currie and Hubrig discuss the ways in which as disabled instructors, they have attempted to transfer the burden of “resilience” away from the students in their classrooms and onto the very design and documents that make up their curriculum instead. As they explain, traditional resilience discourses often ask students to take on the labour of being or becoming resilient in order to withstand “one-size-fits-all pedagogical approach[es] that prioritiz[e] a rigid classroom structure and practices” (p. 133). These approaches often deny, neglect or trivialize the care and accessibility needs of both disabled students and instructors. The expectation of resilience from students to adapt to inaccessible classroom learning often negatively impacts their mental health, undermines their efforts and academic abilities, and further discriminates against disabled, queer, BIPOC and otherwise marginalized students.
In order to counter these processes, currie and Hubrig have drawn upon crip and disability justice scholarship on care work, crip time and kairotic space. Kairotic space and crip time respectively refer to the understanding that our normative understanding of how people move through space and time are based on the abilities and embodiments of non-disabled people (p. 133). Honouring crip time and creating kairotic spaces means enabling students and instructors to work according to their own spatial and temporal needs, which are in turn in formed by their own lived experiences of dis/ability and un/wellness. The authors position their call to adopt more resilient course design as a form of what disability activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls care work, i.e. ways of accessing care that are created by disabled people to center “holistic and intersectionally aware well-being practices” (p. 132).
Using their own teaching experiences, currie and Hubrig illustrate how enacting more resilient course design can require minimal extra labour on the part of instructors, and may even decrease the workload they would perform using more traditional approaches. An example of this approach within the context of writing instruction was implementing soft due dates for written drafts. Students were encouraged to submit a draft of their written assignments for peer review or workshopping by a certain date but were not penalized if they did not submit one by this date. Hubrig, who implemented this policy in her own classroom, found that most students still submitted their assignments by the soft deadline and experienced an increased sense of belonging within the classroom as well as decreased anxiety because their work was only shared within small groups instead of the entire class. Students who submitted their work past this deadline did so with the understanding that they would not be able to receive instructor or peer feedback for their work, which still afforded them the ability to work on crip time while not creating additional work for instructors or peers who may have otherwise been expected to provide feedback past the expected timeline to do so.
currie, s. m., & Hubrig, A. (2022). Care Work Through Course Design: Shifting the Labor of Resilience. Composition Studies, 50(2), 132–153.