Conversations about disability in open education often focus on accessibility, which is framed as a process done for disabled students by abled instructors or instructional designers. Relatively little attention has been paid to the idea of disabled people as OER content creators, changemakers or disrupters.This session, led by two instructors who identify as disabled, explores possibilities for cripping open. We invite participants to think of access as a symbiotic experience exchange rather than something done for a student with a disability, and to see legitimacy in the “insider knowledge” held by disabled people (Smith, 1987; 2002).
Here, we will use cripping as a “verb to describe a process of critique, disruption, and re-imagining…[It is] deployed and redeployed for political purposes as a way to re-imagine conceptual boundaries, relationships, communities, cultural representations, and power structures.” (Hutcheon & Wolbring, 2013). Our session will use narrative, multimedia and reflective activities to ask: What assumptions and practices of open education and open pedagogy would we expose by cripping open? What assumptions do we make about instructors’ bodies and who holds knowledge? How could disabled perspectives and voices destabilize narratives around open? How would cripping invite us to consider how “we create and hold space”? (Cedillo, 2018). What intersections and boundaries would we encounter? What would happen to our genres, our gatherings and our pedagogies if we framed disability as generative rather than deficit?
This session will also put cripping into praxis by inviting participants to engage in the manner that feels right to them. We will share our own stories of how disability informs our pedagogy as well as some examples of how disabled people are using open tools and pedagogies for social justice; make space for disabled voices and narratives (some in person, some via online mediums); and offer some reflective activities and conversations meant to help us probe these questions. We see this session as the beginning of a conversation, and hope that participants will leave at least one idea of how cripping might transform their pedagogy or open education work.
