Critical Reflections of Being a Professional with Visual Impairment

I would not have understood this if I would have just been a student with impairment.

01:38 - I would have just kind of thought that ah, the whole system is out there to oppress me, to exclude me. Look at those people who don’t want to include me in their groups and their conversations for instance, I could have been that student.

01:52 - But then once you become a lecturer, once you slip into the shoe of a lecturer you realize what kind of problems are there, what kind of challenges are there and how do you circumnavigate that. And similar kind of processes happen when I kind of found myself as a public speaker talking to diverse audiences in different settings, not just only for a research dissemination but just too early audience. How do you crystallize complex concepts in simplistic form, for instance.

And what happens when you become a researcher with impairment. Let’s start with the critical reflections of being a lecturer with impairment so as you see on the top, this is what Kjetil asked me in the previous part of this presentation series that this question about disability and identity and what do I say on the top. You know, when I took my second master’s, which was my first master’s in Norway in international social welfare and health policy.

In the second year of that master’s I got an opportunity to teach there part-time and to be a tutor. So it’s kind of like, okay I’d still be a student but I can teach. Very, very interesting. And I thought that I have an impairment so I understand what it is to be having, intuitively get it what it is to have an impairment. What I realized is that it’s not true because there’s so much diversity, so much complexity, students with impairments. No two students with impairment are same.

No two students are the same. That is what as lecturers, educators we have to understand that the final sub-bullet of that point. Treating individuals as unique and in itself instead of saying “ah, this is a person who is from India” putting in these category boxes. Or this is a student who happens to be from Uganda and who is here and does not speak English very well.

04:18 - And the reason why I talked about this is because I was made a tutor to some of the students who came from global South countries, less privileged countries. And whose understanding of education was not to undertake critical thinking but to reproduce what’s there in the text literally. And when they took the exam they got a D and an E and an F and they’re like what is happening, like I’ve worked so hard, I learned everything, I reproduced everything on the paper but I did not get the good grade.

And these are some good students coming from their respective countries. And the point could be somebody could say “ah, these students, they don’t know, you know”. Like you could just dismiss them as a lecturer or a tutor and say “of course they don’t know how to write or how to be critical in their thought process or when they’re writing” but that would be a very superficial assessment. The much deeper assessment would be to understand what cultural context they come from.

Is it okay in that cultural context to be critical or is it very, very geared upon.

05:40 - Professors don’t like critical thinking. They want conformity, they want acceptance, they want obedience. And these students started feeling that perhaps they were not ready, they were stupid, they wanted to drop out some of them.

05:57 - They wanted to go back to their own countries. And I’m sitting there listening to them and I’m like how do I convey to these students who have been quite successful, who have been quite brave and courageous and adventurous and risk-takers to come to Norway so far from their respective countries that it’s a different approach and to do it in a manner which does not dent their self-esteem. So again I’m giving this anecdote so that when you as lecturers, tutors, professors, administrators encounter this instead of being dismissive or going to the most plausible explanation, it’s better to just have a conversation, go deep into it, into the idea and ask them what’s transpiring.

That was one major thing which happened. So as I mentioned a few moments ago that as a student with impairment I could have demanded a lot from my professors and teachers and administrators that why is this thing not happening in this way. Okay, I could have asked multiple questions but then the question is what happened when I became a lecturer? There was a problem like there is this question of hitting the administrative wall. There is a question of the bureaucratic structures.

07:37 - You cannot make things so flexible, so lucid, so fluid that there’s no way of standardizing it. You have to follow some checkboxes. You have to fill them up.

07:53 - And when that happened to me I kind of understood, yes you’ve got to be reasonable, you’ve got to be pragmatic, got to understand. Again, all of this is trial and error.

08:10 - All of this comes from being in situations where in the core assumptions which I had, premises from where I was driving at, were kind of undermined.

08:26 - I came as I said in the previous presentation from the premise of students should have a voice, they have to be critical, they have to have ownership and responsibility, be an expert and all of that. And then when you come to the other side you see, oh yes if the student is that and if you want to accommodate the request of the student how do you do it, how do you let it pass through the university system.

08:53 - Very crucial. And then again another mentioned some time ago that Gagan, you are talkative, you are social, you can do this.

09:05 - I like this dialogical way of pedagogics. I have pedagogics lab which is pretty dialogical, like a bit Socratic in its nature, you know. I might ask questions, I might provoke people to answer to me, students. And I enjoy that way of learning because that kind of dialectical debate makes you to think critically. But as I said some students found out that why is Gagan not saying what he has to say, why is he asking us the question? Isn’t he supposed to say, teach us? And for me it was like what am I doing? I’m supposed to teach them? Because I’m just 26, 27, that’s how old I was.

And some of them were 52 years old. Health professionals coming from Zambia, one of them almost the age of my dad. And how do I say to him that listen I’m going to ask you questions, I’m not going to give you answers. And I would like you to reach to the answer. So, again that conflict, I have a particular style of teaching, but if your style of engaging with the audience and perhaps that style might be anathema for some groups of students. So very, very crucial ideas again for people to just wander about.

Yeah, as you see here in this picture, the idea is, that when I am a lecturer with impairment, I intuitively understand that there’s impairment, but I did not get it that if there is a student on a wheelchair, for her it is very, very important or for him it’s very, very important that I don’t have the lecture in some inaccessible place and for me I had never thought about it and I’m being honest about this. Earlier, because as you remember from my previous presentation, that I came from a business background.

11:39 - So for me to think about these issues of inclusion was bit difficult, but then I…

11:49 - The moment you meet other people, the moment you interact with the students who have different needs, you understand, ah she needs that we should meet on the first floor and not in some corner. Does that building have accessible toilet? Or is there like a small step just before the toilet which is so common in Norway, it’s unbelievable.

12:19 - For other disabilities or other impairments the story is different. If you are vision impaired person it’s a different story. For me as a student I always would like to get the powerpoints in advance but sometimes it’s difficult to get the powerpoints in advance, to share things in advance. Yeah and it’s it’s much more intuitive to understand the perverse effect of impairment once you see their impairment, once when it’s visible it’s in your face.

But the problem happens here. What about us, what about these people who have learning impairment who don’t want to accept partially that they have an impairment and how many of these students just stay quiet. And how do you engage with these students.

13:06 - This is so, so important that I have not found an answer to this question. It’s again trial and error. But the most important thing is to be open-minded, to be sensitive and to be inclusive. And to lend an ear to their story and then to appreciate the fact that these people are coming up to you and making an effort to talk to you and not just say “just put in a little bit of extra effort and you’ll get it”.

13:40 - That might not be the case with some students.

13:44 - Yeah, so which slide is this? Yeah, the tree thing. One size fits all.

13:56 - Again, you know as Einstein so poignantly said, if all of us are genius in some way, shape or form. I’m bear facing it, but if you’re assessing or judging then the capacity of a fish to climb a tree, she or he will fail miserably and feel it’s stupid.

14:20 - So it’s just so important that we understand that we have constraints, resource constraints, I’m constrained, effort constraint, we have bureaucratic hassle. But in those constraints what best can we offer as a lecturer or as an educator. Yeah, so that was about the whole idea of being a lecturer with impairment. So what happened when I found that I was a public speaker or an organizer with an impairment. The firs example is this whole idea that I am the presentation.

I said that I would make this joke that I’ve made the presentation for people who are severely vision dependent like all of you.

15:18 - And I could give this presentation by just what’s there in my head, speaking. I could do storytelling very naturally, very easily. And this fantastic incident happened to me, it was a conference or workshop which was organized by Kjetil and Elinor and Universell team in 2016 Belgium Kent. I was presenting and of course I was presenting without the presentation and I said to the participants that you can just close your eyes if you want to, you can listen to my voice, you don’t need your eyes to be open.

And one participant actually did that. An administrator from Ireland, she closed her eyes, she listened to the presentation. She came after half an hour once the presentation was over and said this was so nice, I could hear you, I could feel, I could understand what you were saying so well and I don’t know why people don’t do this.

16:18 - I felt that there was less stress, I absorbed the lot and it was so heartening that it happened to me. But again, as time progressed what you realize is that you cannot do that for all groups of individuals. If there is a participant, a person who’s hard of hearing, who’s deaf. What do you do with that group if you don’t have sign language interpretation. It’s very, very crucial to have these things contrasted.

16:59 - The next incident or the event is from where I was organizing a panel discussion. It’s again an anecdote which happened last year, 12th of February approximately, 2019 in Berkeley in West of California Berkeley. I organized a panel discussion titled Rethinking diversity, reintroducing disability. And again, I am a novice as I said it this is all trial and error, I have never done this before. And I thought that I was being pretty inclusive, but then one of the persons, one of the major professors from there, she asked me this question: Gagan, in your panel where is the person of color? And for me it was like, because I have never thought on those lines, through the racial lines, never had taught that to myself, perhaps I am the person of color? And she’s like no, no, but where is the African-American representative? And I was like sorry I did not think about this and I tried to incorporate her request but it was too late.

The die had already been cast. Other questions about like, never had I thought that people would say don’t wear scented products. I often entered elevators in Norway, perhaps it’s not just in Norway, but there’s this overwhelmingly strong scent of a perfume and nobody is there in the elevator and I had never thought about it, for me it was like wow, this person had a very strong perfume.

18:48 - Out there people were dropping this as a condition, people were expecting this, they say this to the audience in advance, this whole concept of what’s a safe space. If you get too much verbal, visual input you can go out and paint or just stay quiet. And again these ideas, two years ago I would have just on a theoretical level said yeah, what is this, this makes no sense, but then I was there, trying to organize things, trying to engage with people, undertake public speaking engagements and so on.

I found out that it was very, very complex. That’s why the question of diversity, that’s why the question of universal design of a learning environment, because again the more sensitivity we have the easier it becomes for us to respond to, to relate to these ideas. Otherwise it’s always about us.

20:01 - Stop being such a snowflake. The dismissive approach. This was the picture which I was talking about from Belgium Gent.

20:12 - I think Elinor and Kjetil might remember that day, when the disability service provider or officer from Ireland came up to me. This is the picture about, this was very, very important on multiple levels.

20:32 - A: I was representing the opportunities for postdoc equity and networking without being a postdoc. I was organizing it on their behalf. They had never thought about including disability within the diversity talk because whenever they thought of diversity the idea was it has to be the racial diversity or the gender diversity or the sexual orientation or the transgender people and so on but what about disability? So when I was organizing this even as you see, if you can, there are people who are you could say they are monolithic in the sense that all of them are white excluding me.

But my question was that what’s the purpose, why am I organizing this event? And then I had to come to a realization that we have to understand reality through different lenses. If I tell Kjetil’s story then I kind of disempowered Kjetil. Kjetil has to tell his story, his struggles, his trials, his joys. his successes The becoming a researcher with the impairment, what transpired. These things are overlapping but just to put things into perspective, the first thing which was expected of me was to share my material and powerpoint and all this information in advance and although I expected that as a student, when I wanted my teachers and professors to send it to me, but then I became a researcher and I was going to give a seminar or a presentation or that when Elinor asked me, Gagan can you share your PowerPoint and I shared the PowerPoint to her seven minutes before coming here.

22:31 - I was there till the end you know trying to modify it, make it better.

22:37 - But you have to understand that for this happened to me in Trondheim. This person said can you do this one day in advance so that I could send it to my interpreters, a deaf and hard-of-hearing researcher, because how will I understand the concept of bounded agency or structured individualization or capability input or conversion handicap when you would be peeking and often I am accused of too fast this time I was speaking very, very slow, making a very deliberate effort and she said Gagan, slow down a lot because my interpreters have to talk to me when you are saying things.

This was very hard for me, very, very difficult for me, this whole experience. And then again this question about that the structural challenges of finding an accessible room, finding an accessible building with an accessible toilet, finding the resources for having an interpreter. What if the person does not speak Norwegian language and wants to participate? Could you afford an interpreter in English? All those questions come up.

23:57 - This is a podcast which I participated in and that’s why I requested Elinor to have this in this format where things are getting recorded because once when this presentation is over there would be people who would want to listen to it, who want to reflect upon it, who are not present out here. Like one of my colleagues or my friends who listened when I went to the podcast with Debra Ruth in the United States. And when I was disseminating my research and my experiences this person from Germany comes to me and says where is the transcript Gagan.

And I’m like oh my, where is the transcript. That question I had never thought about it. What do you mean by where is the transcript? I went back to Debra. Debra said yeah it’s in the process of production Gagan, it’ll be done. Fantastic. Six months later in Norway I was invited at my university to participate in the podcast Ask and don’t assume. Very interesting podcast. I asked so what do we do about the transcript, because this is not accessible.

We don’t have the resources Gagan. This is a small shop. Just to put things into the perspective that how it’s not always easy, where you have the right intentions, the right effort, the right kind of approach, often you are impeded by the environment. So the most important thing for me from my perspective and the universal design team perspective should be like this idea of walking the talk you know. You just stop talking about it all the time and see if you can kind of come up with a way to operationalize it, the universal design.

See if you could take some steps, like the MEP principle, mapping the needs of your audience, the expectations of your audience, understanding intersectionality in the broadest possible sense, because if you have understood this in a broad sense then it will not be difficult for you to address small minor changes. Let me back up a bit and explain it a bit more. If you have understood that students coming from global South come from a different cultural background, then you would be able to come up with a way to assess them, teach them and deal with them in a much more inclusive way.

And it’s very, very important that this mapping happens. And this is very crucial that be it you being a researcher, lecturer, tutor you understand your audience pretty well. The other part is the effort equation which I just mentioned some moments ago in passing that you have to be very proactive, you have to be proactively prepared, you have to have a sense of greater flexibility, you have to deal with the uncertainty a bit better and if you can do that then the outcome could potentially be that you have better engagement with your audience.

27:30 - But that does not mean that you would be successful as I say, the only thing which is guaranteed is learning, that you will learn something, like what I learned when I was in at UC Berkeley about fragrance allergies or about safe spaces or about where is the person of color which never happened to me or never occurred to me. So again, learning is the thing which is guaranteed, nothing else. And then the pragmatic principle that you’ve got to balance out things, you’ve got to understand that there’s a trade-off, there are expectations and needs of participants but there are also resource constraints.

And what can I offer. And sometimes it’s very important that the lecturers, professors, administrators just be open to a conversation, just be sensitive in for a talk and not just close themselves and say no this is way beyond my reach. Sometimes you only need to listen to the other perspective and help them, enable them taking few steps, it’s very crucial.

28:36 - So as I said there’s a thinker and a doer, I’m just making it very simplistic but the idea is this that often people come to workshops and seminars and camps and understand Universal Design for Learning and creating an inclusive environment and we understand the diversity and intersectionality and there’s a problem which you’ve got to fix, we’ve got to do this, that, and there’s a lot of thinking which happens, a lot of good discussions but then there’s not too much of doing, not too much of following it up.

And what is most important is as I said like grouping in other people, be more solution oriented being more inclusive and so on.

29:22 - Thank you now we can have more discussions. .