9 Harms faculty are experiencing

“And I’m trying to make sense of like, how do we say, “You’re welcome! Please go elsewhere.” – Tanya T (faculty) Faculty feel ill-equipped to support students and meet their access needs. Instructors are not institutionally resourced with the capacity, power, or skills required to implement access-oriented practices. 

“The impact on myself has been the increase in my own kind of chronic health problems and disablements because access work and anti-racist work, and all these things are taken on kind of to the detriment of the individual taking it on…” – Rachel Gorman (faculty) Faculty reported receiving no formal training or support to meet students’ access needs. Instead, faculty engage in unrecognized and individualized labor to support access-oriented instruction.  Some faculty draw from their lived experiences with disability and other intersecting locations of marginalization to guide their access-oriented teaching practices. However, marginalized faculty are often over-utilized in access labor, leading to experiences of extraction, humiliation, tokenization, and burnout.

“There’s no incentive at my institution for faculty to take on these teaching practices. And that’s really what I see as the major problem.” – AL (faculty) Access leaders put in the extra labour of upskilling themselves at their own expense, which can take away time from their research and negatively impact their career advancement.  Critically, teaching evaluations and institutional job security processes do not reward the labor faculty who invest in access-oriented and inclusive teaching practices.