Navigating "access friction" in teaching
When inclusive teaching is harder than "one cool trick"
A lot of faculty development programming on the topic of accessibility and inclusion offers concrete strategies you can use to make your course design or class activities more accessible. For example, “state expectations clearly.” “Present the same information in multiple ways.” “Add captions and alt text to videos and images.” “Highlight the contributions of a diverse set of researchers or practitioners to your field”. What is perhaps “beyond the scope,” of many of these discussions is what happens when a certain decision leads towards greater access for one student or group of students, but creates barriers for others. This phenomenon is called “access friction.”
Because I find this concept very useful, I tend to talk about it with friends and colleagues. I realize that some people may have heard of access friction through me, but I want to start out by stressing that this is not a concept that I developed myself or even one that I am the first to bring into the teaching and learning conversation. Several sources will be cited related to access friction throughout the post, but I wanted to note that I think I was first introduced to the phrase by Arley McNeney, a teacher, scholar, disability advocate, and paralympian who sadly passed away last year.
The term access friction has been used in a few different ways, all of which I find interesting as a teacher and faculty developer. The way it was introduced by Liz Jackson was as a way to describe the friction that occurs when trying to include disabled people in environments that were not built or intended for them. It can also describe a situation in which non-disabled people attempt to provide access in a way that is not actually helpful. Before we even consider conflicting needs, sometimes disabled people’s very presence creates friction. I think many instructors have had the experience of a student coming to them with an access need that they had never anticipated, and at least momentarily feeling a loss of momentum as they reevaluate their teaching plans.
More colloquially, access friction describes a situation in which people have seemingly opposing access needs, which is how I most commonly hear the term used. A simple example not specifically related to education might be a situation in which one person travels with a service dog and another person has a serious dog allergy. Creating a space that is accessible to both these people will present a challenge. I often experience this version of access friction in my classes when I invite students to choose from a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge or participate in a class activity. What happens when one student has difficulty accessing another student’s contribution to the class? What about when only one room or type of technology is available for class, and students have differing needs with respect to light and sound?
The existence of access friction in a learning context is not limited to disability per se. Last week, I wrote about how the supposed benefits of “active learning” may have some caveats when activities are not designed inclusively. Access friction could be a useful term to describe the problem I raised in that post, namely that when a teaching idea has been shown to improve outcomes or grades on average, that doesn’t necessarily mean it does so for all students or all students equally.
How should we respond to access friction that arises in our classrooms? How should faculty developers address the existence of access friction with instructors? A point that I have learned from disability justice organizers is that access needs may appear to be opposing or conflicting, but we do not need to view them as “in competition” as long as all members of the community are willing to work towards a solution together. Friction is part of the inclusion process. Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch write about the idea of "access as friction," a phrase that acknowledges that nearly all forms of access involve some struggle, and pays tribute to the way disability activists have had to deliberately create friction (i.e. public protest/civil disobedience) to win access in the public sphere. Another way of saying this is that leaning into friction (rather than avoiding it) can lead to change and growth for the better. This may seem like an obvious point, but I find that it is actually quite challenging in much of the current academic environment, where we are often asked to view students as customers and instructors as superhuman. In fact, I think a common source of “access friction” in the classroom is a difference between the access needs of students and those of the instructor. In all likelihood, navigating access friction will require open communication and flexibility from all members of the class community.
For this reason, much of my own instructional approach draws on elements of Universal Design for Learning as well as feminist pedagogy (which emphasizes how students and teachers alike bring their whole selves to the learning environment). I personally favor a version of UDL that creates significant flexibility in how students perceive information and participate in activities, but also asks them to invest in overall accessibility for the class community, not just themselves. Here is a demonstrative example: In my introductory disability studies course, students have a choice of format for the final paper (essay, video, artistic work, powerpoint, podcast, etc.) and are asked to share their final product with their colleagues. I ask the students to make sure that their final product is accessible to the rest of the class to the greatest extent possible - if someone records a podcast, I ask them to at least provide a computer-generated transcript. If they produce a visual work of art, I ask them to provide a text summary of its appearance and their intentions in creating it. With this structure I hope to move towards “collective access1” rather than just individual choice.
As one way of continuing this conversation, I would appreciate hearing about examples of “access friction” from your own teaching and learning experiences! Please feel free to share them with me in the comments, or if you would rather, share them with your colleagues to start a conversation about this topic.
I hope you enjoyed this discussion, and I am always open to feedback and or critiques. Please feel free to comment if you are logged-in to Substack or contact me.
Collective access is one of the “10 Principles of Disability Justice” developed by SinsInvalid.
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.
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!