9 Harms faculty are experiencing
“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.” – (Faculty A)Faculty reported receiving no formal training or institutional support to meet students’ access needs. Instead, faculty engage in unrecognized and individualized labor to support access-oriented instruction. Critically, faculty pointed out that teaching evaluations and institutional job security processes do not reward the labor of faculty who invest in access-oriented and inclusive teaching practices. Overall, 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 da Silveira Gorman (Faculty)
Some faculty draw from lived experiences with disability and other intersecting locations of marginalization to guide their access-oriented teaching. However, marginalized faculty are often over-utilized in access labor, leading to experiences of extraction, tokenization, and burnout. Access leaders put in the extra labour of upskilling themselves, which can take away time from their research and negatively impact career advancement.