Northumbria Learning and Teaching

I've just done day 1 of Northumbria Learning and Teaching. Perhaps it's the post-workshop blues but I'm really down by the whole situation.

I think I entered academia because as the first generation of students with a learning disability  I had a lousy education experience and I thought I could do something about it for the next generation. I'm sitting in a workshop where the reading materials about teaching for accessibility actually isn't' screen readable and I'm wondering how I am being coopted into this dystopia.

I always believe in the transformative power of education. I always want to see myself as giving a hand up rather than being another barrier to be overcome. I know this isn't always the way but my feeling was this is what we all generally want. The opposite view is that education is a way of promoting privilege to a particular social class.  In this case the neurotypical class.  I like to believe this isn't the general view of my fellow academics, but I've seen on the ground evidence this isn't true.

If you do training on how to interview people the answer is interviewers generally want to 'self-reproduce'.  "if only I had the time I would be the best person for the job'"  interviewers are supposed to think. So they pick someone most like themselves.   This is supposed to be the source of unwitting bias. You know - I'm white your not so why should you be any good at this job. So I'm not people are being deliberately exclusive, it's a non-deliberate outcome of other focuses.  I saw this in plain view all over the workshop but this time it's about getting the students to be more like 'us'. So one interpretation of academic assessment is a way of giving potential employers can an excuse ( qualifications ) to reject people who might just think differently from them. From this perspective, the promotion of me-ness Academic activity is at it's worst a way of demoting difference.

In the first day of the sessions, I see how this comes about. I guess it's all about the priorities, one seemingly natural priority pushes another out and somewhere in all this the few without any fault become the fewer. Not intentionally but unintentionally. I watch people becoming victims not of deliberate exclusion but of impetuous neglect.

I know the system doesn't feel I should be here. I guess this is why I overstay my welcome. I am the thin end of the wedge in the door. I am the irritant who doesn't know their place. I am the upstart. I am the vulgarian. I am the nail that sticks out and If I can't take the knocks I should return to the pool my kind came from. But I choose not to. I guess those are the greatest words every written. I will not because I choose not to.