The COVID pandemic has forced onto schools an overnight pivot to virtual delivery and assessment. This emergency provisions and their online component have remained a part of the reality of teaching and learning for large parts of the last two years. Innovative and emergent uses of technology in the classroom have blossomed rapidly and found a rich and opportune context for growth. This two-year period of change and experimentation has now created an unprecedented thirst for the long-term adoption and integration of digital solutions in teaching and learning – be they virtual, hybrid of face to face. Much of the reflection that has occurred around the use and integration of technology and virtual tools in teaching and learning, however, has ignored learner diversity, accessibility, and inclusion. The time constraints, exceptional circumstances of the pivot, the urgency of the measures, and the understanding arrangements were temporary have contributed to a certain laissez faire in terms of accessibility. The legal notion of undue hardship has explicitly been used by many schools and school districts to circumvent legislation on inclusion and human rights provisions which normally guarantee accessibility to learning. This session will first examine the various concerns regarding inclusion and accessibility which have arisen during the pandemic in relation to digital learning. The presentation will then analyze the inherent risks that are present in relation to social justice and inclusion, as educational organizations transition back to face-to-face instruction and seek to retain the digital flavour that has blossomed over the last two years. The third section of this paper is a call for action which delineates the safeguards that must be in place as digital transformation of teaching and learning gains momentum in the post-pandemic landscape.

1. Key social justice lessons from the COVID pivot
Ensuringaccessibilityand inclusionremain at theheartof the
digitaltransformationof educationalspaces in a post-
pandemiclandscape
CIMQUSEF’19, Maroc
19th Edition of the International Conference on the Quality of
Education

2. Land Acknowledgement
• I am honoured to live and work on the unceded and ancestral territory of the Syilx
Peoples

3. Thanks to the conference organizers
• I would like to thank the
organizers – Dr. Abdennasser
Naji - for all the work that has
gone into making this hybrid
event possible. It is a great
honour to speak again at the
CIMQUSEF Conference. I want
to congratulate the Organizing
Committee on their resilience in
scheduling this event through
the COVID disruption.

4. Objectives of the Session
• Explore the disruption the COVID pandemic has created in the K-
12 sector
• Gauge the impact of this disruption on inclusion and social justice
work
• Consider the detail of gains and perturbations
• Examine how to move forward: learning from the experience
• Ponder a word of caution on management of change

5. Personal lens and methodological stance
• Author is a scholar, practitioner, and consultant focused on inclusion and
social justice in schools and post-secondary institutions.
• Much of the work featured in this presentation is qualitative work which has
emerged as a result of specific existing studies continuing through the
pandemic.
• Snowball effect on collection of data on stakeholders’ concerns (teachers,
leaders, UDL specialists, etc.) during the pivot: recorded very specific
feedback on the way inclusive practices were evolving in the field over the
pivot.

6. Since March 2020: an unprecedented
landscape …

7. Section 1 - Disruption the COVID pandemic has
created in the K-12 sector
• How profound a disruption
was it for inclusion and social
justice work in schools?

8. In practice
• The changes differed from jurisdiction to
jurisdiction but included:
• One or several instances of full online
pivot
• Sporadic partial online pivots
• Ongoing experimentation with hybrid
delivery and assessment
• Rise in school drop out numbers
• Absenteeism rates that remain high
globally and have not been thoroughly
explored
• Unprecedented degree of parental
ambivalence towards fully face to face
delivery
• A great degree of uncertainty about the
specific ways this has affected the
management of schools and learner
expectations

9. The cracks in policy and practice
• Despite a wide body of scholarship
on school preparedness, little
effective response was
documented.
• Social justice and inclusion
immediately placed on the back
burner, with a focus on
‘contingency teaching’ becoming a
priority.
• In many jurisdictions, legislative
and legal requirements for
inclusion set aside because of the
urgency (‘undue hardship’
argument in the Canadian context
of the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms)

10. The cracks in policy and practice (contd.)
• Grave breaches of Human Rights
protocols and ethics were
tolerated (example of online
proctoring in North America)
• A lack of concern/ awareness from
the public about the plight of
minority students due to global
appearance of the ‘survival mode’
(i.e. focus on own family and
networks, isolation, financial and
employment concerns, depleted
opportunities for pro social acts)

11. Inconspicuousness of the danger
• At times, the widening of the
gap occurred in almost
unnoticeable ways
• Example of the ‘learning pod’
as illustration of practices
that have become common
place but represent a growing
danger to equity in schools
• Issue of under-reporting of
such phenomena

12. Key take away
• The COVID pandemic has created the most significant disruption of the last 60
years to the K-12 sector. This has been particularly damaging to the work
carried out in schools around social justice, inclusion, accessibility, and critical
pedagogy.

13. Section2 – Just howbad was it? Gaugingthe impactof this
disruptionon inclusionand socialjusticework

14. Examining the detail of the COVID impact on
accessibility, inclusion, and social justice in schools
• The picture overall has been
concerning in this area
• But has it all been bad?
• Have there been any social
justice opportunities at all in
this chaos?
• Interestingly the detailed
picture is dichotomous.
• When polled, practitioners are
always split on the subject.

16. Observations and Analysis
• Some gains/ facilitators
• Educators have globally embraced
their role as designers of the
leanring experience
• They are increasingly aware of the
impact of bad design on student
experience
• They are more receptive than ever
to the relevance of inclusive design
• There have been more widely and
openly shared resources related to
good design, learner-centered
practices, and accessible mindsets
• Some new hurdles
• The discourse on inclusion is more
diluted and less easy to identify
• Some confusion between inclusive
strategies and simple technology
integration
• The reflection around social
justice, access and inclusion is
fragmented and not
homegeneous: clear focus on
accessibility in the production of
material to students, but few
efforts with respect to other
dimensions

17. Observations and Analysis (contd.)
• Some gains/ facilitators
• Noticeably growing international
dialogue around inclusion in teaching
and learning. Ironically, there has
been less travel but more
opportunities for the global sharing of
knowledge More advocacy related to
inclusion and social justice from the
student body itself, as well as
community and parents
• Widespread understanding that many
of the lessons learnt during the COVID
pandemic in relation to UDL need
integrated into f2f teaching in the
post-pandemic landscape
• Some new hurdles
• There have not always been adequate
points of contact for teachers seeking to
adopt inclusive strategies – most key
stakeholders have been oversolicited and
exhausted
• No opportunitied for the water cooler
chat, i.e. the soft skills development
around social capital development/
personal networks
• Educators are more receptive than ever to
inclusion and accessibility but also burnt
out and less open to innovation. COVID
exhaustion is real.
• Many students feel that despite growing
efforts, there have been major disasters
in specific context, and still very little
accountability.

18. Final Assessment: A window of opportunity
• The landscape is not
systematically hopeless
• This disruption also represent
an unprecedented landscape
for change
• There are windows of
opportunities
• Some caveats around the
need for proactive reflection
for these lessons to be
integrated back into policy
and practice.

19. Key take away
• The post-pandemic landscape creates unprecedented opportunities for
teacher buy-in when it comes to the adoption and implementation of
inclusive design and mindset

20. Section 3: Learning from the disruption
• How do we now, as educational institutions and sectors, identify and
document the mistakes?
• How do we now, as educational institutions and sectors, identify and
integrate the successes into ?

21. Calls for action
• There is an urgent need to:
• Pause and document the mistakes
candidly
• Rectify these wrongs and address the
gaps in achievements where these have
occurred
• Reject the notion that schools have gone
‘back to normal’
• Record the beneficial impact of the pivot
on teacher mindset with regards to
inclusion, accessibility and social justice
• Build on this teacher receptiveness while
the opportunity exists
• Make school preparedness a reality
(rather than a conceptual notion) - this is
a fast changing landscape and similar
disruptions will occur again - and ensure
social justice is a cornerstone of this
preparedness

22. A word of caution on management of change in
educational institutions
• Schools and the educational sector
are not optimally effective in
addressing management of change
effectively
• Beyond this, all organizations have a
tendency to return to status quo,
however dysfunctional the status quo
might be.
• How do we successfully integrate
these lessons around social justice,
inclusion, accessibility, and school
preparedness into our futures?
• Integration must be intentional,
proactive, and reflective.
• Is it occurring in your sectors?

23. How do these campus dynamics affect me
as an instructor or a practitioner?
• What will you do, in each of
your sectors, to keep this
dialogue alive?
• How will you gauge whether
an authentic reflection has
been integrated into practice?
• How do we move from
disruption to ‘business as
usual’ without erasing the
lessons learnt?

24. Key take away
• There are rich lessons to be learnt and integrated from the COVID chaos into
our practices and policies around inclusion and social justice.
• This process will not occur automatically and it must be triggered by agents of
change who confront systems that naturally revert back to status quo.

25. Questions

26. References & Resources
Bashan, J., Blackorby, J., & Marino, M. (2020) Opportunity in Crisis: The Role of
Universal Design for Learning in Educational Redesign. Learning Disabilities: A
Contemporary Journal 18(1), 71-91.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1264277.pdf
Kilpatrick, J.R.., Ehrlich, S., & Bartlett, M. (2021) Learning from COVID-19: Universal
Design for Learning Implementation Prior to and During a Pandemic. The Journal of
Applied Instructional Design.
https://edtechbooks.org/jaid_10_1/universal_design_forS

27. Contact details
• Frederic Fovet (PhD.)
• Assistant Professor, School of Education, Thompson Rivers University
• ffovet@tru.ca
• UDL and Inclusion Consultant
• Implementudl@gmail.com
• @Ffovet
• www.implementudl.com