for so many of us, the stubborn adherence to in-person instruction has been a way to ensure that disabled scholars remain inferior, that we can't teach and learn to produce knowledge at the level that we could otherwise. I also want to address long COVID newly disabled instructors and students because it's far too rarely acknowledged that COVID has been not just a mass death event, but a mass disabling event that it continues to be a mass disabling event. It's not over. And only in the disability community do we have a sense of how extensive the impact of long COVID is. That's because many of us who were already disabled have been doing the work of Crip Duelas, which is a term for, you know, when you help to orient and support folks who are newly disabled. So we've been helping folks with long COVID understand how to care for a disabled body mind, how to navigate the medical system, how to navigate institutions that are hostile to disability despite illegal responsibility to accommodate, etc. So different numbers have been cited for long COVID, but right now it's like anywhere from one third to two thirds of people who have had COVID will have symptoms that continue well past the acute phase of infection. It's not necessary to have had a severe case of COVID to develop long COVID and vaccination has only been shown to reduce the incidence of long COVID by 15%. This is also a risk that a person runs with each new infection. You don't become more resistant to long COVID infection. And we don't know the full impacts of infection until years from now. We won't until years from now. So it's bewildering under these circumstances to talk about a return to normal. And it's unconscionable that institutions of higher education are exposing students and instructors to a disabling illness with seemingly no other plan than to discard anyone who's disabled by this choice. That should infuriate folks, but we barely heard a keep about it. So I would say with the return to normal scene, a return to the batter old days, a squandered opportunity, just a lot left wanting. And I would hope that the institution will begin to consult with and work to meet the needs of disabled students and instructors in ways that it has not yet up to this point. Thank you so much, Corinne. Our second panelist is Shota Iwasaki. He's a PhD candidate and session instructor in the Department of Asian Studies. Shota is actually currently out of country and out of our time zone, and he's participating in the workshop asynchronously. So he pre-recorded his presentation and I will be playing it. So if you have any questions for him, he wants them to be directly sent to his UBC address. So I'm going to post his address in the chat, and I'm going to play the video he sent me. Hello everyone. My name is Shota Iwasaki. I am a session lecturer and a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies for GBC. I have a speech disability. So let me use a computer generated voice instead of my physical one for my presentation. I am an East Asian man with short black hair. I am wearing brown frame glasses and an Oxford gray short sleeve shirt. My pronoun is he, him. I am sitting in my room at home with a background blurred. I'm out of town today and cannot synchronously attend the workshop. So I am participating asynchronously through a pre-recorded video. I am a settler and I cannot speak fluently. I have lived with this discluent speech since childhood, but I've not had a chance to learn alternative communication to speaking, such as sign language. I normally use my physical voice in daily life. However, in a teaching setting where I am expected to verbally convey a certain amount of information in a limited time and in a specific manner, I use a computer generated voice and animated PowerPoint slides that coordinate perfectly with the voice. As you can see in here right now, this teaching method takes much time and energy for preparation. However, this is currently the only way to meet my teaching duties. I would like to first emphasize that I have struggled with normalcy in teaching and little appropriate instructional support for disabled instructors at UBC, or generally in academia, since I started to teach as a session lecturer in 2019. Not after the pandemic occurred in 2020. On the top of that, the transition to online teaching due to the pandemic and the following return to campus have further impacted my teaching with disabled speech in various ways. Today, I would like to share some of my experiences as a disabled instructor at UBC surrounding those issues. When I started teaching in term one of the 2019 winter session, I first had to develop my own method to teach in person that would be feasible with my disabled speech or without speech itself. I looked for instructional support at UBC, but there was almost nothing helpful for me. For example, there was no teaching workshop at UBC that was useful for teaching with disabled speech. Because the normal ability to speak was an implicit premise for all the teaching workshops, more generally for the scholarship of teaching and learning. In fact, I asked the CTLT for help, but unfortunately they told me that they did not have any teaching method or instructional support for my teaching with disabled speech. Literally, I had to develop my own way of teaching, expending extra time and energy while making efforts to seek personal institutional support. The pandemic occurred soon after I developed a prototype of the current teaching method and taught a course in person for the first time. In mid-March 2020, UBC moved all classes online and continued remote teaching until the end of the 2021 summer session. I was supposed to teach a course in the fall of 2020, so this time I had to newly develop a method to teach online feasible for me, which took much extra time, energy and effort from me in the same way as I developed a method for in-person teaching. However, in the transition to remote and online teaching, various teaching tools and options became widely accepted and available, some of which were helpful to my teaching with disabled speech. For example, asynchronous learning activities as an alternative to traditional lectures reduced the extra work for teaching preparation. In synchronous sessions via Zoom, I could use the text chatting function to communicate with students by typing. My teaching assistant was also able to effectively communicate with students through the chat during my lecture. This made up for the non-flexibility of my teaching due to my disfluent speech and the computer generated voice, which increased the overall quality of teaching. In summer 2021, the university planned to return to campus for in-person teaching and learning from the fall. I was supposed to teach a course with a mixture of in-person and online activities per term 2 of the 2021 winter session. The course had 48 enrollments. It is counted as a literature course being an arts degree requirement, and many of the students were from various arts departments. But due to the rapidly evolving challenges associated with the Omicron variant at the end of 2021, the university decided to deliver the majority of classes online until the 24th of January. Subsequently, they decided to continue with online teaching and learning until the 7th of February. To prepare for the return to campus in a synchronous Zoom session in January, I conducted an anonymous survey asking the 40 attending students which delivery mode they preferred for the rest of the term in person or online. The result was that 15 students, 38% preferred in person and 25 students, 62% preferred online. In addition, when I told the students about the possibility of recording in-person classes for those unable to attend, some students expressed their privacy concerns and rejection regarding the recording of in-class discussion. So, I was required to follow the university's decision while dealing with these students' requests and concerns. Theoretically, streaming in-person lectures via Zoom would be one solution for my course. However, I soon realized that it was difficult for my current teaching method to flexibly manage both Zoom and the classroom simultaneously. I could not adjust my teaching with disabled speech to such a hybrid flexible delivery mode in limited time and support. Consequently, I decided to provide a Zoom session and an in-person session in a week. Both sessions have the same content, meaning my students were able to choose their preferred one for the week. I had to teach the same content twice and accordingly my workload increased. But this was what I could arrange to achieve equity and accessibility for students realistically. Finally, I would like to mention future accessible teaching. First, the transition to online teaching due to the pandemic brought about various teaching tools and delivery modes that make teaching more accessible to me. It would be great if those teaching tools and delivery modes would be normalized. And if I could choose more accessible ones at my discretion, even after the full return to campus. Second, there are still many things difficult for me to do without further institutional support at various levels and directions. It would be great if there would be a more accessible place to discuss and work together about possible solutions. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much. Okay, so again, if you have any questions or show that or comments, please send them to his email address. I just posted in the chat. Okay, so our last panelist is Dr. Donna Solomon. I'm a new list translation specialist and he's a judge in the meat, why free program of the department of family practice in the faculty of medicine. Donna, the door is yours. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction. I'm Donna Solomon. And my pronouns are she or her. I am a white woman with long brown curly hair. I have blue eyes and I wear glasses. I'm wearing a gray shirt with black stars on it. And in the background, there's a few bookshelves and an army of Autobots and Decepticons and a sword hanging on the wall. So, when we were asked to talk about, you know, what does the return mean to disabled instructors. My first thought was that, you know, we're a pretty diverse bunch. It's going to mean something very different to each of us. But that said, what I've heard and what I have felt is that it was a tremendous loss. And during the pandemic, a lot of disabled people at UBC for the very first time in our careers felt genuinely included. We were able to access so many more activities. We were able to manage our environments which meant we could minimize the harm that we experienced by doing all these things. And for the very first time, our colleagues actually understood a tiny bit more about what our lives were like. I remember a conversation with my colleagues when they were describing how they were feeling so trapped in their homes during lockdown. And I responded, welcome to my life. UBC's return to campus then felt like such a huge loss of that inclusivity. And given that many of us had been advocating with UBC long before the return to actually avoid that situation. It felt like our concerns were being dismissed and it felt like a betrayal. And at the same time, UBC's return was just a symptom in a very much larger problem. Throughout the pandemic, disabled people were not prioritized or centered at any point. In BC, some disabled advocacy groups were able to fight to get priority access to vaccines. But many of us didn't have that, despite other provinces prioritizing people with our same conditions or disabilities. The financial support that the Canadian UBC government offered to disabled people bordered on non-existent. And when disability-related payments are compared to what the government deemed to be a necessary amount to subsidize able-bodied people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic, it became very clear just how little importance is placed on the needs of disabled people. So likewise, during the return to normal, the fact that disabled people are often still at higher risk of severe disease and death has been largely ignored. Leaving many of us faced with a decision to risk our lives or those of our immune-compromised relatives, or stay in lockdown. So at UBC, when we talk about this return and the concerns that many of us have, it's in a much broader context of not having our needs and voices heard and being constantly underrepresented. And at the same time, at UBC, a lot of us, particularly staff, are being, staff and faculty actually, but we're faced with a mandate to return to offices that are frankly dangerous to us. My office, for example, is in a hospital. To get there, I have to use public transit. It's a shared office space and when we're all there, it's extremely crowded. My ability to maintain distance from my colleagues, many of whom have children who are not able to be vaccinated but are still attending daycares where COVID is spreading like crazy. My ability to protect myself is extremely limited. So while I have not yet been forced back because of extraordinary circumstances, some of my colleagues have and are facing these fears. In order to avoid such a mandate, we try to go through the accommodations process, which I think it's been discussed before in other contexts is a degrading and patronizing obstacle course at the end of which many people are told that UBC does not offer a remote work accommodation. Even when accommodations are granted, and this is well beyond the return to campus, some of us have found that our departments are supervisors and following that example, our colleagues treat those accommodations like a burden or as an excuse to single us out for exclusion and bullying. In insecure employment conditions such as grant funded contracts, it becomes extremely easy for those jobs to suddenly disappear. The rules and the pressures that are presented by this return add a significant burden to an environment that already presents a lot of obstacles to inclusion. So when we talk about what should be happening, it should be individualized approaches. This isn't a one size fits all situation. Like any other group, there's a lot of diversity and each of us is going to respond to a situation very differently. And that's the key principle that should frankly underlie all our work in making the university as a whole and the return specifically flexible and responsive to individual needs. That's a challenge. A university in its current world thrives on structures and policies, and we'd have to change at a very fundamental level to focus on the individual rather than the group. But that's also a fantastic opportunity. We know that diversity creates excellence. We know that more diverse teams and approaches results in better outcomes. There's data on this embracing that diversity in our approaches to teaching research learning will only benefit all of us, including UBC. So when we're asked, you know, how should the university be consulting with disabled instructors about delivery modes? Honestly, my first response was, well, consulting at all would be a really great start to be very blunt with you. At the moment, the standard approach to consultation at UBC usually goes something like this. A policy is developed. It's then approved by the board or whatever senior leadership needs to approve it. And if they choose to consult, they then contact so-called stakeholder groups and ask for feedback. In other words, by the time we're consulted, if we're consulted at all, the policy has already been created and approved. At best, any feedback we give could result in cosmetic changes. Anything more substantive is likely to be ignored and typically has been. This is not consultation. The entire approach to engagement with all equity-denied groups needs to change. We need to be at the table for the creation of any policy that's relevant to us and not for one or two meetings so they can give us a presentation and tell us what they're doing. At every meeting, in every discussion, on every email. The same should be true for discussions about delivery modes and teaching. Work with us from the beginning to figure out the best and most inclusive delivery options. Some courses have to be offered in person. I did a degree in acting at UBC. It would be really difficult to learn that without being in the same room. But for others, an online approach may even be preferable and for most probably a combination of the above could work. In a class offering multiple sessions, why do all of them have to be offered through the same delivery mode? And there's no reason for this to be a binary choice. An in-person class can be live streamed and an instructor can teach remotely to a lecture hall full of students on campus. And it shouldn't only be disabled instructors and staff who contribute to these discussions. Disabled students are also struggling to get the accommodations they need during this return. And I would like to speak very briefly to the survey results that were talked about earlier. Because I noticed something when I was looking at the negative comments. They're valid. They're true. There is a lot of burden to it. But so many of those negative comments could be mitigated or even eliminated with better supports, more experience and more practice with online teaching modalities. For example, whenever any of us teach something for the first time, the workload is dramatically higher than it is the second or third time around. The same is going to be true for at least some of the remote teaching experience. Likewise, when many of us start teaching, there's a bit of a learning curve to the process. How do you handle meetings and student support and facilitating discussions? These are skills that need to be learned and honed. The same is true to adapting these skills to a different setting. With more practice, we would all get better at it. Looking at the positive comments, on the other hand, the vast majority of those can't be replicated in an in-person setting. And I just have to reiterate, this is such an opportunity for UBC to revolutionize how we teach and how we engage with students in research. I recently spent some time visiting family who I haven't seen in many years. And I realized just how unbelievably creative I have been to develop an environment for myself that accommodates my disabilities without making me feel broken all the time. It was a pretty gradual process, so I didn't realize just how extensively I've modified my worlds to make it work for me. Disabled people are, often by necessity, extremely innovative and creative about how we approach our world, how we interact with others, how we learn, teach, play, how we live. That creativity, that innovation, that's one hell of a resource. It's exactly what UBC needs right now to take advantage of the pretty crappy situation that the world has thrown at us with COVID. We can turn this into a better, more powerful, more inclusive way to learn and teach. I want to thank everybody for attending, for your thoughts, for your encouragement, those of you who said thank you. If you want to continue the conversation, please go to the padlet that's in the chat and continue the conversation there. If you have thoughts or questions for Shota, please email Shota. He would love to be able to engage a bit there. So is there anything else that I've missed? I think there's also in the chat a survey. A feedback survey. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything else? I don't think there's anything else, but yeah, at least I just posted a link for the feedback survey. So if you could fill that out and share your feedback on the workshop with us, that'd be wonderful. Thank you so much.