The sentences that follow this one are what I was thinking the end result would be when I started this section on the adm. of Landmark. I do still have an initial response of outrage when I learn about abuses I hadn't encountered before. I'm not surprised; I'm angry. I think that is an appropriate initial response, but what about follow-up? What do I do next? Call Landmark? Try to spark conversations with other academics about this? Where do I start, is the question I'm asking myself right now. I can work on my classroom and talk with faculty and admin and staff at my uni. What else?

And don't constantly try to separate students who identify with a particular community from each other for the sake of some sense of responsibility to "integrate" students. Let students be comfortable and, when ready, let them get out of their comfort zones. Present "getting out of your comfort zone" as something to reach for when they themselves judge it is a good time to do that. Forced integration is so weird to me. My students get so much more out of the content when they can talk about it with people who they feel sort of innately understand them rather than immediately being thrown into a group or pair that may not, and also be in a situation where the culturally or socially dominant member(s) intimidates them, not challenges them. It's a choice I believe students could be given a few weeks in after they've established their space and place and whatever type of way they are able to use their "voices".

I cannot wait to teach this moving forward: "learner negotiation for UDL, based on its principles of inclusion"

Hybridity and transformation are such great words for how to approach design as a team rather than in a "teacher dictatorship." Hybridity is a sticky word in my field because it has varied origins, some colonizing racist reduction and some just sort of ambiguous. Here's a section of an explanation that I found that I think works well for connecting hybridity to transformation, though from https://literariness.org/2016/04/08/homi-bhabhas-concept-of-hybridity/:

"However, Young himself offers a number of objections to the indiscriminate use of the term. He notes how influential the term ‘hybridity’ was in imperial and colonial discourse in negative accounts of the union of disparate races – accounts that implied that unless actively and persistently cultivated, such hybrids would inevitably revert to their ‘primitive’ stock. Hybridity thus became, particularly at the turn of the century, part of a colonialist discourse of racism. Young draws our attention to the dangers of employing a term so rooted in a previous set of racist assumptions, but he also notes that there is a difference between unconscious processes of hybrid mixture, or creolization, and a conscious and politically motivated concern with the deliberate disruption of homogeneity. He notes that for Bakhtin, for example, hybridity is politicized, made contestatory, so that it embraces the subversion and challenge of division and separation. Bakhtin’s hybridity ‘sets different points of view against each other in a conflictual structure, which retains “a certain elemental, organic energy and openendedness”’ (Young 1995: 21–22). It is this potential of hybridity to reverse ‘the structures of domination in the colonial situation’ (23), which Young recognizes, that Bhabha also articulates. ‘Bakhtin’s intentional hybrid has been transformed by Bhabha into an active moment of challenge and resistance against a dominant colonial power . . . depriving the imposed imperialist culture,not only of the authority that it has for so long imposed politically, often through violence, but even of its own claims to authenticity’" (23).

This is why it's so important to have open, ongoing dialogue with individual students about what is and is not working for them before assignments are due, as assignments are due, and after they've submitted and assignment. Simple things like, "If you are willing, would take about 5 minutes to jot down some things that made completing this assignment difficult for you. Then, I'll ask you to shift gears and list or explain what made it possible for you to do the assignment." I'm really writing this for myself as a reminder of how this type of intervention can help all students.

Yes! Plenty of research, both anecdotal and quantitative, to back this up.

Reach out to Jen and Mary Kate about teaching students to alt text table and graph meanings like I have lit and writing students learn alt text for our short story reviews and images to explain their image related to their story and their purpose, not just describe the image

I wonder how ai solution could both address and further complicate this?

Over and over and over and over! I've taken some hits over the years for practicing principles of negotiation, situated education, co-education, but I've never regretted it. While it makes students who are successful in the standardized classroom scared, sometimes angry, and always uncomfortable, they also succeed in the end, and so does everyone. What the standardized classroom students seem to take issue with is that they do not have the opportunity exceed the outcomes of others, even though they, too, have demonstratively succeeded in the objectives. The idea that in order to be successful, there must be those who are not, is one very difficult to process with some people. I'm lucky to have instructional technologists at my uni who center constant improvement in this area for both our on ground and fully online course designs, but at the content and grading level, I still have a lot of work to do.

This is what I'm always trying to figure out how to facilitate.

I want to posit that this has to start with being responsible for the fact that discrimination is largely disguised as unconscious and implicit both when it is and when it is not. Therefore, the first step is to practice guided self-reflections that identify one's ideology, then epistemology (or vice-versa), about what disability means--how "I" define it--through careful reflection and discussions that require "me" to identify past, current, and potential discriminations that "I" practice. Not everyone starts or ends up in the same place with this type of reflexive work, so it's also important to acknowledge and accept that at the onset to make critical reflection more approachable for people new to this type exercise. I know, after this reading and writing this note, that I have not devoted near enough time to this at the classroom level. I'm also avoiding it in my methodology and praxis in my research and writing right now, even though it is a central tenet of my work. I'm sacrificing it because I'm giving primacy to my perceived expectations from the more traditional academics I'm meeting with in the next few months, even though they are interested in my work because of tenets such as this. I'm constantly in my own battle with the very status quo I'm so committed to pushing back against.