, Inclusion, and the Future of Learning and Work

Speakers: Jutta Treviranus, Deborah Stienstra, and Dr. Mahadeo A. Sukhai

Moderator: Michelle Fach

Michelle Fach: Good afternoon, everyone. I am thrilled to be here today. My name is Michelle Fach and I am the Executive Director of Open Learning and Educational Support. And on behalf of myself, the university and Athol Gow, who is the co-chair of the conference committee as well as the Manager of Accessibility Services at the library. We would like to welcome you to the day one virtual Accessibility Conference closing panel discussion. I know that we're all very excited to be part of this. This session features three distinguished academics and researchers who will be speaking to the conference theme of Accessibility, Inclusion and the Future of Learning and Work from their respective areas of disciplinary expertise and interest. Each panelist will have a chance to speak for 10 minutes. Once all of the panelists have spoken, there will be an opportunity for you, the participants, to address the panelists with some questions.

Michelle Fach: So, that will be part of the Q&A. This session is being captioned in-person by a representative from the Canadian Hearing Services, thanks to the support of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

Michelle Fach: Well, we do not know definitely how the world of work and education will change after the pandemic. There is a little doubt that they will. In one year COVID 19 and the requirements for social distancing has brought about a digital transformation of learning and work, that otherwise would have been decades in the making. Companies have discovered that a large compliment of their staff can work from home without a loss of productivity. Schools have successfully delivered instruction, both synchronously and asynchronously, and teachers have developed innovative, novel, engaging ways to deliver their curriculum to a remote learner. People with have benefited from some aspects of remote work and learning. Working from home has meant individuals with visual impairments have been spared of a tiring and potential and dangerous commute.

Michelle Fach: Students who have physical limitations have missed fewer classes due to winter storms. But the experience has not all been wholly positive. People with visual and cognitive disabilities have struggled more frequently with inaccessible documents. Virtual meeting software such as Zoom can be challenging. It can be a challenging interface with people who are neuro-diverse or experience anxiety. And those with hearing impairments have to deal with poor audio quality or a lagging ASL interpretation.

Michelle Fach:

Page 1 of 25 So, if we are moving to a world where more remote or hybrid or blended learning and working is inevitable, how do we ensure that this is a new world, that this new world is an inclusive and accessible, free from barriers from individuals with disabilities, as far as we can make it. How can we design it to leverage the largely untapped potential of people with disabilities as a source of talent ideas?

Michelle Fach: How do we do this in the face of compounding challenges, such as a lack of access to high speed internet or the impacts of poverty or gender on the ability to work from home? Is the challenge of inclusion simply a matter of tweaking our technology and making accessible documents or is it more complicated? These are the questions that our panelists are eager to address today. Our first panelist, Deborah Stienstra, holds the Jarislowsky Chair in Families and Work and is the Director of the Live Work Well Research Center at the University of Guelph. Welcome Debra.

Michelle Fach: Next, we have Dr. Mahadeo Sukhai. He is the Director of Research and Chief Inclusion and Accessibility Officer idea team with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

Michelle Fach: And Dr. Jutta Treviranus is the Director and Founder of the Inclusion Design Research Center and professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto. She established a graduate program in inclusion design, and also heads the Inclusive Design Institute, a multi university center of expertise.

Michelle Fach: So, we are going to start off this panel with Debra. I will pass it over to you.

Deborah Stienstra: Thanks so much, Michelle. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm just going to share my screen. I hope it's going to work.

Deborah Stienstra: And can you let me know if that's okay?

Michelle Fach: Yeah, we can see your screen. It's not in presentation mode but we can see it.

Deborah Stienstra: Great. Well, I'm happy.

Deborah Stienstra: No, that's going to be even worse. Isn't it?

Michelle Fach: Yeah.

Page 2 of 25 Deborah Stienstra: There you go.

Michelle Fach: That's good.

Deborah Stienstra: Now you're getting which screen?

Michelle Fach: We can see your presentation perfectly.

Deborah Stienstra: Okay. Perfect.

Deborah Stienstra: Well, thank you so much for inviting me and it's a pleasure to be here at the Accessibility Conference this year. Today, I wanted and was asked to speak a little bit about working and learning from home from an intersectional perspective.

Deborah Stienstra: And so, on the screen, I've put my comments and I'll try and stick fairly close to them but I'll also try and model good practice and describe what's on the screen. So, on the screen is a picture of two women. Folks who identify as women and who are using sign language and have their faces covered with, or at least their mouths are covered with masks.

Deborah Stienstra: Overall, what I'd like to do is during this talk is to use an intersectional approach, which is trying to look at the diversity of people with disabilities in Canada and specifically to examine work from home for diverse people with disabilities. The COVID-19 related impacts related to work from home on people with disabilities and post-COVID strategies. I'm not going to spend any time in the formal presentation talking about learning from home but I'm happy to share some of the results of the study we did that included education and learning from home.

Deborah Stienstra: So, as is probably for this audience, well-known information, before COVID-19 people with disabilities had and continue to have substantially lower employment rates than people without disabilities. In the 2017 Canadian survey on disabilities, 59% of people with disabilities, working age people with disabilities, were employed while people without disabilities, it was closer to 80%.

Deborah Stienstra: And when we look with an intersectional analysis that the diversity of people with disabilities, we recognize that those rates vary for people with different aspects of impairment, for different genders, for people of different ages and for people who identify themselves as indigenous. For example, we

Page 3 of 25 know that people with intellectual disabilities have some of the lowest rates of employment. And we know that women with disabilities generally have lower rates than men. And we know that people with more complex or multiple impairments have lower employment rates.

Deborah Stienstra: The ame survey talked also about what it takes to get people with disabilities into the workplace. And they identified four key employment workplace accommodations for people with disabilities. And the four workplace accommodations were modified work hours, modify duties, modified workstations and remote work. It's important to note that the requirements for workplace accommodations were highest among those people who had what, Statistics Canada calls, more severe disabilities or who had multiple or co-occurring impairments. They happen to be women or identify as women and surprisingly, were in management or professional occupations. So, pre-COVID, we see that employers could ensure a greater proportion of people with disabilities if they had flexible hours, if they had flexible jobs and if they allowed some people to work from home. Accommodations are not always a equipment requirement.

Deborah Stienstra: So, in the summer and fall, our center, the Live Work Well Research Center was invited by Employment and Social Development Canada to conduct a fairly large qualitative and quantitative research study on the using and gender intersectional analysis lens to look at COVID-19 policies and their impacts on diverse people with disabilities. It was a large study. As I said, we interviewed people across Canada. Although, we focused on five provinces. We did a survey of the literature. We looked at policy analysis, we interviewed key informants and this 140 page report covers 19 different thematic areas. So that's why I'm focusing specifically on employment and the workplace.

Deborah Stienstra: We also presented the findings of our report to the ministers, what was then called the ministers, COVID-19 Disability Advisory Group and got some feedback from them about this. Two key findings were that people with disabilities were largely invisible in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite being at greater risk of getting COVID-19 because of congregate living or having support providers come into their homes or a variety of structural reasons. There was also more difficulty in meeting their day to day needs, including food, healthcare, and support services.

Deborah Stienstra: There were some specific COVID-19 employment impacts. First of all, there is a disproportionately high job loss among people with disabilities. And that job loss especially affected young people with disabilities, women with disabilities, those experiencing more than one impairment and those with lower levels of education. We found that there was a lack of opportunities for people with disabilities. So, that trouble getting into the employment sector was compounded by COVID-19 because there just weren't so many opportunities. And we found that working from home was not an option for many people. In part, it was related to delays and challenging processes to get workplace accommodations that happened when people wanted to work from home. And we found that existing systemic barriers were made significantly worse, especially for people that experienced multiple aspects of discrimination. For example, gender and disability, gender race and disability and other aspects.

Deborah Stienstra:

Page 4 of 25 So, I've also tried to include a few quotations from our participants. So, one focus group participants said, "Especially with people who have medical issues, who have immune issues and things like that, who, you know, are at increased risk. Right now, I think that employers have done a particularly poor job of accommodating these people. I'm not aware of any employers that have granted accommodations to people who are immune compromised that work in healthcare."

Deborah Stienstra: So, this participant was illustrating some of the unique experiences of people with disabilities who work in the healthcare field and can't get the accommodations they need during COVID-19. We also found that work from home did not work for people who worked in industries or in positions that are not suitable for home-based work, who didn't have adequate access to technology or the internet or familiarity with the technology. We've all gotten to know how to use Zoom but it still provides a lot of challenges for people who may interface with the technology differently or who may not have access to the technologies. And as I said, a lot of people don't have the necessary workplace accommodations at home.

Deborah Stienstra: So, this is a quote of people that noted the need for workplace accommodations, "Work from home did not work for individuals with more severe impairments or disabilities who were twice as likely to require working from home as an accommodation but 61% less likely to get their needs met." So, they needed it more but were less likely to get their needs met. We also noted that women with disabilities in particular had more caregiving responsibilities and at the same time, they had more challenges receiving care because of challenges with access to services.

Deborah Stienstra: So, what can we learn from this overview around COVID-19? First of all, work from home is not an adequate solution. It is a solution for some people but it's not a universal panacea. It doesn't work for lots of people and it's not going to be able to address the employment impacts for all people with disabilities. Work from home needs to be accompanied by measures to address ongoing systemic barriers for people with disabilities. But we also learned that with the right accessible technology and workplace accommodations, as well as inclusive employment policies, people with disabilities will be able to obtain and sustain employment during and post COVID-19.

Deborah Stienstra: So, I want to thank you. You can see our report on our website, www.liveworkwell.ca and I invite you to contact me in the chat or afterwards to continue the conversation.

Deborah Stienstra: Thanks so much.

Michelle Fach: Thank you so much, Deborah. That is very interesting research and definitely speaks to the ongoing structural barriers and challenges that individuals face, especially during the pandemic.

Michelle Fach:

Page 5 of 25 So, thank you very much and I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Michelle Fach: I am now going to pass it over to Dr. Sukhai, please.

Mahadeo Sukhai: Good afternoon, everybody. That is if you are... Well, actually, if you're anywhere in Canada, good afternoon. And thanks for being here today and spending some time with us. Being the middle of three, is a bit of a tough act to do and I hope that I'm going to give this justice. I'm just popping my screen share on right now.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And so, I'm going to take a bit of a different tactic from Deborah and Jutta, to follow, and actually talk a little bit about some synthesis that I and some collaborators have been knocking around in terms of re- imagining how we work and learn online. And so, what I really want to talk about is Life at the Intersection of Accessibility, Attitudes and Technology. And I'm going to do this through the lens of data synthesis from work that I've done over the past number of years, including a large Accessibility Standards Canada funded project on building an evidence-based universal design framework for employment standards in Canada.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And so, first of all, as Michelle mentioned, I'm the Director of Research and Chief Inclusion and Accessibility Officer at the CNIB. I also hold Adjunct Assistant Professor Appointments in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Queens and the Faculty of Business and Information Technology at Ontario Tech University. I also co-founded a company that focuses on accessibility in science education, known as IDEA-STEM. I'm a researcher in social determinants of health and social outcomes. And by background, I'm a cancer geneticist and someone who spent a lot of time in academic healthcare.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And so, I'm going to start with a premise and the premise is illustrated on the third slide by two cartoons. And the cartoon on the left is labeled, "Before COVID." And in this premise, we recognize the teaching and learning environment and the working environment pre-COVID were two very different things. They felt different. They were experienced differently. They were structurally very different. Now during the pandemic, instead of the arrows pulling apart, as on the left, the arrows are now pushing together on the right. And we think about how we learn and how we teach in a world impacted by COVID. We also think about remote work and virtual work and we realize that they very much feel the same and they very much look the same. And so, let's talk a little bit about in-person work environments versus virtual work environments or learning environments.

Mahadeo Sukhai: In terms of in-person, we're providing space for work and learning, which is removed from a home environment. You go someplace specific to go to work. You go someplace specific to go to school. There's real-time interaction with colleagues and there's space and time for unstructured interactions. There's nonverbal communication. It's very much a read and respond kind of environment. But in the context of virtual or remote work or learning, the space for work and learning becomes very much integrated with our home environments. The real-time interaction that we have with colleagues is via

Page 6 of 25 audio, video and text. How we manage unstructured interaction is an ongoing question, 15 months into the pandemic. And how we manage and access non-verbal communication is an ongoing question, 15 months into the pandemic, which leads the big question of, "How do we read and respond?"

Mahadeo Sukhai: There's a fundamental premise that I'm going to drop on the virtual table for conversation. That is that what we consider to be effective virtual work and learning environments has been all about mimicking in-person work and learning environments. And there's a cartoon of a person sitting at a desk, surrounded by plants, using a Mac and wearing a head set. And that's basically what virtual work and virtual learning has become but it's become that, in order to, as I say, mimic that in-person setting.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And all of the solutions that you find that are out there around virtual work and virtual learning and a lot of these are published in the early stages of the pandemic and my team at CNIB certainly published a number of them. We talked about setting up discrete workplaces at home, discrete environments, discreet routines, in terms of scheduling and habits, even how we dressed and metaphorically walking in the front door to go to work. There's a lot of talk and chatter around video on meetings. A lot of people have fostered device connectedness to simulate being available to colleagues during the work day, which is Zoom fatigue. And a lot of environmental solutions such as plants, natural light, pets, food and beverage.

Mahadeo Sukhai: But what's missing from all of this. What's missing is the spontaneity, the water cooler chats, the spontaneous discussions at class, at work, hallway conversations and other spontaneous discussions. We're also missing emotional connectedness. 93% of how we communicate is non-verbal. Multisensory engagement through touch, tone, whole body language and overhearing others conversations are missing. The synergy of being near other people is missing and there's reduced capacity for empathy, resilience, diversity and diversity retention. And what's also missing is flexibility because in order for us to mimic the in-person environment, we have to schedule a lot more. And so, that leads us to a hypothesis. The physical work and learning environments and our virtual work solutions are based on ablest principles. And I'm going to say that and the cartoon on the slide is actually a frowny face and now I'm going to defend it. I'm going to defend it by saying, let's rethink the concept of ability.

Mahadeo Sukhai: Disability is nothing more and nothing less than differences in the ways that we take in or interact with information, that we process information or that we communicate with information. And on the right hand side of the slide is a ginormous word cloud that talks about diversity and equity and age and discrimination and all the different ways we think about intersectional identity. And so, when we think about how much we process and what kinds of information we process, we have to think about the sensory input that we have. We have to think about knowledge transfer and how timely it can be. And we have to think about emotional context and subtext. We also want to think about this thing called the hidden curriculum. And this is something that I've talked about a lot at school and I'm also going to translate it to the workplace environment here. All the things that we want or expect students or workers to know or learn without formally teaching them or calling these skillsets out, orally or in writing, and this hidden curriculum is often what drives success in whatever fields we have.

Page 7 of 25 PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:23:04]

Mahadeo Sukhai: What drives success in whatever fields we have. This really requires reading between the lines and at the end of the day, students and workers don't know what they don't know and don't know what they're not aware they need to know. So here's really the money slide of all of this, that when we think about In-Person environments, and we think about Virtual environments, we're thinking about the notion of sensory input, shared experiences, real time interaction, but let's think about this through the lens of (dis)ability, through the lens of different information processing, through the lens of different communication.

Mahadeo Sukhai: What we realize is that when we try to get that Virtual work environment to mimic the In-person work environment, we're really trying to push sensory input and shared experiences in real time interaction. But those are things the persons with (dis)abilities are going to start from a different conceptual place with any way.

Mahadeo Sukhai: So then we think about what we want out of that physical workplace. We think about what we're trying to mimic with it. And we come to the notion that what we're actually really trying to do is mimic an ablest construct. So let's apply that a tiny bit to STEM and STEM education, which is now a COVID inspired reality. And so the STEM Professional Training Pipeline is something I've shown a lot before.

Mahadeo Sukhai: You've got K to 12 on one side, you've got employments on the other, and you've got all manner of post- secondary education in between, but for people with (dis)abilities, that's not a pipeline. It's more of a funnel. And there's a lot of glass ceilings or impenetrable barriers between K to 12 and undergrad, between undergrad and graduate school, between graduate school and whatever comes after and then onto employment. And so these blockages can take the form of transitional barriers, which are barriers to employment or barriers to entry into college or university or barriers to entry into graduate school, or barriers to entry into program of study.

Mahadeo Sukhai: But then there's also environmental barriers. That's the environmental barriers, particularly now that we're trying to, again, mimic the physical In-Person workplace learning environment that are starting to be more of a challenge, because now we're talking about gatekeeping, we're talking about colleagues' attitudes, we're talking about design of learning and workspaces. We're talking about access to technology and access to information.

Mahadeo Sukhai: We're really talking about how do we move from online to in-person, and how do we mimic in-person online, but we're again, we're doing so in ways that are fundamentally ablest. So when we talk about accessibility in STEM, we're going to talk about online teaching. We're going to talk about labs and simulations. We're going to talk about educational materials, and from a STEM specific challenge perspective, we're talking about technology over pedagogy. We're talking about representation of visual

Page 8 of 25 concepts, discipline specific symbology and default modes of teaching in the science where we do a lot of presentation and not necessarily a lot of teaching.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And realistically, what I want us to get to is this idea of our foundational metaphor. It's the concept of equality versus equity versus universal access and universal design and how things have changed in the context of the pandemic and how coming out on the other side, we're not going to escape the fact that that things have irrevocably changed the way we think about the world has changed and the way we actually do, our work and our learning has changed. Has it changed to the point where we really need to confront some of those very deeply hidden preconceptions in everything we do?

Mahadeo Sukhai: I think with that I'm actually just going to close by acknowledging my colleagues at CNIB on the team that I lead, the IDEA team inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility, my collaborators, and the trainees on the building an Evidence-Based Universal Design Framework for Employment Standards in Canada, grant funded by accessibility standards, Canada, particularly conversations with Erin Lee and Peter Coppin from OCAD university and the Inclusive Design Masters program, and my collaborator in IDEA-STEM, Ainsley Latour as well. And I'm going to thank you very much for paying attention and for your time, we're going to have lots of fun during the question period.

Michelle Fach: Thank you very much Dr.Sukhai, very insightful and I really appreciated how you spoke about mimicking these experiences and trying to replicate what we're doing face-to-face and online and the various different modes.

Michelle Fach: I think the one thing I would say in addition is I just don't think it ends with employment. I think working in learning is on a continuum and so we're... We need to really think intentionally about how we design those experiences to ensure that there is a universal approach to engagement. That's fabulous. Thank you so much. And we are now going to go to Dr. Treviranus.

Jutta Treviranus: And do I need to swap my displays or do you see the one slide?

Michelle Fach: I do see the one slide, has the cat in the background, I believe is that-

Jutta Treviranus: Great. So thank you so much. I just wanted to make you aware of my additional audience that helped me constantly write these presentations. So I want to take an aspirational perspective to the future of work and learning and provoke some out of the box thinking. And I'm very much looking forward to the conversation that will follow in this field. And I've been in this field for quite some time. We frequently speak about catching up as people with (dis)abilities.

Jutta Treviranus:

Page 9 of 25 During the pandemic we've been speaking about kids falling behind and what are we going to do about returning to the status quo? And my contention is that I think we should stop trying to catch up, which has stopped trying to do or get access to exactly what everyone else has access to. And I believe that there is an amazing opportunity that is closing a Window that is closing quite quickly, but hopefully we can take advantage of it because we are in a moment of disruption where a lot of things are possible that were not possible before.

Jutta Treviranus: People are aware that those... This is the way we always do things, is not the appropriate attitude towards how we are going to do things when we get out of this pandemic. I think there is a chance to answer, sorry for all these quotes that skate where the puck is going as Wayne Gretzky talks about pounce where the mouse will be as... Is one of the tails talks about leapfrog, others who are working in this space, or I think also help to avoid a train wreck with respect to the future of work and learning.

Jutta Treviranus: So when we talk to people about the future of work, and here I'm not just talking about the imminent future or within the next year or so, or at the end of the pandemic, but in discussing the future of work with people who are looking at it in the 10 year, 20 year, 30 year horizon, or even in some of the short- term horizon, and one of the biggest concerns or the big biggest disruptors to employment is to ask what will be automated.

Jutta Treviranus: One thing to note is that that is dependent upon Data Machine Learning systems, AI systems and are using data. Data is from the past largely, and machine learning is intended to optimize the patterns of the past. So what has worked in the past, let's get our machines to do that better, faster, more efficiently. And they generally do formulate things that humans do. So formulaic things, things that are patterns that can be replicated.

Jutta Treviranus: One lesson that we can learn is, or one current patterns. And there are many others is that Uber lesson. And if you recall, Uber has, is collecting a ton of data about the customer and the driver, and is using that data to optimize the performance of the driver and the delivery of the service, trying to get as efficient a service as possible. But the intention here was for worker replacement.

Jutta Treviranus: So the idea is that we learned from how people can do it more efficiently. We drive or shape a human performance to the optimal we learned from that. And then we apply it to machines. And there are other patterns, not just in Uber, not just in the GIG economy. There are many work surveillance systems that are currently employed. I'm sure that many of you are using optimization techniques that with your LMS, with your university or employment data systems.

Jutta Treviranus: And so that data can also be collected to teach machines, to standardize work, and it discourages exceptions and special treatment. And then at the same time we have education, where we are also attempting to focus on STEM on. We're using intelligent tutors to help struggling students perform the same way as students who are not struggling.

Page 10 of 25 Jutta Treviranus: We're using proctoring systems to weed out cheating or anything that deviates from the expected performance within a test, our LMS is, are in effect conducting learning surveillance and all of those things that cannot fit a particular formula or pattern like humanities and the arts are getting defunded or discouraged, take the example of Laurentian College within Ontario at the moment. So given these patterns and given that, what is wanted is not someone that performs something differently that has a different set of skills. When will we catch up?

Jutta Treviranus: We're in an age of acceleration, this particular pattern, there is pressure to do this more and more. So I would say if we're trying to catch up, it's like we not to work at, it'll be a very pessimistic journey, but why do I think that our community can in fact leapfrog, and I'm going to go back to something that I've talked about a bit, which is this data set that I collected, that I represent, and it's a large dataset of all of the needs of a given population.

Jutta Treviranus: When I try to represented it, I have to plot it in a multi-variate scatterplot. It looks like a human Starburst. And one of the things to note is that in the middle are 80% of those needs. They are clustered in 20% of the space. They're very close together. That means they're very similar and out at the outer edge are all of those needs that are unlike the average.

Jutta Treviranus: And they're very far apart and they're very different. So out there is diversity, in the middle is homogeneity, and things that are similar. And unfortunately, because of the patterns that have happened to date, design works for the middle is difficult to use as you move away from the middle or away from the average. And if you're out at that periphery, then design, most designs don't work. And it doesn't matter whether it's product, services, policies, et cetera, and the middle predictions are highly accurate.

Jutta Treviranus: As you move away from the middle they're inaccurate, and they're wrong as you get out to that outer edge, but how can we break this pattern which affects everything that we encountered? Well, one other view of where we are at the moment in the pandemic and where we are going is that we are currently in a Hill climbing exercise. That means we're optimizing a particular pattern, the patterns of the past, and we're eroding the slope which causes a disparity.

Jutta Treviranus: And in order for us to survive, we actually have to find the global Optima out of this crisis because I'm doing things the way that we've always been doing it. Isn't going to get us out of this crisis. And the people closest to the bottom are more diverse. They're less invested in the past. They're at that outer edge of the humans, a scatterplot, and the only formula agreed upon by diversity and complexity theorists.

Jutta Treviranus:

Page 11 of 25 And by the people looking at the future of work is to diversification and difference to include diverse perspectives. So stop doing the same thing over and over again, and to work together. And so it's out at that outer edge where most people with (dis)abilities who have different needs from the average are, but that's also where we find innovation and weak signals. And if we design with and for, and by individuals out of that outer edge, the individuals in the middle have room for growth and for change.

Jutta Treviranus: Think about all of the things that were done for inclusion that now benefit everyone. So the unexplored terrain out there is where, and if you can imagine for a minute, what would happen if our systems of employment, our employment ecosystems, our schools, our learning was designed primarily for, and by people with (dis)abilities, how much better than they would be for everyone. So whether it's student differentiation, not standardization within our schools, work optimization by workers for workers, collaboration, complimentary skills, rather than competitive fitting a particular formula for as a replaceable worker, fitting the job to the worker, not the worker to the job.

Jutta Treviranus: This is in part what we're attempting to do with Inclusive Design. And we're not trying to find a winning solution or the best fit what we're doing is we're trying to create a system that iterates to include more and more needs and individuals, and watch out for the Cobra effects of linear thinking, the rut of mono- causality. And I'd love to continue the conversation. I'd love to discuss these things with Mahadeo and Deborah who go... Who are very thoughtful in the area of work and learning.

Michelle Fach: Thank you very much, Dr. Treviranus. I really liked what you were speaking about and I challenged us really to... When we think about, and really work hard to include those diverse perspectives, as we design a more inclusive environment and experiences that we do so intentionally, that we really are mindful of making sure that those diverse perspectives are intentionally considered as we really work to build a more equitable and barrier free environment. So thank you very, very much for your talk. We are now at the part where we're going to go to some questions, but I have a few questions actually for the panelists and that we...

Michelle Fach: I'm going to start with, and maybe I can start with you Dr. Treviranus to see what your thoughts are on this, so that it specifically relates to the intersection of workplace and educational institutions. And I spent a lot of time actually in that environment. So I'm curious from your perspective, in order for remote and hybrid learning or blended learning, the new way of education beyond post-secondary or beyond the pandemic. In order for it to be successful, what do we need to do? We also need to rethink a major rethink of our workplace and educational institutions. And if so, what do we need to consider in those environments to actually be more inclusive?

Jutta Treviranus: Yeah. I think, so thinking of it from the perspective of how do we benefit all students and workers? I think first off we need to consider education is lifelong. I agree with Mahadeo, the two are definitely entangled. What we know of work is that it is going to change. I mean, we're in a period of flux of change of uncertainty.

Page 12 of 25 Jutta Treviranus: So this idea of that, we, I mean, when we talk about a terminal degree, I mean, education doesn't end there. Yes, we can mark a certain milestone with degrees, et cetera, but this false notion that here learning is over, and now you start your career is just completely outdated. We're also, all of our education is a narrowing. I love the picture you have Mahadeo of the funnel, and that is so destructive of chances that all students have, because what we've done, we've sort of abandoned the generalist, we've abandoned, the critical thinking.

Jutta Treviranus: We are funneling people into greater and greater specialization, and we're discouraging the broader thinking that comes from the humanities and from the critical thinking. And unfortunately we were using the technical tools to amplify that. So the instructional tutors for struggling students, the proctoring systems, the larger classes, where there is a fewer, fewer opportunities to, for creativity and all of those are really distressing way of approaches.

Jutta Treviranus: And of course, it's mirrored within the application of technology within the workplace as well, not just in the workplace, but all of our technology seem to be decreasing the adoptability of people. I mean, we talk about the fear that technology is adapting exponentially, and people are adapting linearly, but all of our technology is reinforcing that. We are recommender engines only introduce us to people like us or things that people like us like.

Jutta Treviranus: We have Twitter, allows a very, very shallow form of communication. I mean, I can go on and on. In our social life or life outside of work, in our work, in our education, everything is leading to this conformant monoculture, which is going to mean, I mean, mono-cultures are slayed by a single act. It doesn't prepare us for the next crisis. So I think we need to stop pause, use this disruption to really think about where we're going with education and with work.

Michelle Fach: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that comment. Dr. Sukhai, did you have anything else you wanted to add to those comments?

Mahadeo Sukhai: Yeah. Thanks very much, Michelle. And I think you too you made some excellent points there. I tend to agree that we have in a lot of disciplines and it's most evident in STEM, the loss of the polymath. The idea that if you, it's, if you're going to go into a field, it's better to be deep and narrow than it is to be broad and not so narrow.

Mahadeo Sukhai: The funny thing is that that permeates anything to do with STEM period, from how you learn it to how you teach it, to how you find a job in it. When you leave school, because, there's this sort of boundary marker, and it's pretty ancestral. The concept of going from school into the workforce has been with us for at least a century, perhaps more.

Page 13 of 25 Mahadeo Sukhai: And so here we are now at this point in time where it's absolutely worth it saying, that doesn't work anymore. We need to consider not just the fact that somebody can go to school while working or work while going to school. But the fact that these environments are perhaps not as different as we might think. And honestly, I don't know if there's an appetite for it systemically, and I've seen lots of arguments where people will have said, "No, there's no appetite for it."

Mahadeo Sukhai: And others who will have said, "Yes, there's appetite for it." But I think what we need to do is we need to sit down and we need to recognize that the policies come from practice, practice comes from past experience. What we need to do is we need to imagine forward. And every time we write a policy, we're actually imagining backward.

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:46:04]

Mahadeo Sukhai: And every time we write a policy, we're actually imagining backward. Right? And so we need to get to this collective space where we are thinking about things that we don't know are actually going to happen. And then we have to start being inclusive as we think about those future paths, those, I guess contingencies would be a word for it. And so, then we're actually not imagining, based on previous experience, we're imagining based on speculative fiction, basically. Right? But it's a legitimate field of writing. It's a legitimate genre and we need to consider doing more of that when it comes to, well, what's schooling going to look like? What's work going to look like? What's the difference between school and work and why should there be a difference?

Mahadeo Sukhai: How do we build an environment that is useful for everybody, not just useful for people who are actually building the environment? And those are deep, rich, powerful questions. And I think with the advent of something like the Accessible Canada Act, we get to tackle some of them at the national level. At least this is my hope being Chair of the Employment Technical Committee. But, at the end of the day, it takes collective will to do this sort of thing. And that means a collective will to say, "Let's dig deep into something and try to figure out how many better ways there are of doing it."

Michelle Fach: Absolutely. And I go back to what you talked about in terms of learning places, wearing spaces. And I think about the classrooms of the future and how the learning environments of the future and what that will look like and your point about really thinking forward and rather than using our past experience and our lived experience in designing our policies and our practices and our structures to address what we know, how do we move forward and look to the future? So thank you very much.

Michelle Fach: Debra, I'm going to move to you and I have a question for you that I'm really interested to ask.

Deborah Stienstra: [inaudible 00:48:11] That conversation.

Page 14 of 25 Michelle Fach: So will the and this is to me is a, is a big question. So will the emerging hybrid blended model of work and learning. So what are, that would be, a bit of a remote, a bit of face to face, different types of models. Will that model of work and learning lead to a brave new world for people with disabilities? Or will it lead to the same old world with even bigger barriers?

Deborah Stienstra: Thanks, Michelle. And I really did want to jump into that conversation partly because I think that when we imagine things we often start from our own experiences or from those experiences that we're comfortable with, that we know about, and we don't allow ourselves often to get unsettled by experiences that don't quite fit or that we're not so aware of. And so part of, I think when we think about diversity and intersectionality, we're trying to not let imagination be limited, but let it be reflexive of diverse experiences and also diverse, but not static, diverse experiences, like seeing people, not simply as embodied in their whiteness or their woman, their identity as a woman or, their experiences as a person with disabilities regardless, right? Like any of those are static identities or static imaginings of people. And we don't have effective tools to regularly reflect on what does it mean to be a young woman, gender queer person with intermittent chronic fatigues syndrome or whatever that changes how I interact in each and every environment that I experienced, but also at different points in my day. Right?

Deborah Stienstra: So, that starburst that Jutta talked about, I think has, not just that single dimension, but it has multiple layers and they're always shifting back and forth. Like it's a really evocative image, but it has to be seen as a dynamic layered set of experiences. And so that's where I think we need to begin to answer your question about whether or not, the emerging hybrid model of work and learning leads to a brave new world or the same old, same old. I think it depends on how would you do it and where you imagine people. So I've been in a series of conversations about what work, what school is going to look like teaching for a university it's going to look like in the fall. University of Guelph, says as much as possible it's going to be face to face. Well, that's really interesting. And then you add on this layer of people who can't be there and people who want to be there, but you want to keep your distance from because they're not well, or they've got a complex thing.

Deborah Stienstra: I think that any environment can be made inclusive with intent and with the right structural supports and movement. So for example, I taught online for the last year as did all of us. And it, part of my goal is to create community in class because through community, we get to know each other and we get to know more about each other and it doesn't just become, I have to accommodate you, but it's like, I get to meet you as a person. And that is possible. It's not optimal, but there are more ways in for students with disabilities, with certain impairments and certain ways of being, and knowing in an online environment.

Deborah Stienstra: But for me as a person who experiences chronic fatigue syndrome, this late in a day, it's torture for me to have to be on this environment. There's too many stimuli. There's too much. I can't hold all that information in. And so, yes, it's not going to be any different then when I'm in a classroom and after three hours I'm absolutely exhausted. So it's about, I think the intent and the structures to be both

Page 15 of 25 inclusive and accessible and that flexibility that I think the starburst, the dynamic starburst gets us to. And, so I think I agree with both Mahadeo and Jutta that the future has got to be one that we stop and recognize that this is a moment of change. And that the moment doesn't have to go back to what was normal, the moment is how can we re-imagine in this dynamic way.

Michelle Fach: Thank you very much. I really, once again, like what you're talking about in terms of intent, because I do agree that we are, the pandemic, how, how negative it has been. There has been some gains with respect to engagement in some areas, inclusion, and, and instructors thinking about their teaching and how to be more inclusive in their teaching. And we, and we want to make sure that we harness all of the learnings that we've had, but do it so intentionally to ensure that we're not creating barriers for others. So thank you very much.

Deborah Stienstra: Can I just add to that Michelle, before you go, I think if intent isn't matched with resources and supports and structures, you're going to get a lot of really burned out people. And so it's got to go together, right? Like we have to have enough time and not too many demands to be able to have good intentions and to meet people in a good way. Right? And, that requires recognizing that this was an extraordinary year, that it took huge amounts of effort and energy to be present in a workplace. And it takes, workplace accommodations. It takes enough time. It takes regular breaks, all of those sorts of things, in order to be able to have the intent.

Michelle Fach: I completely agree. It's about a culture, right? It's really about the foundation on making sure that the culture is there and that look at it from all lenses through all lenses. So, absolutely. Thank you very much. I will open it up to the other panelists. Is there anything else you would like to add to what Deborah has said? And then from there I'm going to, I know there's a number of questions in the Q and A, and I definitely want to get to that before the end of our session. So...

Jutta Treviranus: Yeah, I would, I completely agree that the starburst it's not only, it's not two dimensional as I represented, it's three dimensional and it's in constant flux and we move in and out of various areas. And also the terrain that I talked about is not a static terrain. It's also in constant flux. One piece that I wanted to add to the discussion of education, I think there needs to be a much greater emphasis on collaboration and complementarity, everything. I mean, we're pitting each other against each other as opposed to looking at complimentary skills, teamwork, especially we started out in education and then it continues in the workplace and that is much more supportive of diversity as well. The, I mean, we've learned during the pandemic that none of us are safe until, or we haven't learned, but we've been demonstrated that none of us are safe until all of us are safe, but we seem to be already quite quickly abandoning that. And in our attempt to defend certain aspects of education and democracy and work, which, which is really unfortunate. And I think Mahadeo had his hand up too.

Michelle Fach: Ya, absolutely.

Mahadeo Sukhai:

Page 16 of 25 Thanks very much, Jutta. So, inclusion is not a democracy and accessibility is not a democracy. And, and I've said that a couple of times before, this is the first time I'm actually saying it in front of an audience of more than 150 people, so somebody somewhere is bound to tweet it now. And, and here's what I mean by that, right? When we start to think about serving the most, we start counting people in very unfortunate ways and we need to start thinking about serving all as the standard to which we have to hold ourselves and you can't get all by getting 80% of all right? And this is what the Pareto Principle loves to try to do and it doesn't necessarily work. That we can't get 80% of our results and call that enough.

Mahadeo Sukhai: You know, Michelle, you asked, is the hybrid model of work and learning, going to be the future. There's some seriously, seriously significant problems with that hybrid model. I mean, there's problems with the in-person model, there's problems with the virtual model. And my premise in my 10 minutes was that the whole thing's built on an enablist construct which is the realization that I, myself sort of, kind of had recently when I was chatting with Erin Lee about her masters of design projects. And, as she was presenting her work, to me, it sort of just came out to me in one of those sort of mental hit me on the nose kinds of things that, well, hang on a moment, let's actually think about the workplace. Let's think about the learning environment.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And, because we're starting from a flawed premise and that is that, the hybrid going to have the best of both worlds, the problem ends up being that what we're really trying to do is really try to mimic one world, the in-person world without fundamentally thinking about whether that's the right thing to do. And somebody said in the chat or the Q and A, the importance of thinking short-term, not just thinking long-term because, because we're coming at this conversation, all three of us Deborah, Jutta and myself with kind of the intent to shake the long-term foundations of how we think about education and how we think about employment, how we think about work and how we think about learning. But then we've also got real significant short-term challenges that everybody's facing, and we absolutely need to get at those, right?

Mahadeo Sukhai: And again, we're not necessarily going to get at them by looking backward, which is what policies and practices are designed to do. We need to get at them by thinking, by thinking differently, by looking forward by starting to think about how much effort it actually does take to do this stuff and investing the resources as Deborah had said. I mean, the saying goes that the ball rolls downhill, right? All balls roll downhill because that's how gravity works. Right? And, so like balls, human beings tend to go for the path of least resistance. The path of least resistance gets us to inclusion's not democratic, right? But, actually then doing something with that requires all of us to actually, invest the time and effort and energy in doing the work. If we didn't spend all of our time arguing about whether the work should be done, the work could actually get done.

Jutta Treviranus: Yeah. So it's, we grow from small successes and I completely agree that inclusion is not democratic because what that does, then it is pit the trivial needs of the many against the essential needs of the few. And I would actually challenge you in terms of the Pareto Principle, because I think the way to get to all is to address the needs that the edges, it that's where innovation happens. That's where the, the

Page 17 of 25 edges encompass and, and that actually Pareto was misquoted by Koch because Pareto talked about a vital few. And I think those vital few are the 20% out of that edge. And that's so I, we need to reprioritize, but we, it is the short term is to, as you say, rethink unlearn and start from small successes.

Mahadeo Sukhai: Oh, and I really should clarify. I'm not a fan of majority rules. And so, doing 80% of doing 20% of the work to get to 80% of the results is not something that I'm keen to do. So, I wasn't defending the Principle.

Deborah Stienstra: Can I add just a comment? I think we need to realize that part, and this might be a bit stark for people, but part of the choices we make in the short term are really like the triage protocol that's happening in COVID right now. We're deciding who gets to learn the way or work the way they are able to, and who gets cut off, right? Who doesn't get the ventilator? Who doesn't get? Who do we decide gets to make a choice? Who do we make a decision about, has the greatest likelihood of success. And therefore we're going to move forward in that direction. And I challenged us to get rid of the triage protocol and work in learning, because for the past however long that's how that's the ableist piece that I think Mahadeo was talking is the foundation. We are triaging people who we don't think will be successful.

Jutta Treviranus: We're using a social Darwinist approach to, and when in fact, it's those individuals that are going to compel us to be more adaptive and be able to address the next crisis.

Deborah Stienstra: It's the learning. I love the image of the starburst, but I've often used, if you open your arms up wide to address the margins, the people that are on the margins, you're actually going to include a lot more people because of the innovations that people with disabilities have had to make at every point in our lives. Right?

Jutta Treviranus: Yeah. But that's where resourcefulness is.

Deborah Stienstra: That's right. That's where the pioneering happens. That's where the innovation happens. It doesn't happens, when you fit in a system. You don't think about how to change the system. It's only when you're a misfit that you think about the adaptations that are needed. And we, the fundamental rethinking.

Jutta Treviranus: Hierarchy of compromise and this hierarchy of justification, we think that people that require change need to compromise the most. We think that people that are currently not in power have to justify the most when we should flip that. I mean, there's so many things we should flip and unlearn.

Mahadeo Sukhai: It's actually really funny.

Page 18 of 25 Michelle Fach: Go ahead.

Mahadeo Sukhai: Sorry. I was just going to say it's actually really funny because at the start of this month, I was at another conference where a very similar conversation actually came up the issue of resourcefulness and understanding the innovation that we as persons with disabilities engineer for ourselves in order to do the things that we want to do. And in another context, I had a conversation around well assistive technology and what kinds of assistive technology people have and how they use them. And the thing is that half the things that we have as assistive technology, we don't use the way that we're supposed to.

Mahadeo Sukhai: You know, my sort of acknowledgment of my STEM trainee days is the story that I tell where we're one of the OTs at the old ATRC that UT used to run at the , actually taught me how to, re-imagine a closed circuit television as a dissection microscope. And that's technological innovation, but a lot of people do that sort of thing generally every single day and we have no idea. And so there's no interest in channeling that because the system is not set up to recognize that's legitimate behavior.

Michelle Fach: This is fabulous conversation. And I, do want to take a few moments to get to some of the participant questions and ensure that they have an opportunity to get into this conversation. So, Dr. Treviranus, I'm going to actually pose this question to you first. So the question is, "we hear a lot about the consumerist churn and higher education. How do you see that trend influencing accessibility and inclusion positively or negatively?"

Jutta Treviranus: That's a great question. And I think that the, so the viewing the students as consumers of education and attempting to do customer service to individuals with, sorry, to students, and I think there's both positive and negative, or like in terms of influencing the accessibility or the treatment of students, the way that consumers, serving consumers is viewed is usually the average consumer, the highest customer base. I mean, the minute we continue to use the statistical average or the tools where majority rules in determining how we should design education on that basis, we're going to, and of course the issue with a consumer approach is that it usually also is talking about economic survival and together with the consumerist approach, there is the increase in tuition. The assumption that the student pays not that education is a right, or that there is a larger systemic benefit to education.

Jutta Treviranus: I think education should be free. I think it would increase our GDP. It would help our economy. So I would reject actually that approach and students should see education as a right, and they should have input into how education is designed. So I'm not avoiding the question, but I think that everything that is bundled with that is detrimental, not just to students with disabilities, but to students in general, it is good to listen to what students need, but I don't think it's good to, to view students as consumers of a something that they're paying for.

Michelle Fach:

Page 19 of 25 Deborah, did you want to add at all to that?

Deborah Stienstra: I agree with Jutta that the education should be free and that we should shift. I think students, my experience with students is that many of them are already claiming.

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:09:04]

Deborah Stienstra: Experience of students is that many of them already claim their education, but they claim it as consumers. So they don't see it as a right, they see it as a way to a job, and I think there's a... Because they want a career that benefits them in life and that's what we've taught them. So I'd actually go a little farther than just getting rid of cost for education. I think we need to think about the capitalist society more generally. We could go into a long conversation about that, but I think that as long as we're in a neoliberal economic situation that has capitalist values at its core, we're going to be seeing this and therefore the move to consumerism. So I'm not very hopeful about the change. I think we can tinker around, but I think it's going to take a lot more. I'm kind of skeptical about a shift from that.

Michelle Fach: Thank you. Dr. Sukhai, I've got a question for you. We talked a lot about policy factors, and so the question from the participant is how do we get policy makers, CEOs, or senior decision makers to see the benefit of a hybrid blended work and learning environments? And I know we talked about blended or hybrid may not be the best because we're not... We're mimicking the face-to-face, but if we think intentionally about those environments, how do we get policy makers, CEOs, and decision makers to see the benefits?

Mahadeo Sukhai: You know, Michelle, that's a great question. What gets measured gets done. It's an old adage in the evaluation space, and I think it's absolutely spot on. And so if we demonstrate effectiveness of new ways of doing things, then people will transition to new ways of doing things, right? But the important thing in terms of demonstrating effectiveness is who are we demonstrating effectiveness for, and who's the target audience for that demonstration, right? And this is where, again, we actually have to think very much about who's in our work and learning spaces, right? And we have to think about intersectional social identity. We have to think about ability. We have to think about race. We have to think about gender. We have to think about language and so on. And what we need to appreciate is that all of that matters when we're doing the measuring.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And so some things are going to work better for some than they will for others. Pre-pandemic, there was this huge movements toward agile offices, right? And there was a movement toward agile offices because people were starting to write in the business literature about the measurable, tangible ways that agile offices were making a difference. But when you actually sit down and you think about the agile office as a construct, it's not a construct that is natively accessible or natively inclusive to somebody who is not the center of the human starburst, right, in any dimension. And, so I think what we need to do is we need to figure out what the right measures are.

Page 20 of 25 Mahadeo Sukhai: Now I will tell you, because one of my trainees has done some work to try to identify how to actually pick up on organizational inclusion measures, they're not always simple. They're not always easy to identify, and frankly, sometimes we actually have to make it up because the precedent isn't there and people love precedent. And so what it takes then is it commitments to measurement, but also commitments to do so creatively, to do so inclusively, and to do so in a rigorous way that then you have the ability to put in front of somebody and say, "Here you go. You wanted past experience? This is how you're going to define policy. Here it is."

Jutta Treviranus: I actually think that what gets measured gets done is somewhat discriminatory because, of course, you rule with the majority. I mean, it will always... So the... If we're using... I'll refer to a book by Steffen Mau, The Metric Society, where he shows just how that pushes towards the needs of the majority and to staying with the past. So I think what we need to do, and of course, measurement needs to be quantified, there are so many things that are not quantifiable that are, however, quite critical. So one of the things I think we should reconsider is that particular push towards measurement, there have to be other ways that we can demonstrate because measurement is simply based upon numbers, and there is no... We are not measuring value. So, online at the moment, in the web, in our technology, the only value that is reflected there is popularity, how many people like something and how much money, the monetization of something.

Jutta Treviranus: And so it's... I think we need to figure out some ways of reflecting, not just the number, but the importance or the value or the critical nature to possibly just one individual. The other issue is that people with disabilities are often just one representation of one. They cannot be represented in the measurement. I see. There's lots of hands.

Deborah Stienstra: Deborah's hand is up. Can I...

Michelle Fach: Yes, absolutely. Please do.

Deborah Stienstra: Thank you. I want to put a pitch in for the other side. I think measurement is a piece of it, but if it isn't accompanied by narratives of people's experiences, doesn't... You don't always have to bring the same old people. We've digital storytelling, composite stories that are anonymized that are used, but they also can be used in combination with community-engaged scholarship. So the importance of working with our colleagues in the advocacy world, who are often much more effective in making the policy point, and they're much more convincing. So to me, it's a mixture of three parts, right? Some sense of the date, the so-called data that policy makers think they need, some of the stories that reaches them on a human level, and some really persistent advocates who use these effectively every single time they meet those policy makers. And to me, that's how you get people to change their minds and their hearts.

Jutta Treviranus:

Page 21 of 25 Yeah, not dismissing those stories as, oh, that's just anecdote. No, where is the quantitative data? Where's the evidence?

Michelle Fach: I really liked that three-pronged approach because you're right. We can't go out of this with just one solution. There's a question that's come in from one of the participants for Dr. Treviranus, and it's, "I really appreciate your focus on disruption as [inaudible 01:17:06] star potential. I wonder if you have thoughts on how to disrupt the current structure of accommodations in post-secondary."

Jutta Treviranus: Yeah. So this is a great question. And I mean, accommodations are an expensive bandaid. The only reason people need accommodations is because the system is designed the wrong way. I mean, it's designed in such a way that in order to receive the service you should be getting, you have to ask for an exception or some specialized service. We should be trying to design all of our systems in such a way that the student or the employee doesn't need to ask for a special exception, that there are sufficient choices within the system that everybody has access to those particular services and you don't need to identify yourself, "Oh, I'm special. I need an exception." So I'm not sure if that... But I think we should use as schools, as employment systems, we should use the record of what people have needed accommodations for and figure out how to then integrate that as a common choice for everyone.

Michelle Fach: Have a design for those experiences. Absolutely. Does anyone else? Dr. Sukhai, you put your hand up?

Mahadeo Sukhai: Thanks very much, Michelle. So I actually don't have a raise hand function, I think because I'm not inside the U of Guelph environment. I will say this and it's actually also what I wanted to say in response to the conversation that you tend Deborah spun off from what I said about measurement. In my field, in the space in which I grew up as an academic, personalized medicine evolved as a way of recognizing that there was the right intervention for the right person at the right time. And personalized medicine became very much... And of one kinds of trials and of one kinds of stories, right? And I think we need to rededicate ourselves very strongly to the end of one approach, because you can measure end of one approaches, and you can understand how well they work for the person that they're intended to work for, right?

Mahadeo Sukhai: And then out of that will come some more systemic understandings. And so when we think about measurement, we think about doing it the traditional way, and now I think we need to think about how we measure in inclusive non-traditional innovative ways. And the same thing with accommodation. So, I did a Walrus Talk a couple of years ago, that Jutta and I were on the stage together for that one as well, and one of the analogies that I used in that Walrus Talk was a conversation about elevators and buildings and what kinds of elevators afforded agency versus what kinds of elevators didn't, and what was an accommodation versus what was an environmental solution. And the point to that story is a very important one here, and that is a recognition that people will have independent and individual solutions sometimes to the same challenge. They're going to face the workplace environment, sometimes even with the same, gigantic air quotes here, "disability category", right?

Page 22 of 25 Mahadeo Sukhai: But the solutions are going to be different. The solution is going to be nuanced because everybody is a different person. And so it's nice to understand sort of how all of those solutions may have worked, but often what ends up happening in the workplace environment is, okay, one person out of every 200 in the workforce is somebody who identifies as blind or partially sighted, and so a company of 500 people might be doing really well, again, in gigantic air-quotes, to have three individuals who are blind or partially sighted, right? But then what, what might happen is after those three leave and another three comes, somebody somewhere is going to say, "Well, the accommodations that worked previously, we're going to try them again and we'll use them because everybody who's blind or partially sighted is exactly the same," and that's not true, right? That's not even up for debate.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And so, if we're going to disrupt accommodation within working, within learning, we have to do so by creating an environment where environmental solutions are already within the space, and where the need to request something that is specific to me in the way that the requests go through the process now is much reduced, right? And then also you create a system whereby you know what, I don't actually need to ask to do something. I have the resources and the know-how, or the access to the spaces to be able to do it myself without having to go through my boss, without having to go through the Disability Services Office, without having to go through my faculty member.

Jutta Treviranus: Yeah. And one thing actually with that measurement that you were talking about personalized measurement is marking. At the moment, we have this silly mark system where everybody's ranked on the same scale as though everyone should be attempting to become the standardized student. And one thing that could be done that is more... That personalized is personal Delta being the what... So how much have I progressed within my own trajectory, as opposed to the same trajectory that everybody else, and that will also prepare students to be better prepared for a future of work where it's differentiation and differences, things that are not formulaic will serve you. So I think we can agree... Yeah, sorry, I'm conscious of the... There's a bunch more questions.

Michelle Fach: No, that's okay. I don't think we're going to get to [inaudible 01:23:38] because we only have a few minutes left. I did want to make sure, Deborah, did you have anything else you wanted to add to the conversation before I close us out?

Deborah Stienstra: I just loved that last question that came up, what do you see as the most promising technology processor conversation to come out of our COVID environment? And I would have to say... I'm going to answer. I'm going to have to say it's the caring, the social responsibility, and caring that has come. We may have to be physically distanced, but we have found different ways of reaching out to strangers who we run across. I see it every day when I go out for my walk with my dogs, and the people I run into are, even in our tiny little town of Guelph, are lovely, friendly. And I found that in teaching online as well, we found better ways of caring for each other than often happens in the face-to-face class, and people disclose, oh, so much more once they felt that culture of caring. So that's what I'd like to close with is that sense of social responsibility and caring.

Page 23 of 25 Michelle Fach: Yeah, I agree. I think that is a great way, and is there anything that the other two presenters would like to add to that?

Jutta Treviranus: Can I... I saw that there were a lot of write-in cost and economics, and one of the things that we certainly discovered and have shown is that it costs a lot less if you consider the entire student body, the entire set of employees right from the beginning. If you have a resilient system that adapts better, that is better at addressing change, it costs a lot more if you only address the 80%, it becomes brittle. There's more help required that you add on and patch and patch until it reaches end of life. So, caring actually, and caring for the whole group is less costly.

Michelle Fach: Excellent. Thank you so much. And Dr. Sukhai, I will give you the final word of the panelists, and then I will close the sessions. So, is there anything that you think technology or something that you think we need to keep? Are they able to learn...

Mahadeo Sukhai: So, I think that the pandemic's done something really interesting that most people don't really talk about very much, or perhaps haven't fully recognized. And that is that it has enforced a state of being, a state of living that has in some ways been very much like the state being and the state of living that many persons with disabilities have experienced throughout our lives in a variety of different ways, in a variety of different contexts, right? And the pandemic has given us this... Given is perhaps the wrong word. I don't mean to make it sound like a positive thing because it is most certainly not, but it's caused us to confront loss of freedom and what loss of personal freedom actually means to us in certain ways, and what can we do to overcome that rather gargantuan public health barrier.

Mahadeo Sukhai: And the thing is that metaphorically, there's a lot there that resonates with the lived experience of persons with disabilities, and that's a very broad statement. I'm happy to defend it if there's time later. If we were doing this in person, we'd all go to a bar and have a drink and I could defend it ad nauseam. But what I want to do is, I want to drop that there, right? Much like my earlier bombshell that the physical work and learning environments is totally abelist, I'm going to drop this one out there for people to think about, because what people aren't doing is actually picking up on that recognition and saying, "Okay, now maybe we can, to extend the point of empathy, the extent the point of caring, be more empathetic." Understand that lived experiences and lived circumstances matter in ways that we didn't think they mattered before, right?

Mahadeo Sukhai: And I think that's something that comes out of this, that we haven't picked up on as a society, as a group of thinkers within the space as thought leaders. And perhaps we should start actually noodling that over and seeing if we want to go somewhere with it. And so the other thing that I would say is I think we also need to make sure that we're doing a lot, not just for the long-term, but we also play the game of recognizing long-term benefits, generational benefits, generational changes, while at the same time working to change the system today. We can't just work to change the system today without thinking about the long-term. And we can't just focus on the long-term and neglect the system today.

Page 24 of 25 Michelle Fach: Great. Great way to end this session. Thank you very much. I want to thank the panelists for joining us again today. Your insights, your perspectives, your thoughts on these questions, and on the area of work and learning are very, very insightful. And I know that they have allowed us to challenge our assumptions and to think about how we move forward in this post-pandemic world. So thank you very much. We are at the end of this day of our session. I want to thank all of you who are with us, our conference supporters, our participants for joining us today. Thank you so much for your questions and for engaging in the chat along the side, I could see it. I can't read it all, but I can see it floating along. So thank you so much for being engaged. So have a great evening everyone, and we'll see you tomorrow.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:30:19]

Transcript by Rev.com

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