Committee:
Kihong Ku, Thomas Jefferson University, USA
Christopher Pastore, Thomas Jefferson University, USA
Lizbeth Goodman, University College Dublin, Ireland
Bonnie Stewart, University of Windsor, Canada

Jess Mitchell, Ph.D.
SMARTlab Practice-Based PhD in Architecture and Design Research, Thomas Jefferson University
CC-BY 4.0 International

I was motivated to do this thesis because I felt I was noticing something that was missing. Something was missing in the ways we were talking about and actioning inclusion in education. I watched as some learners were missed even with a pedagogical and institutional commitment to inclusion.

And now that the very notion of inclusion has become so deeply politicized and weaponized in N. America, I feel even more committed to exploring what it means, what this missing piece could be, and how to articulate all of this in a way that addresses the fuzziness and seeming weaknesses in the application of ‘inclusion’ as a concept in education.

Research Problem and Thesis

Research Problem: something is missing from Inclusion as practiced in Education
Thesis: There is a way to action inclusion in education that can address individual needs to locate and address ‘the missing middle’.

There are still learners who are falling through the gaps (encountering barriers and not having their needs met) in teaching and learning spaces. It led me to exploring what I call the ‘complex human entanglement’ that happens in the teaching and learning space.

• When individuals with hopes, dreams, pasts, experiences, and biases come together in class communities
• When instructors have power over learners in the form of designed decisions like those in the syllabus, assessments, completion, success, and more.
• The design decisions that are made about how to construct and schedule the learning moments.
• The social and political location of the moments the class happens within
• The social and political locations of the individuals in the class
• And more…

Based on these complexities I was interested in exploring what I call the missing middle.

I was eager to explore with former students, the ways that we co-created the relational, the interpersonal, and the space, in our particular locations, the time, the current events – the entanglements, and how it impacted their missing middles…

Theories (a pluralism)

Feminism: situated knowledge(s)
Social constructivism: a community learning and supporting each other
Social constructionism: norms in our space co-created, social location
Interpretivism: the individual
Constructivism: dynamic human, location, and space entanglement

All aspects of this work embrace a ‘both, and’ – a fundamental pluralism.

In keeping with that is my borrowing from the following theoretical framings:
From Feminism, largely Haraway (1988), I use the notion of situated knowledge; here I call them knowledges, a reference to de Souza Santos (2007) and his notion of epistemicide – so, multiple feminist knowledges, situated in subjectivity and space and time, culture, history, and political contexts.

I lean on social constructivism to emphasize the collaborative learning and knowledge construction through social interaction in the class – what I call our community of practice. It aligns well with inclusive education by promoting diverse perspectives and fostering a supportive learning environment for all students.

From social constructionism – Berger & Luckmann (1967) – reality is socially constructed, is not objective but is actively constructed and negotiated by individuals within a social context. I blur the notion of social location from Berger to contemporary uses where a person is situated in a space and with a Self that is made sense of ‘by’ and ‘with’ the individual.

Interpretivism w/o relativism – individual participants were describing their own reality, and experience of a situation. I didn’t want to lose the ‘I’ in this work.

Constructivism in so far as the dynamism of people, the location and the space all made up the entanglement we found ourselves in.

There is plenty of unfinished business as it were from this slide—some of which might be interesting to take up in further research… or not. I am interested in how all of this amounts to an applied ethic of sorts, so I am not keen to overemphasize the theoretical frameworks but instead to showcase them as I have cherry-picked how to construct the solid, opaque, and transparent parts of complex human entanglement.

Literature Review: Where is Inclusion in Higher Education & Design?

• Education: Tactical and/or Socio-Emotional
• Design: Tactical and/or Socio-Emotional

Within the literature review I explored the literature within two primary domains:
Education & Design
As a pedagogue and as an inclusive design practitioner, I use the findings and tools of these two disciplines to craft my own design of teaching and learning.
What I found in the literature was what felt like a continuum that stretched between two things, not mutually exclusive things, but two things:

I called them the The Tactical and the Socioemotional

The Tactical: solve for this…

The tactical represents one kind of application of inclusion visible in both Education and in Design.

The tactical are largely logistical, functional, or presentational features: e.g., font size, text alternatives, localized content, readability, and many accessibility features.

What is shown here is a visualization from the Microsoft Inclusive Design Guide. It is something that the Design team at Microsoft produced after working closely with the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University, where I am a Senior Manager. As part of the Prosperity4All grant within the EUs Framework Programme 7, my colleagues and I called these three cross-cutting instances the permanent, the temporary, and the ephemeral. They captured the social model for disability, a foundational point in inclusive design. The social model states that in most cases the culture, architecture, or social systems are disabling – not the individual’s medical status. And that we can find commonalities in functional needs if we start from that perspective.

The Socioemotional: you should care about these things…

Another approach to actioning inclusion that the literature speaks to is what I have called the socioemotional. Namely, these are group identities that we, personally, and our institutions also sometimes tell us we SHOULD care about.

The Socioemotional shows up in social issues that require emotional intelligence to understand and address such as racism, racial inequity, patriarchy, sexism, and other social and cultural phenomena. Closeness in terminology to socio-emotional development (in children) is intentional. While children learn peer interaction, identity, sense of self, and more, the adults engaging in the socioemotional are extending an emotional intelligence to others (Thompson, 1993). The connection is an intentional act to highlight how social emotional development manifests in inclusion in adulthood.

Literature Review: Where is Inclusion in Higher Education & Design?
The Gap

The literature, my own experiences as both a practitioner of ID and an instructor contributed to this – an articulation of the Gap as I saw it.

This is an exploration of where inclusion shows up in higher education and design.

The Tactical appears in the field of Design as
In the individual: user-continued design, which includes and encourages agency, choice, and customization
In the group it shows up as: WCAG, ADA, Universal Design

The Tactical appears in the field of Education as
In the individual: IEPs individualized education plans, and UDL
In the group: UDL, Inclusive Pedagogy, and some Open Pedagogies

There is some blurriness in this chart – where approaches do not wholly fit into one box (for example UDL can be used to achieve inclusion for an individual and/or a group).

————–

The Socioemotional appears in the field of Design:
In the group as collective actions via things like Design Justice, and through disruptive approaches like Co-Design and to an extent Participatory Design.
In the field of Education, the socioemotional shows up as institutional calls for equity, some approaches to Open Pedagogy that address equity-deserving groups, and through allyship (stickers or logos and the like on office doors, syllabi, emails, etc.).

The gap I identified is that there is no articulated way of addressing the individual in the socioemotional approaches to action inclusion.
This gap is what I call the missing middle… where UDL, ADA, UD, Co-design do not address individuals.

Innovation: The Missing Middle

• I’m your only black student.
• I’m white, cis, and male, and I grew up in abject poverty.
• I don’t feel as if I belong here.
• I don’t feel seen or heard.
• I am not convinced my voice matters.
• My life is complex and filled with dependents I care for.
• Trauma: it’s more than just an event – I carry it with me cellularly.
• I’m currently in crisis and I haven’t told you.

The missing middle is where I see the following people:
I’m your only black student, what are you going to do now?
I’m white and I grew up in poverty in southwestern Louisiana, near Cancer Alley, what are you going to do now?
Or I went to public school in Atlanta where the windows are covered with cardboard blocking out the sun and also making it impossible to identify who is in the room—a deterrent for would-be drive by shootings.
I don’t feel as if I belong here, what are you going to do now?
I don’t feel seen or heard so I wind up saying a lot, or nothing…
I have had unwanted sexual advances from other students and even from professors, so I will not be showing up to class and will instead be choosing only those courses that record all lectures and allow for remote participation.
I am not convinced my voice matters
My life is complex and filled with dependents I care for
Trauma: it’s more than just an event – I carry it with me on my skin
I am not performing the way I was at the beginning of the term and you don’t know why, but my husband had a heart attack and is currently in hospice care.
I was doing so well, getting an A and then I became addicted to opioids and the methadone clinic is only open during class times. (Gannon 2018, p. 28)
The reason I keep saying that my grandparent has died is because I keep having miscarriages and I don’t really want to tell you that.

Each of these is based on a real person, a real experience, a real description of a gap or a barrier to learning. As you can see, many of these short descriptions will present in complex ways. Many are invisible to instructors and Universal Design for Learning or even Open Pedagogies will not touch these individuals… is there a way to try to address that?

Mixed Qualitative Methods:
Reflexive Thematic Analysis and Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis

• Invited all members of 2 former (matriculated) graduate cohorts in Inclusive Design
• Semi-structured interviews (n=10)
• 3 x consent
• Why no demographic content?
• Reflexive thematic analysis (iterative coding that let the taxonomy emerge)
• Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) (that does not lose the “I” in this work)

So, I aimed to connect with former students of Inclusive Design in a Master’s in ID program that I teach in. I invited only those graduate students who had already matriculated and were no longer my student and thus not in a relationship of power with me (as much as possible). I still write letters of reference for these graduates, and made clear that their participation would not negatively impact that at all.

The individuals who opted in were self-selecting to be part of this work. I had conversations with all of them: in all cases I have audio and or video and text transcripts. I have approximately 18 hours of content that I coded using MaxQDA 24 that allowed me to annotate and code the ”data”. I used PowerPoint for any visualizations I produced.

I asked the participants for their consent 3x though my REB required I do so once. I wanted to honour the dynamism of time. In the course of the writing of this thesis, the participants have seen Inclusion weaponized, leaving some without jobs – impacting those most precarious.

Some of the conversations occurred on web conferencing tools, remotely. I have still never met some of the participants in person (ever). Three participants elected to meet in person in agreed-upon locations that included a park bench and an individual’s apartment.

Where relevant I have included personal details that the individual shared. I have done this narratively and conversationally to represent the deeply humanized approach. Because the focus here is on inclusion, it demonstrates the unimportance of demographic information in addressing the individual. Where relevant to the “voice” of the individual, I have included identity information with continued consent.

I used Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) because through its reflexive-ness I was able to iteratively code, letting taxonomies emerge and flex.

I also chose to use Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) because I did not want to lose the individual’s voice – the ”I”

The following are the result of the RTA.

Themes

• Readiness
• The Relational
• Stickiness
• Self-awareness
• Self to Other
• Designing / Architecting

The themes were already there, here they are identified. They are not shown here as proof of something–they are here to show the complexity and interrelatedness of these as ideas.

They are subjective to my own gaze at the many hours of conversation. They show some of the elements that emerged as important in notable ways:

• Sometimes what was notable was the same for a number of participants – a sort of amplitude
• Other times what was notable was essential for one individual – a highly personalized point of go/no-go

The subjective and qualitative approach to this work allows for the research to not get stuck in the numbers game of “majority” or “sameness” – something that is essential to addressing those on the edges who are not statistically significant but are ethically and entirely relevant in inclusion efforts.

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Readiness:

Participants often spoke about the timing being right for them, about the work on self they had done before being confronted by the perspective shift of ID, and the slower speed of building trust. They mentioned things coming together in a way they could not have anticipated or forced. Participants spoke about this time with an almost hushed uncertainty, often fixing their gaze away from me, the listener—it seemed to signify an inward, private tug. Readiness came upon them; it was not necessarily something emerging intentionally from them or chosen. This coalescence involved elements of time and speed and place that ultimately contributed to individual readiness.

Everyone’s definition of readiness will necessarily be different, but the ethos is similar. Readiness in each participant was linked to some awareness of previous habits or approaches that no longer served the individual. In other words, a readiness to grow and change necessitated a break with previous habits. That break came with some cosmic dissonance and a queasiness often triggered by moments of awe (some called them ‘ah-ha’ moments).

Relational:

The relational experiences are essential for some students to participate in the brave space. Some spoke of being shocked that they felt so seen and heard by the community. Students specifically spoke of trust being built over time and being demonstrated through consistency in actions and overall integrity.

They expressed this being unusual in education for them, this being what it must feel like to be a colleague of someone (as opposed to their lesser). In some cases, participants experienced discomfort when they realized how seen they were.

In some cases, the participant felt that the familiarity led to being known enough that they felt a greater level of trust. And with that trust they were able to let go, be more open, be more experimental, and act without fear of judgement. It allowed students to push and to be pushed in ways they had never experienced in coursework, and this enabled deeper considerations of wicked problems and the hard work of inclusive design.

Stickiness:

This was those bits that stuck with students beyond the course and had an impact on them we might call outcomes, but here are referred to as stickiness. Stickiness can be concepts, instruments, moments, approaches, and more. The students in this study frequently spoke of the concept of brave space being one that stuck with them and that they have shared in diverse contexts. Brave spaces; QRD; pairing; structured structurelessness all arose as sticky concepts.

Self-awareness:

In retrospect, several participants spoke about a discomfort and uncertainty with just about everything at the beginning of the course. They report having experiences or moments pointed out to them that caused them to re-think much of what they had been doing before, what had been done around them, and how it all might be done differently. Their discomfort and uncertainty came from the up-ending of habituated and assumed ways things were done.

Without clarity with the ways to do things, and with a practice that includes questioning everything, there is not much that is immovable. This might be akin to that moment where those first experiencing inclusive design and the perspective shift it carries worry about slipping into relativism—they were struck by what felt like utter structurelessness. It requires a reorganization and recalibration of priorities, vision, what we choose to look at, and what we value. Many expressed a journey through recalibrating self into a modeled type that they wanted to experiment with.

Self to Others:

Many spoke about the changes in self-awareness and the great journey from self to other— As Anna Deveare Smith puts it, committing “some of their lives to being ambassadors to that which is not you” (Dorian, 2020, 10:10)

There was agreement that by about Week 6 something began to shift in the course community. One participant described it as an ah-ha moment when he realized that it is about self, but it is a rebuilding of self in a situated context that is marked by meaningful relationships with others. From that ah-ha moment, the students dig in deeper to explore how to identify those on the edges.

One student described realizing that in ID there is a social component, an emotional component, a technological component, a time-based component, and an historical component.

Designing/architecting:

Many of the respondents spoke of how the authenticity of the course made them take themselves more seriously. They were more engaged and more in charge of their own learning. They felt a commitment to the community to show up ready to discuss tough topics. They felt a commitment to come as their best self, including being prepared. They spoke both about how they felt more professional in the class and how they felt their work reflected more soul.

Students spoke about the way the course began; they spoke about moments of disruption in conversations within the class. There were moments for each student that were still etched in their memory. They processed the moments and spoke about how they impacted the learning. Moments of conflict, of discomfort, of resolution, of tension and then release were all moments commented on. They reflected upon how those moments contributed to the building of a community—sharing those moments with others mattered.

At this moment I feel it is important to underscore the point about the falseness of any listing of themes or steps to achieve inclusion

• because it will fail to capture what coalesces
• because the lists do not fundamentally address the complexity of individuals in structured spaces with others in community, context, self, group dynamics, power, privilege, social location, political timing, etc.
• because they will not represent the complexities, the dynamism, the entanglement.

And the ways we’ve been talking about inclusion have not captured this complexity, so I don’t want to further muddy the space with some shortlist of outcomes.

I want, instead to stress the layered with dynamism.

I lean on this art piece, called Entropia by Julie Mehretu, a piece that shows a place (at the bottom you see a grid structure), it is layered, dynamic, dimensional, ordered and disordered, it is complexity. It is Complex Human Entanglement

Now What?

I will offer the following though:

When we take from the themes we can see how the following can begin to fill gaps for individuals in the socioemotional application of inclusion:

Building trust can contribute to READINESS
Nurturing relationships is the RELATIONAL
Reflection throughout is the STICKINESS
Acknowledging Self is the SELF-AWARENESS
in Extending this generosity to others is the SELF TO OTHERS
And in Designing for Flexibility we are DESIGNING and ARCHITECTING the conditions where bravery (and even transformation) can occur

And from the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, I offer the following individual voices…

Daphne

Daphne I think of my drama teacher, I’ve always had it in me that I was like I loved performing and being a dramatic person. He didn’t instill that in me. He just simply allowed me to be who I was and for that, I thank him for the opportunity. Like the distinction between like oh they changed me, but they also didn’t like direct me in one way or another. They simply just accepted who I was and that allowed me to thrive.

Jess The pedagogues that have had an impact on Daphne are the ones that created space to grow. This harkens work in pedagogy that embraces the liminal–“the role of the pedagogue in the complex grey area of training where we are not doing therapy, but also not not doing therapy” (Mitchell, 2022).

THIS IS THE RELATIONAL and the designed — architecting the space to let Daphne thrive.
This worked for Daphne; for others it will not. This is a pedagogy of one.

Kate

Jess      Why did you come back after I pushed you?

Kate     Umm. <laughs heartily> OK,
1. Southern Italian. OK?!
2. You know, that’s just life.
I was raised that way. <with indignant eyebrows the likes of which dare someone to mess with them> And I’m not a freaking quitter. I… no, no way in hell like, are you kidding me? I am so stubborn and I knew that you understood me. I knew that you understood that I just need to be like, yelled at sometimes. <both laugh> And that’s what I need in someone who’s pushing me. You know?! But I also, you know, I appreciated that you wouldn’t just leave me to drive, if that makes sense. You would also guide me in the way I needed.

Jess I couldn’t be sure, but Kate and I had gotten to know each other well enough that I knew they were capable of the kind of work they ultimately produced. But I wasn’t seeing it… yet… and so I said as much. It was a risky moment—I could have lost them. Instead, from that moment on I got to see Kate dig in, dig deep, and produce some great work at just the right time.

We can say we need to personalize the approach, but we don’t say how. Kate here needed to be pushed. If I pushed them or other students without creating some trust I could lose them, I could lose them dramatically. Someone who does not present as Kate does might completely retreat. This required an element of emotional intelligence shared between me and Kate through our conversations – through our trust-building in our relationship over time.

This worked for Kate; This is their self-awareness at work and the relational trust we had built. For others, this might not work and might even cause harm. This is a pedagogy of one. Kate let me know this is what they needed…

Lucy

Lucy     I have to for me to learn. Sometimes I do need to spar with somebody.
Jess      What does sparring look like for you?
Lucy     Ohm challenging the norm. Right. Sometimes, like I’ve done this. I don’t think I’ve really done it with you, but I think I’ve done it definitely with the—everybody knows that I pick a fight with a teacher, like every teacher that I’ve been [in class] with
Jess      But Lucy, you didn’t spar with me…
Lucy     Because you had no ego.
Lucy     Yeah. So it’s the ones with the biggest egos that it turns into a fight versus a spar right? And the ones where they feel like I’m challenging their authority OR challenging their knowledge, their role as the knowledge keeper. You know?
Jess      Yes.
Lucy     Yeah. So the only ones that actually fight back with me. Are usually the ones with the biggest egos….

Jess Lucy is describing something I have often felt about good relationships in education too—they can feel like play, like stirring each other up, like pushing buttons because you know each other well enough to trust you will stop before you cause harm. Or if you miss that moment, you will be skilled enough in apology that you will be able to make it function again. Lucy and I had an interesting moment where we played together—bouncing some language around, playing with who can reappropriate language and where and how they can do so. Neither of us held back, there was a tense moment, we didn’t agree, and still we persisted in trusting and respecting each other. We heard each other on a cellular level, and it had a profound impact on me. Sometimes readiness, timing, and a good poke from a trusted collaborator works!

Lucy prods and spars because it helps her learn, trust, and build relationships. Others avoid sparring entirely. This is a pedagogy of one.

Ned

Jess     Why did you come back?
Ned     Yeah. Yeah, I do also remember the moment of like talking about marks and then like I even stated it in one of my earlier reflections of like Jess wouldn’t do that to us like I knew you understood the value of our marks not even like even for my situation where it also was my funding like and I had no way to tell what is the lowest threshold for that because they don’t tell us because of course of course they don’t. Yeah, I trusted you and I was like eventually I think I got to the point of like, if I’m going down the wrong path again, I’m sure Jess would speak up about it. So I just kind of did. I was like, let’s just try this and I just forgot about what’s right or what’s wrong in the sense of the classroom, because I knew no matter what, you’re going to kind of be there to catch me. If I started flopping…
Jess     Beautiful. And I didn’t need to. Ned, this is your hero’s narrative. You know that, right?
Ned     Yeah, I [just] realized it too.

Jess Big moments like this are why this matters. We both left this conversation lifted. These are the moments: the gifts people can give each other—reciprocally.

Trust and gifts — This is a pedagogy of one.

Student X

Student X describes that one of the outcomes from this class was a “greater awareness of when they are using their privilege.” They have changed how they interact with people—they are practicing it differently: being vulnerable, being open, being transparent and sharing their own reflections on interactions with other people.

Student X ended our conversation with a proud smile, saying, “My disruptions piece is over here on the wall still. I created a list of who I prioritize…”

Student X was clear about their own privilege and had some awareness of that coming into the class. They described the class as allowing them to bring in their extant skill set, put the barriers down, and learn what they needed to: “the socioemotional, emotional intelligence training”.

Student X had a transformation from Self to Other. It was hard and this is their outcome.

This is a pedagogy of one.

This Was Designed

Just as we can see how
Building trust
Nurturing relationships
Reflecting
Self-awareness
Extension to others
And designing with flexibility can address the unique needs of individuals, we can explore why this is largely missing from inclusion efforts or inclusion conversations…

First, we must realize the limitation of policies or approaches that only address groups… And then we need to elevate the importance of the relational – and the entanglement that comes with that

Culturally we have arrived at a place that is represented by those things we have collectively designed as our singular chosen framework for reasoning and decision-making and a demonstration of rigour.

That place is committed to scale, certainty, inflexibility, fear of relativism, positivism, neo-liberalism, dichotomous flaws, and biases.

Designed

Scale

Certainty

Inflexibility

Fear of relativism

Positivism

Neo-liberalism

Dichotomous flaws

Biases

This is designed and designable.

We make decisions based on cognitive frameworks that we arrive at through history, teaching, learning, and all of our influences.

The way we think impacts the decisions we make. Our decisions are not neutral, they are impacted by many things and they exert our approach on others. When we make a decision that impacts another we are designer/deciders

Our thinking is influenced by the arc of history and of cognitive frameworks–I chose to glance at the shift in cognitive frameworks at the dawn of the Enlightenment and the peak of the Scientific Revolution.

That is worth exploring.

It has shaped and limited our thinking resulting in weak logic, incomplete policy, and flawed design… That flawed design is everywhere around us and, even when it isn’t intentional, can exclude people. And if our cognitive frameworks contribute to an overall design that inadvertently or unexpectedly or unintentionally, or quite intentionally excludes some, it is an ethical edge.

I think there is an ethical responsibility as an instructor to worry about missing someone or something… We are making ethical decisions and if we don’t talk about them we’re going to have this gap…

I see Kevin Gannon doing this in his work and I read it as a battle cry for the stories, the voices, and the experiences of individuals.

Over-indexed	Missing Middle	What we fear
Scale	Doubt	Costly
Certainty	Uncertainty / Incompletion What we don’t know (yet)	Nihilism
Inflexibility	Flexibility	Amoral
Absolutism	Discomfort	Relativism
Positivism	Ethical lines / Edge Cases	Unethical, Unfair
Neo-liberalism	Ethical practices	Communism / Socialism
Dichotomous	Quantum entanglement	Indecision
Biases	Openness	“Reverse” biases

Missing Middle (thinking)

What is the dominant paradigm and why is it held up as the one way, why is it not only over-indexed but accepted as the one way? – de Sousa Santos calls this epistemicide. But just like in the socioemotional approaches to inclusion, there is a missing middle in our thinking about ways to structure our epistemological pursuits…

We arrived at a dualism through history.

Either	Or
Mind	Body
Quantitative	Qualitative
White	Black
Scientific	Unscientific
Known	Unknown
Good	Bad
Specific	Abstract
Able	Disabled

In my thesis I argue that some of this dualism dates back at least to the height of the scientific revolution and the dawn of the enlightenment. It all seemed like a good idea: logic and Mind took primacy over feeling and the gut and the philosophical and the spiritual. But what did we lose with this perspective?

It has led to positivism, economic rationalism, neo-liberalism – and it has seeped into all of our institutions and is at the core of many of our contemporary ethical issues because it suggests there is a knowable, clear solution – when there is not – it is merely a line we draw to establish an ethical edge.

And it has impacted our higher education institutions too:
Macfarlane states, “over-reliance on dualisms among higher education scholars has adverse effects including narrowing the possibilities of research design and inhibiting intellectual advancement within the field”

There are no ethics here, there are no conversations about ethical edges, there are no individuals struggling.

So, because we all make decisions and therefore, we are all designers… I wanted to have a way of expressing how to do this decision-making… and doing it with explicit and transparent ethical ideas. So, I came up with the following instrument.

Question:

Why is this the way it is?

What is the history?

What were the decisions that were made to get here?

Reflect:

Who were the designer/deciders

What was the social location of these decisions?

How can we understand the ethics of this?

Disrupt

How can we do this differently?

How can we think through any of the other ways to design/decide this?

Through questioning and reflecting, now that we have revealed historical inequities and harm, ethical edges, biases, unintended consequences, flawed design, flawed decision-making .. The designer/decider chooses how to incorporate that information into the re-design as an historically-located designer/decider.

At stake is the opportunity to address inequities, ethics, historical harm, and flawed design/decision-making.

Outcome

There are real ways we can “design” our teaching and learning environments so that the opportunity for inclusion is fulsome and available to all.

The Missing Middle: Thank you for your kind attention!   Questions? Email me at jmitchell[at]ocadu.ca or FNLN[at]gmail

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