As someone who often uses and advocates for “unessay” assignments, I really appreciate your strategy of asking students to make their work on such assignments more accessible. I’ll be building that into my assignments going forward.
Thanks Derek! I’ll be the first to admit I’ve encountered a few bumps doing this, but ultimately I think it has been fruitful. Happy to talk more about it any time
Having mostly encountered this idea as a framing of access needs as “conflicting” and having wanted to find ways to talk about it with students as well as administrators and such without the inherent negativity and scarcity-mindset that “conflicting” implies, I am especially grateful for your thorough and nuanced discussion!
Thank you for bringing this topic to the surface and for challenging the notion that instructors alone should have the "superhuman" burden of resolving all access needs! Reading this and your previous article, I am struggling with how to distinguish legitimate access needs from mere student preferences. Whether you do it "actively" or not, learning and growing is always challenging and uncomfortable, to a degree. I have seen a lot of students recently (as part of STEM classroom observation/research, not my own students) that seem most comfortable being passive and not contributing to class activities, expecting the instructor and the few engaged students to just "feed" them the content they need to pass the class. Semester after semester, the majority of these students fail the class after not having established any "depth" to their learning. How do we distinguish access needs from preferences when navigating this friction? Can we always assume students know what is best for their learning? I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this!
As someone who often uses and advocates for “unessay” assignments, I really appreciate your strategy of asking students to make their work on such assignments more accessible. I’ll be building that into my assignments going forward.
Thanks Derek! I’ll be the first to admit I’ve encountered a few bumps doing this, but ultimately I think it has been fruitful. Happy to talk more about it any time
Having mostly encountered this idea as a framing of access needs as “conflicting” and having wanted to find ways to talk about it with students as well as administrators and such without the inherent negativity and scarcity-mindset that “conflicting” implies, I am especially grateful for your thorough and nuanced discussion!
Thank you for bringing this topic to the surface and for challenging the notion that instructors alone should have the "superhuman" burden of resolving all access needs! Reading this and your previous article, I am struggling with how to distinguish legitimate access needs from mere student preferences. Whether you do it "actively" or not, learning and growing is always challenging and uncomfortable, to a degree. I have seen a lot of students recently (as part of STEM classroom observation/research, not my own students) that seem most comfortable being passive and not contributing to class activities, expecting the instructor and the few engaged students to just "feed" them the content they need to pass the class. Semester after semester, the majority of these students fail the class after not having established any "depth" to their learning. How do we distinguish access needs from preferences when navigating this friction? Can we always assume students know what is best for their learning? I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on this!