Lessons from the 2019 AHEAD Ireland Conference

I have been back from Dublin for three weeks now and have meant to put down thoughts from the conference for a while now, but have just been too busy.  So here we go at last – better late than never!

First I need to stress how enjoyable the Dublin Conference has been.  Croke Park remains a great venue for it.  And, as I stated in my keynote, the AHEAD Conference has consistently been one of the most enjoyable ones I have attended over the years.  Three reasons for this: it is creative; it is self-reflective and progressive.  As a conference it has consistently been creative: we have had the addition of the fabulous conversation tables, the poster sessions over cocktails and – this year – the book launch via interactive and personalized dialogues over drinks.   The conference has also been bold with its titles and its themes, and thought provoking in its imagery: circuses, elephants in the room, journeys to Oz, etc.  The message has managed to be entertaining while to the point.

As a UDL Conference it also always remains self-reflective.  Too many such venues adopt a “do as we preach, not as we do” attitude, and discuss multiple means of interaction while offering the audience a “one size fits all”, “sage on a stage” delivery.  The AHEAD conference in Dublin has reliably triggered awareness and discussions around the application of UDL to the conference format itself, inviting all presenters to actively design for engagement, to ensure diversified representation to the audience and to seek some degree of action and expression from participant.  The organizing committee has been pioneering in this respect and the notion of a “UDL format” in conferences is now catching on.

I also find the Dublin Conference to be, year after year, the most progressive of venues when it comes to Disability in Higher Education.  Many post-secondary gatherings on Disability still focus primarily on accommodations and hence limit the scope of the dialogue that can happen around reform and genuine implementation of the social model.  The AHEAD conference, on the other hand, refuses to get bogged down in the “here and now”, and dares to think boldly about what the future of Accessibility should be.  In doing so, it encourages participants to be forward thinking and to become agents of change.

In terms of content, the conference was extremely satisfying too, because it afforded a wide scope view of the progress UDL implementation is achieving on a European scale.  Discussions, both during sessions and over lunch, included colleagues from England, Belgium, Norway, and of course Ireland.  As such, this has become a venue that allows international comparisons, cross-border brainstorming over challenges, and the sharing of experiences gained at national level.  This is useful because it demonstrates to us how complex UDL implementation can be in the post-secondary landscape, depending on national history, cultural tradition, funding model, legislative momentum and political will.

I also keep meeting, within this national conference, a certain type of weathered professionals that are hanging tight to hope of reaching wide UDL implementation across the post-secondary sector, but that also recognize the hurdles and the complexity of this process.  These are encouraging encounters, which I feel evidence the coming of age of the UDL movement.  I think we can all be accused of having, at some point or other, been overly enthusiastic, slightly rushed in our hopes and dreams about UDL, and to some extent simplistic in our approaches.   Cross-institution UDL implementation in Higher Ed is a long and complex process.  Universities are multi-layered environments, staffed with professionals of widely varying training and theoretical backgrounds; they are vast systems subject to a variety of forces and mechanisms.  As such it is fair to say they have an ambivalent relationship with the process of management of change.  It is highly pleasing, and immensely reassuring, therefore to see folks coming back to the Dublin conference, year after year, a little wiser, a little more patient and increasingly more subtle in their analyses and their message.  The speakers and participants one is likely to encounter at Croke Park, is by far the most seasoned team of UDL theorists I have had the pleasure to come across over the years.

The other take away from Dublin was the Irish experience itself around UDL.  There is something really significant happening in Ireland at present, around the transformation of teaching and learning in higher education – and I feel we all have a lot to learn from it.  Again, it is the “progressive” flavour of it all that strikes any visitor from overseas: less resistance than elsewhere, less moaning, less resignation.  Just a bold confidence that change needs to happen.  And change we did witness – being described session after session, be it in further education, in rural settings, in traditional campuses such as Trinity College, in a variety of disciplines and departments.  It’s in this respect too that the UDL badges are fascinating.  Badges of the sort keep popping up in various national contexts, but in Ireland – and with AHEAD – these are not just a matter of wishful thinking; nor are they just the product of ambitious but overworked researchers that run the risk of remaining “on the shelf”; we have instead seen them used, lived, narrated and celebrated by educators who benefitted a great deal from their creation.  What an utter joy these two days have been!

Until next year!

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