Thinking differently - ontology

 The discipline of education and what there is to know - interpretive based on situated experiences, differentiation and reflective practices. Community of practice and teacher education and development is said to be socially constructed. There is no one reality but multiple interpretations, situations and applications depending on context.

The discipline of digital accessibility sits within the IT discipline which has its roots in a more positivist domain and the guidance surrounding digital accessibility relates to the web and is defined as a checklist known as the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). Testing of products and coding is primarily scientific or formulaic.

The area of disability is said to be socially l constructed in that disability is not a singular thing it is made up of people’s experience of their own disability and no two people with the same condition experience it the same, the lived experience and others understanding of it is subjective and therefore interpreted differently. When it comes to accessibility in the physical world this is often described using the terms universal design or inclusive design that appreciate that one size does not fit all but there needs to be flexibility in design to meet a range of needs as well as involve a range of people in the development of accessibility environments and products to capture the various needs.

The discipline of digital accessibility sits therefore in some conflict with these two disciplines in that it has reduced something that is experienced in many ways to a singular checklist, yet this checklist is the primary means and guidance to apply digital accessibility.

There are models of disability that are relevant too, there are two main models recognised currently. The medical model of disability and the social model. The medical model sees disability as more of a criteria of features where patients need fixing or treated to fit into what is considered to be the healthy typical norm. Often solutions for disability are accommodations that are added to be able to function or participate in mainstream society, such as assistive technologies, medicine and additional accommodations to address or fix the person’s disablement, it heavily focuses on a persons disability that is the barrier to their engagement.

Social justice, social responsibility and the humanistic perspective- Sonka.

The social model on the other hand sees many disabling barriers as being in society, for example inaccessible environments, attitudes or poorly designed services as creating the barriers for those with disabilities. One example is ramps rather than stairs means that everyone can enter a building whereas stairs create a barrier for someone in a wheelchair, therefore the barrier isn’t the person’s disability preventing them from entering a building. This is where universal design is closely linked to the social model of disability. Inclusive design takes this a step further by involving people in the design of services and environments to ensure they are built understanding users diverse needs as much as possible.

The current legal guidelines for digital accessibility are based upon a checklist to ensure websites are built with accessibility in mind and therefore prevent barriers, however guidance from the government suggests auditing websites for any fixes needed, which has been criticised as being interpreted as a reactive process to adding on accessibility at the end rather than proactive designing for accessibility. 

The WCAG guidelines also come from the discipline of web development and IT and therefore aimed at a singular profession, there is much discussion in literature that this message says that this is the responsibility of some people, not all. Whereas the social model of disability needs society as a whole needs to proactively create services and environments without barriers. If the guidelines and instruction is directed at the IT profession it reduces the audience and assumptions to a smaller set of people.

EDI - Digital Accessibility is part of the equity and inclusion agenda and something we should all know about to be inclusive in our digital society.

In education teachers deal with differentiation in the classroom to address spectrums of needs and is situated in a classroom environment with different learners in different classroom or topic settings, they too as public body employees have to meet the needs of their learners digitally by adopting the WCAG guidelines in digital and online resources, yet teaching and learning inclusively goes far beyond the technical requirements of a document. Teachers are encouraged to adopt the universal design for learning framework to account for engagement, means of representation and multiple means of assessment, which is more subjective that just a singular criteria or technical checklist.

As a society we have guidelines that were meant for the technical profession being adopted by others, who find them complex for everyday adoption. The emphasis on digital accessibility education is on the digital skillset and currently overlooks the underpinning intentions of the social model of disability as a means for society to prevent barriers. Most education sits within the digital skillset and not within EDI or the low hanging fruit skills that everyone can apply. This research therefore aims to reframe the needs and skills for digital accessibility back to the discipline of equality and inclusion awareness and align it to the social model of disability and the low hanging fruit skills that everyone can apply, not just those in the technical disciplines.

Retrofit - wider proactive implementation. The education to prepare people for the world starts at school as a proactive means of preparing the next generation to contribute to society, yet digital accessibility is currently taught much later in life in the workplace and mostly to a small proportion of people in technical professions. This later teaching in the workplace or addressing of the subject still sees accessibility as something to do reactively, yet only accounts for content made by organisations not be everyone in our digital society. 

Treating and placing digital accessibility in the technical profession keeps it distant from the main purpose of it being part of equality, diversity and inclusion and as a topic removed from its intended purpose. This research aims to align digital accessibility awareness back to the social model of disability and as a subject to be able to discuss and explore the broader interpretation of disability and the needs of those who have disabilities such as permanent, temporary and situational, another interpretive notion of accessibility needs being diverse where one size does not fit all.

As a subject that holds a multitude of needs and interpretations both towards those who live with disabilities and those situated within different teaching and classroom environments this research sits ontologically within the interpretive paradigm to be able to plan and structure research.

Research findings are going to be varied and not conform to any singular scale of measurement. In piloting a new curriculum that promotes much discussion and application the methodology would need to reflect the voices and experiences of those participating.

The teaching profession is underpinned by observations, reflective practices and decisions based on situated contexts that involve many factors that inform decisions and for teachers to help develop a new curriculum never taught before this maybe interpreted depending on the teachers knowledge and teaching experience, but by combining different experiences and input this steers the research to social constructivist methods of coproduction and collaboration that reflects the teaching community of practice. The fact that teachers will develop the toolkit and recommendations at the end mean that not only will teachers be working together to design and express ideas but it will inform and support the wider community of teachers and be relatable. This research will not be conforming to a checklist but designing a curriculum and an introduction to digital skills and awareness that would be appropriate for the level of learners they teach and what could work in their shared classroom environments.

The literature review will explore what activities have already been done to teach digital accessibility and universal design to ascertain what will be useful for the school and beginner’s level classroom and what will help underpin the social model of disability lens.

The subject being multidisciplinary means it sits in a more diverse area than just a checklist, it combines conceptual understanding of disability which is described as a social construct, similar to that of understanding a range of needs. The area of digital skills to be able to action needs is more reductionist but when combined with discussing and exploring needs brings it into the fold of social construction of knowledge and making connections between different people and different solutions.

The subject is multidisciplinary and therefore it will explore the layers of knowledge needed to understand the needs for digital accessibility in society, by combining activities from the learning objectives of conceptual understanding of disability, understanding barriers and needs and basic digital skills appropriate for beginners.

Action research is usually used to test and refine new interventions, but in this case this is a topic teachers do not yet teach and isn’t an intervention to add to an existing topic, therefore this study needs to explore the planning of an appropriate curriculum as well as the support needed to introduce and teach it. This expands the action research to being far more than a cyclical evaluation of lessons and towards a more iterative approach to plan, test and evaluate.

Pedagogy the art, craft and science of teaching is described in this way as a combination of pedagogy as planned, enacted and experienced and in this case we need to consider all aspects of the teaching process. Therefore building upon the action research to adopt a more design based research approach, often used to coproduce and evaluate teaching and learning materials. Design based research is traditionally broken into stages to iteratively build upon the last. In this case the model of pedagogy as planned, enacted and experienced fits particularly well as each stage builds upon the next.

The planning stage will be led by identified examples from the literature of teaching and learning activities appropriate for beginners level that were evaluated and discussed as techniques or activities that work. Using a workshop or focus group approach teachers can explore what would work for learners at school level but also what they feel comfortable being able to teach as someone not necessarily from a technical profession or discipline, as this may be taught by others only within the EDI lens.

Pragmatism explores the ‘what works’ approach and the diagram offered by ?? offers a research design that closely aligns to design based research with identifying a need and planning to address it, cycles of testing and making recommendations at the end. Using this as a structure to inform a design based approach also fits the pedagogy as planned, enacted and experienced model.

Design based research requires a primarily social constructivist approach to co-produce knowledge and make recommendations to support teachers to deliver the basic principles of digital accessibility awareness, however pragmatism offers a mixed method opportunity to bring in other means of review to reinforce findings, such as adding assessment or quiz scores to ascertain levels of learning all of which are an appropriate measure within the teaching discipline. This study therefore will take a socially constructed design based approach but take some influence from the opportunities of mixed methods to triangulate or offer deeper insight in line with the teaching profession.

To read: 

Interpretive - Social constructivism (why and what is currently there - discuss the teaching discipline and disability discipline and IT digital skills discipline debate)

Knowledge for education around digital accessibility is coming from a different discipline - WCAG. Accessibility is related to disability (Youngblood) - rather than an extension of this it is being built and developed as knowledge for the technical disciplines with little education framed by the disciplines of disabilities- e.g most papers that cover digital accessibility in teaching are within web development, software or engineering rather than an extension of teaching equality and inclusion in a digital world. This study will address that gap to bring it back into the classroom under the umbrella and mainstream subject of EDI where everyday digital knowledge and skills can be applied.

Where to find new knowledge for the discipline - teaching has observations, reflective practice, assessment and cycles of reflection and improvement, planning for differentiation and diversity.

Action research/Design based research/pragmatism and mixed methods influence

To do:

Aims/objectives/questions 

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There is no one reality

The topic of digital accessibility has no one reality. It has been described as multidisciplinary in that it touches on several aspects, such as the conceptual understanding of disability, procedural knowledge and technical skills (Lewthwaite Ref).  (Break this down one by one - this topic then sits under the overarching discipline of teaching).

Papers have identified it’s connection to teaching about social justice (Ref), social responsibility (ref) and when it comes to disability this is mainly covered by blindness (ref) or several papers where activities identify types of disabilities and what digital solutions can be offered (Refs). However most research papers relate to the technical characteristics of making content accessible to the WCAG guidelines (refs) and sit within web development (refs) software development and engineering (refs) or digital media (refs) and library resources (ref).

There is little reference specifically to the pedagogy of teaching, such as the full process of planning, enacting or reflecting on teaching (ref) or to meeting the needs of the social model of disability as a teaching aim (ref). Most papers are singular descriptive and reflective accounts of teaching that offer little empirical evidence towards wider best practice for teaching digital accessibility awareness as a multidisciplinary topic (Ref).

The domain of evidence based practice sits heavily within the teaching profession and community with this being described as either due to the teaching expertise and experiences built upon over time by individual teachers (Ref) or knowledge shared within the community of teaching practice (Ref). Evidence for teaching is often generated from reflective accounts as echoed by (ref) or through data from observations, pre and post data, learner feedback or assessments. - #Geoff Petty books etc#. The research papers of individual accounts of teaching digital accessibility do offer a range of these mechanisms to reflect the teaching discipline, such as pre/post (ref), assessment scores (ref), learner and teacher interviews and feedback (ref) and descriptive case study accounts (ref).

This type of information is contextual, situated, interpreted and often synthesised from a range of sources to be generalisable. Teaching is a discipline commonly accepted as sitting within a subjective and interpretative domain. Like the topic of disability that is described as socially constructed and interpreted based upon contextual knowledge and experience, teaching is also subject and also needs many voices to construct meaningful understanding. Both the subject being taught and the discipline of teaching steers this research towards an ontological position of interpretive data collection and analysis.

Under the umbrella of disability sits accessibility which is again subjective depending on what individual barriers people face and how they experience them. However digital accessibility within the legal framework sits under web accessibility and the technical discipline, more attuned to more precise formulas of code and scientific measurements, and as such the legal standards relate to a checklist of measurement against the WCAG criteria, a one size fits all definition of compliance. This study won’t however be measuring compliance, nor teaching learners to create content to measure against a checklist, the intention will be raising awareness of people’s needs in a digital society and what can help in terms of creating digital content to prevent barriers from a beginner’s perspective and level of everyday understanding, not a technical set of skills and standards. The teaching will however refer to this standard in terms of wider application, beyond that of the basics everyone that can apply in wider society. There isn’t yet a formal standard for everyday application and skills for digital accessibility other than those referred to as the low hanging fruit of applying headings, colour contrast, descriptive links, captions and using in-built accessibility checkers to help identify and address basic issues (regs). The teaching in this case will be exploring and being aware of everyday solutions and digital skills rather than measuring their effectiveness.

Discipline of teaching measured by Ofsted through a combination of observations, assessments, etc - match that to research evidence- what this offers for a research paradigm.

What is being looked at and researched is the teaching of a subject rather than the digital accessibility discipline. However the discipline behind taught takes its influence from several domains that will impact how it is taught and examined within the research.

Inductive in that is will be planned by teachers and therefore there are no hypotheses to test on a direction of travel and aim for the teaching objectives. Observations and evaluations of what has been discussed, decided and experienced by participant teachers. Researcher as participant but reporting from the inside - design based research involves the person collating the information to inform a set of recommendations or to create a supporting toolkit for the teaching of the subject.

Teaching is complex, it is a combination of how a teacher teaches it, how a learner learns it and the combination of who and what needs are in your classroom so it can’t be measured easily to account for all of this with quantitative measurements, it needs a more detailed insight and deconstruction.

Courses and assessments are also measured and validated in a collaboration, such as internal and external verification and moderating of course specifications or assessment of learning. Then there is Ofsted, so the discipline of teaching involves many voices and perspectives.

Evidence based practice contribution.

Research for policy or research for practice.

Action research pros and cons - lesson study involving others to get wider perspectives to reinforce or challenge views about the actions and outcomes of the study. This helps to address a singular practitioner’s bias or interpretation of a situation or event.

Lesson study focuses and structures the observations on the learning outcomes, not just an observation if everything.

Teaching as a discipline: the art and science of teaching and where it sits - there is not one reality there are several and too many components for it to be scientifically measured. - pros and cons of scientific verses interpretive research. Knowledge of and for teachers - where does it come from? - how will this contribute?

Action research in education book:

http://sutlib2.sut.ac.th/sut_contents/H112461.pdf

Theoretical framework advice:

https://www.thephdproofreaders.com/structuring-a-thesis/what-is-a-theoretical-framework/