(funky instrumental music)
- Welcome to the "Accessible Learning Experience",
where we help you turn learning barriers
into learning opportunities.
On this episode, AEM Center project director
Cynthia Curry chats with Dr. Eric Moore,
director of learning technology
at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Dr. Moore's passion for designing
more inclusive learning environments
in workplaces has been informed and inspired
by his own lived experience with disability,
and the many roles he has had in education,
both in the US and abroad.
Here then is our conversation with Dr. Eric Moore.
- Eric Moore, thank you so much for joining us
on the "Accessible Learning Experience Podcast".
You're a longtime friend and partner of the AEM Center.
Tell us about your accessibility story.
What brought you into this field?
- Well, thank you so much, it's really exciting to be here,
and to be a guest on a podcast
that I've so enjoyed listening to to this point.
So my accessibility story.
Well to keep it short, I suppose,
I myself am am deaf, a lower D deaf,
I consider myself to be part of hearing culture,
even though my body is in fact, completely deaf.
I have a cochlear implant that ties me back
into the hearing world, that I'm grateful for,
and allows me to maintain that identity that I have.
But I kind of was thrown into
the accessibility arena without choice.
Starting as a child, at about 10 years old,
I started to lose my hearing, and that loss was gradual,
and quite profound, actually,
by the time I was an adult and a professional.
I really wanted to be a teacher, right,
my whole life that was just what I wanted to be.
And there were tough questions
that people would bring to me sometimes,
like, "Ah, are you sure? That might not be a field
that you would be..."
"I mean, I'm sure you'd be a great teacher,
but your hearing."
That sort of like tiptoeing around your disability means
that you can't be this.
And part of me, I'm not a rebel in the sense
that I do so without a cause, but if I have a cause,
I don't mind standing up to push back for...
I don't think this is right.
If I believe I'm have the capacity to be a good teacher,
then I'm gonna be a good teacher,
and don't tell me otherwise [laughter].
And so I did, and I was a good teacher.
And I loved teaching,
and loved getting to interact with my students.
I had a rich career as a teacher for seven years,
teaching literature, philosophy, drama, religion,
all these subjects that really involve
a lot of conversation.
You can't really teach literature
by talking to the students, right?
It's very much a dialogue.
The same thing with philosophy, and of course, drama, right.
I went into these things because I loved them,
and I wasn't going to allow my disability to prevent me
from doing what I felt called to do.
And so, as I've furthered my career,
and moved on into my PhD, and moving in teacher education,
and then into professional work, and instructional design,
and so forth, I've carried with me that early pushback
on the notion that people should be excluded from careers
because of their disabilities.
Well, both the classroom and the career.
I really feel like I did it,
in part because of privileges that I have
outside of my disability,
in part because lots of people were there supporting me
through all of that.
And because I felt like I wasn't going
to let something get in my way.
And so now I'm in a position where I feel like
I have an opportunity to be a supportive force for others
who are going through similar experiences in school,
or in their careers, to fight for what
I think makes the world better.
When we have people in all the variety at the table,
and disability being part of that variable tapestry
that makes up humanity.
- Well, Eric, thanks so much for sharing
your accessibility story.
I know that so many people who are listening,
there'll be people who have disabilities.
There'll be disabled people who are listening
who relate to your story, and then there'll be those of us
who may not have disabilities,
but we advocate on behalf of those who do,
to create more accessible learning experiences for them.
And I know we're all fired up by your story
and your passion.
You mentioned a little bit about your career in education.
Tell us a little bit more.
We know a little bit about your path to getting here.
So tell us a little bit about what you've been up to
in your education career.
- Sure, well, so I started out as a new graduate teaching
in rural Indiana.
So working in a school where it was a small school,
where teachers had, in my case, seven preps [laughter],
spanning from 6th grade to 12th grade.
It was quite a challenging first year.
I did find, honestly, that I was sort of disillusioned
in my first year as a teacher.
The school that I was stepping into,
despite being rural and so forth, was a blue ribbon school.
And so for those who might not have been
in public education, the United States in those times,
that was during the presidency of George W. Bush,
and the blue ribbon schools were those that were excelling
in test scores.
And it was a really big deal for the school
to maintain its high test scores.
I have some very strong feelings about that,
that I won't spend the podcast going on about,
but I'm not just not a big fan of test scores
or the standardized tests at all.
And so it wasn't necessarily a very good fit for me.
And so I quickly felt like this school,
and maybe even this country, isn't going
to be a good place for me to teach.
So I did begin searching for other opportunities,
and we ended up going from Indiana to Indonesia
the next year.
So we flew overseas, packed up our meager belongings
as newlyweds, and set out for adventure
and ended up in Java, Indonesia,
where we taught in international school.
And that was really transformative.
I feel that was really a much better fit for me,
where standardized tests were not a thing.
It was an international baccalaureate school.
The focus was on developing the learner.
It was them that I really had the experience of interacting
with a substantial number of people from all over the world,
where the first time in my life where I was the minority.
Where my language was not the language
that was spoken in the country, that sort of thing.
And it really helped me attune to some of the experiences
that my students in Indiana had
that I couldn't really relate to at the time.
And I feel like that was really an important part
in pushing me further into where I already had
that natural propensity for accessibility
and universal design for learning,
even though I didn't know it by name yet.
That experience of realizing what it was like
to be minoritized in more than one way,
and being able to empathize with my learners in that way,
really made me feel even more passionate
about finding solutions that would reach these students.
And noticed also, and just in the curriculum,
and the way I was teaching,
there was not at first a very big difference
in terms of what I taught or how I taught in Indonesia,
compared to how I did the year before in Indiana.
I was kind of going towards the same familiar text
that I already knew, "The Great Gatsby",
"To Kill A Mockingbird", whatever.
The same literature that I taught in the United States.
To students who did not have any cultural contextual
understanding for Alabama in the 1950s. [laughter]
And they didn't need to. If we spent time explaining
that to them, it wasn't going to be fruitful.
And so I had to kind of began to fan out,
and to explore first the literature that represented
the learners in my classroom, which is really helpful
for them to feel highlighted at certain times,
and for me to learn more about where they were coming from,
and the cultural dynamics of their home countries.
And then ultimately,
we also intentionally began reading texts from countries
that none of us belonged to.
That were translated from languages that none of us spoke.
And it became a tool for, just as I was having to learn
and empathize into their cultures,
now we were all doing that together,
and I was to getting to teach them
that work of being empathetic and curious
about how people think,
and how values and systems are different
in different parts of the world.
So that was really permeating
the way that I approached curriculum.
And at the same time, I was looking for different ways
to approach my pedagogy.
As I recognized that there were cultural differences
that affected how learners learned,
or how they expressed themselves in the classrooms.
And my way of doing things weren't always effective.
And that was really when I began picking up UDL Theory
and Practice: Teaching Every Child in the Digital Age.
I really began immersing in UDL as a recommendation
that had come to me, and began putting it into practice.
Probably in a very novice way, but nevertheless,
really seeing the impact.
Even just the intentionality of approaching things
through this, the multiple means of engagement,
multiple means of representation, and action expression,
just the principles, you know,
and thinking about that, and thinking about how there's more
than one way for my learners
to get to this outcome was transformative.
And I feel like not only did it make me a better teacher,
it made my classes a warmer place.
People felt like they belonged there,
that they didn't have to adapt to the way that
there's this big white American teacher taught...you know,
but that they could bring their authentic selves
to my classroom.
And I even changed the desk formation,
well away from the all seats point forward
towards the stage...on the stage.
into pods, and then ultimately into couches.
As I got down to smaller class sizes,
and we basically had a cafe setting in the corner,
where we would just sit, sip coffee or tea.
The kids could bring those to my class,
and we'd talk about literature, philosophy.
And it was, those were the best classes I ever taught,
and we felt connected.
And I believed that that was attributable,
largely to my learning about UDL,
and my willingness to be open to learning
about better teaching, about other people,
about other cultures.
And I feel like I'm grateful that I had those opportunities
early in my career.
- When we met to plan this episode over the summer,
we talked about a lot of possible topics.
So you've already demonstrated
all these different diverse areas.
You're really versatile around accessibility, and UDL,
and culture, cultural responsive teaching.
So you have all of this deep knowledge and wide experiences
in the field of accessibility and UDL.
So it was both fun and challenging to try to narrow down
the possibilities to fit a short podcast.
And in the end, you wanted this episode to be about access
and belonging in the workplace.
belonging is one of the words
that you were just talking about.
Why did this topic rise to the top for you?
- Well, I think part of it is because of
I like to focus on where I am now, to some extent.
I certainly miss being in the classroom,
but I'm not in the classroom anymore.
So my career trajectory has taken me outside the classroom,
where I'm now more of a support role
in a pediatric research hospital.
So in a supporting faculty,
who are doing really important work
with children with disabilities or injuries,
and helping them develop learning experiences
to train their own faculty,
or other doctors around the world, that type of thing.
And so I'm more in an industry now,
than I am in a formal education environment.
And so, but I carry with me all of the background
that we've been talking about.
And so I'm not just an instructional designer,
I'm an instructional designer who came from being
a teacher, an international community member.
All of those things, and so this still influences
how I see things in the workplace.
And so a lot of the work that I'm doing now
outside of my technical job description
is about promoting accessibility in the workplace.
And really, it's for the very same reasons
that 20 something year old me was learning
about UDL in the classroom.
It's because we want to create workplaces
where people belong, where all the diverse voices can come
to the table, where nobody is made to feel
that they can't do a job because of their disability, right?
And so, just like we don't want students to feel like
they're not good at literature, or drama, or whatever,
because of a disability or difference of any form.
So it's something that I'm immersed in right now,
that I'm excited about because I get to explore,
and I'm learning about it right now.
And I just love to share things as I'm learning about them.
- So how have you seen a lack of accessibility get
in the way of the career advancement
of people who use assistive technology?
- So mainly, the way I've seen the lack of accessibility
in the way of advancement, I've seen it in two ways.
First at my time in a large southeastern university,
and then now at my current employer,
I've sort of seen this in different ways.
In the university setting,
often time what I saw when I was working with faculty,
and of course championing accessibility and so forth,
was this attitude that people with this type
of disability don't become X, Y, or Z profession,
major, whatever.
For example, as we were looking to purchase software
for drafting for architectural rendering,
I got the the statement that, well, if you're blind,
or if you're low vision, you can't be an architect, right?
And I went, and I pulled up an article,
because there was this blind man,
a man who actually became blind after he was an architect,
who is still an architect, and does a really good job.
And his creative accessibility solution,
or his assistive technology is Wikki Stix.
It's a great article, I think it was in 60 Minutes,
where he did this interview,
but he basically does architectural rendering
with Wikki Stix.
So those wax covered strings, basically.
And then they use a scanner to convert that
into a CAD drafting on the computer, and so forth.
And he's giving much more credence
to the way of building feels and sounds.
He's experiencing architecture in a totally different way.
And what he's claims, and what his firm has found is that
he's actually a better architect since he went blind
than he was before, because he just is encountering it
in a way that very few architects had ever done before.
Right, and so I shared this
with the architectural department,
and the argument that I made was that if you were blind,
would you come to a university with that attitude,
to learn to be an architect, 'cause I wouldn't.
It's a chicken and egg thing.
If we create systems and spaces where people don't feel
they belong, of course they're not gonna show up, right.
But then you're taking the wrong message away
if the message you take away is that they can't.
The message that you should take away
is that you've prevented them. You've missed the opportunity
to do something pretty remarkable,
to have an opportunity to see the world in a different way,
to see your profession in a different way.
Here at the institute, we're really making steps forward,
I think, towards accessibility.
And it's something that I think is ingrained
in the attitudes here,
that we are an institute that supports children
with disabilities, that's what we do.
But one place that I feel has been overlooked, perhaps,
has been as we're focusing on accessibility
for our end users, for the children and their families,
we've sometimes just kind of skipped over,
but what about the employees, right.
And this isn't just this institute,
this is across the board and industry.
Every industry I've been in, including education,
when you talk about accessibility in education,
it's about the end users, the end users, the end users.
We talk about accessibility in software,
oftentimes looking at the end user,
not the one who's developing something with the software.
For example, we talk about how to make
a PowerPoint presentation accessible.
We don't talk about how the PowerPoint platform
is accessible to somebody making a PowerPoint as much.
And so those are the conversations
that I think we need to be having
if we're going to be serious about making sure
that workplaces are spaces that are warm and welcoming
for people with disabilities, for the variability,
and the new ideas, and the new experiences,
and new perspectives that they bring.
That getting past this idea that this is a cumbersome thing
that we have to do, or it's a charity or something.
And instead seeing, we're better because we're making
a place at the table for everybody,
including the disabled folks among us.
- Thanks so much for bringing in the story of Chris Downey,
Eric, the architect who lost his vision later in life.
I would encourage anybody who's not familiar
with Chris Downey's story to watch it,
and read about it, because I think that that's
such an exemplar that we can all learn from.
So in that context of the broader picture
of your experiences as a disabled person,
as well as, as your observations of what makes a welcoming,
comfortable workspace for people with disabilities,
what recommendations do you have for our listeners
who have the opportunity
to make their workplaces more accessible?
- Yeah, thank you for that.
Well, I think the biggest thing that I've learned
in my career is that it's really important
that people speak up.
So if you are yourself a disabled person,
it is so important that you not hold back.
If you feel like you have an unmet need,
like the institute just, or I'm sorry,
the organization that you work
for has accessibility barriers that are preventing you
from doing your job to your full capacity,
it's really important that you speak up,
because not only are you, in doing so,
do you ensure that you're able to really shine,
and to be fully present,
and have an equitable work experience,
which is critically important.
I've also found that there are a lot of people who feel,
for a multitude of reasons, afraid to speak up.
Who might have the very same needs that you do.
And by championing change in your organization,
other people will benefit from that as well.
Especially if you push for not just accommodation models,
but accessibility models, universal design models.
Pushing for systemic change, rather than just,
what do you do for me,
that really can have auxiliary benefits
for lots of other people, current or future,
at the organization.
And going back to my point before,
possibly making your organization the kind of organization
that a disabled person would seek out and want to work for,
because they recognize quickly, or early on,
that the barriers have already been removed.
That this organization wants various people,
including disabled people, to work there.
It can really be transformative.
So that speaking up doesn't make you a burden.
It doesn't make you a problem.
it makes you somebody who knows
that you have something meaningful to contribute,
and that that contribution goes beyond you,
to other folks now or in the future
who might be working there.
That speaking up also pertains to those
who are not disabled.
If you recognize that there are barriers,
there's a good opportunity here
to draw attention to the barrier.
This does not necessarily mean needing
to refer to a certain person, right?
You don't want to get in that situation
where you're outing somebody, right?
But you can say,
"I recognize that there is an accessibility problem
in our conference room."
"I noticed that our videos, our training videos
are not closed captioned."
"I noticed that our website does not have
sufficient color contrast," right.
Focus on the barriers that you see in the workplace,
and draw attention to those, to the appropriate people,
to get those things changed, right.
That's being a strong ally for us disabled folks.
And it is showing that you, yourself, care about it,
and it draws attention to the organization
that they should be caring about it too.
By calling out accessibility barriers
that don't affect you personally,
you're really demonstrating a high level
of ethical awareness.
What Piaget or Colberg would get
as some of the higher levels of ethics.
And you're helping your organization become a better place
for everybody to work in.
So that's a really important opportunity.
I would also say what has been said many times,
including, I think on this podcast,
that when organizations are trying to do things
to support disabled people,
which is really good and really important,
nothing about us without us.
What we mean by that is that often time
we see these really good intentions fall flat
because people didn't consult disabled folks
about what actually works.
What are the current best practices?
How do we best address this barrier?
And they maybe just go out and try something.
So it's important that... I wanna honor the effort
to organizations make when they're doing that,
but I also want to encourage them that that effort
is so much better spent when you involve
the beneficiaries in addressing that.
Sometimes it's helpful, I think,
to get this point across here and elsewhere,
to recognize, again,
that disability is one type of variability.
Like women, would you be okay with a bunch of men
in a room deciding what women need? Right.
People of color, would you be happy with a bunch
of white folks talking about what people of color need?
You know, of course not.
Those things are so immediately obvious to us,
and yet when it comes to disability,
often time we have a bunch of people
without disabilities deciding what disabled folks need.
And we need to get to a point where we recognize
that that's just as wrong as the first two examples,
and we need to actively counteract that in our workplaces.
- So 'nothing about us without us'
is what I heard you say in a lot of different ways
with the examples, and how just important it is to make sure
that people with disabilities are part of the design
of an environment, whether it's physical or digital.
Reminds me of our four-part video series at the AEM Center,
the Accessibility Across The Lifespan.
And so many things that you said,
I'm really proud to say are also mentioned
in that video series around starting a conversation
with others about accessibility,
that really, it should be a community response,
and it should not be retrofitting.
Sometimes it does necessitate retrofitting,
but really, we wanna think about accessibility
from the beginning.
And I was also reminded in your discussion about the fact
that UDL really started in the built environment,
so universal design in physical spaces.
And that goes back to the first few episodes
of the "Accessible Learning Experience",
where we interviewed a couple of the founders of CAST,
David Rose and Skip Stahl,
and we learned that UDL really did originate
from universal design in the environment.
So thank you for bringing us full circle.
So last question, Eric, is how do we stay in touch with you?
- I am a 21st century citizen,
so it's easy to find me if you try.
You can find me on Twitter with the handle @Innospire.
That's I-N-N-O-S-P-I-R-E-E-D-U, InnospireEDU.
They can also find my website, innospire.org,
where I do consultations, and keynotes,
and good stuff like that.
Or just reach out to me by email.
You can reach me at drejmoore@innospire.org.
I love to hear from people, and the stories,
and adventures that you're going on as well.
And have any opportunity that I have to come alongside you,
and support others' good work, and UDL and accessibility
in education and industry alike.
- Eric, thanks so much for joining us today.
We really appreciate you spending the time with us.
We know how busy you are, how in demand you are.
I know that this podcast is going to attract
a lot of attention, and we're really proud that you were
a guest on the "Accessible Learning Experience".
Thanks so much again.
- Thank you, and I feel like it's the other way around,
I'm honored to be a guest on this podcast,
so thank you so much for having me.
(funky instrumental music)
- Thanks for tuning in to this episode
of the "Accessible Learning Experience".
Brought to you by the National Center
on Accessible Educational Materials at CAST.
You can find us on the web at aem.cast.org.
There you'll find show notes with links
to all of the resources mentioned on each episode.
Thanks again for listening, and remember,
accessibility is everyone's responsibility.
(funky instrumental music)
The contents of this podcast were developed
under a cooperative agreement
with the US Department of Education.
However, those contents do not necessarily represent
the policy of the US Department of Education,
and you should not assume endorsement
by the federal government.