Welcome to Episode 144 of the Think UDL podcast: Accessible Workplaces with Connor Duignan. Connor Duignan is a Technical Software Developer at Innopharma Education. I met Connor at the AHEAD (Assoc. On Higher Education and Disability) conference in Dublin, Ireland. His talk “Tertiary Education as Accessible Workplaces” beautifully summarized what accommodations and structures we have in higher education could also be transferred to the workplace to make a better working environment for all involved. In our conversation, we discuss principles that should be in place to make the workplace more flexible and accessible. This episode hits on the major ideas of Connor’s thesis with some excellent talking points for employers and employees to follow. Additionally, we had a wonderful time talking about the Irish language and its renaissance in Ireland, and why language itself is so important to a people and a culture. This is important to identity, culture, and individuality which is also linked to learner variability, and why we need to have places where everyone can bring their best selves in any environment, from higher ed to the workplace and everywhere else.
Resources
Connor Duignan’s Lightning Talk at AHEAD 2025
Tertiary Education as Accessible Workplaces (Slides for Lightning Talk)
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Universal Design for Learning, learner variability, accessible workplaces, Connor Duignan, Innopharma Education, remote learning, accommodations, autism, flexible work, UDL principles, learner agency, Irish language, cultural identity, educational reform.
SPEAKERS
Connor Duignan, Lillian Nave
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to Think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters.
Welcome to Episode 144 of the think UDL podcast, accessible workplaces with Connor Duignan. Connor Duignan is a technical software developer at Innopharma Education. I met Connor at the AHEAD conference in Dublin, Ireland. AHEAD stands for the Association on Higher Education and Disability. His talk “Tertiary Education as Accessible Workplaces,” beautifully summarized what accommodations and structures we have in higher ed that could also be transferred to the workplace to make a better working environment for all involved in our conversation, we discussed principles that should be in place to make the workplace more flexible and accessible. This episode hits on the major ideas of Connor’s thesis with some excellent talking points for employers and employees to follow. Additionally, we had a wonderful time talking about the Irish language and its renaissance in Ireland, and why language itself is so important to a people and a culture. This is important to identity, culture and individuality, which is also linked to learner variability, and why we need to have places where everyone can bring their best selves, their authentic selves, and who they really are into any environment, from higher ed to the workplace and everywhere else, as always, I thank you for tuning in to listen to this insightful discussion with my guest, Connor Duignan on the think UDL podcast. Connor, thank you for joining me today.
Connor Duignan 02:21
Thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be on the Think UDL podcast. So thank you very much, Lillian, I’m really happy to be here.
Lillian Nave 02:28
I’m so glad we had a great conversation when I got to meet you at a conference in Dublin. And so wanted to get into a lot of the things that kind of your past and your the kind of the way you are have helped you to be a better educator. So the first thing I need to ask is, what makes you a different kind of learner?
Connor Duignan 02:54
Well, I think it kind of all revolves around how much I despise authority. I was the worst kid in school. Everyone hated me and loved me at the same time. So I never really had much time for, you know, prescribed methods of learning. You know, I can’t just sit down at the end of the day and do two hours of study on a certain subject, nothing will go in. I will be bored the entire time, and I would just feel resentment towards that subject, because it’s just this exercise of boredom. So I prefer to tackle these things at my own pace. I generally learn by doing. I like to make mistakes, because mistakes are great. They’re the best learning tool. And using those mistakes as an opportunity to apply theory if there’s a gap in my knowledge, Here’s a demonstration of why that knowledge is important. That’s why mistakes are great, and that’s how I learn by being disruptive to my life and others.
Lillian Nave 04:06
Wow, that is, I’ve never had an answer like that. And there’s usually something that I’m like, Oh, I’m so like that. That is something I totally resonate with. No, not at all. I was the most compliant student, right? The people pleasing kind of thing. And I bet if we had been in the same class, I wouldn’t have known at all what to do with you in my learning years at all. So, but now I completely love when I have students that are going to push boundaries and question things. They’re the best.
Connor Duignan 04:41
Yeah, I do think that I’m the best, so it’s nice to hear that from someone else. Yeah, I appreciate students like that as well. When I’m well, I do. I do a bit of teaching. We’ll go into that a little later, but I do some teaching, and I really like when students are disruptive and talkative. Of because, mainly because either they’re bored or they’re really engaging with the subject matter. You can use that energy, you can direct it and make everybody else feel alive and engaged. And they have this inherent ability to let you explain the subject matter in a different way, because you see that they have a different perspective, and then suddenly you can click into that perspective and explain the whole thing in a different way. So that’s why disruption is the best. I think we should have class outside every day. Yeah, no, classroom teacher books.
Lillian Nave 05:37
Yeah, it is definitely a great teacher, and I was not prepared for the disruptive student, that’s for sure. When I first started teaching and I would freeze, and I was ready for a bunch of compliant students, but now I design for disruption and and hopefully that becomes a very positive and engaging part. But yeah, it definitely. I think we have to know who we are, too, as facilitators.
Connor Duignan 06:05
Yeah, you can’t teach or you wouldn’t want to learn. You know, you have to engage yourself before you engage your students.
Lillian Nave 06:12
Yeah, wow, okay. Oh, I love it, so I very much appreciate that answer, and it’s probably the exact opposite of what I was, which is wonderful. That’s what’s learner variability. I love it. Okay, so what? What do you do now? What’s your role now? And I know it’s in accommodations, and what sort of accommodations does your office provide for students? So kind of tell me what world you’re in now.
Connor Duignan 06:46
I am a technical software developer. I like to say I’m technically a software developer because I wear many hats, and that’s one of the things I do. I work at a small college called Innopharma Education. We do bespoke courses for mostly pharmaceutical studies, food science and then digitalization. We do things for other colleges, but we also do stuff ourselves. So I help to provide IT support. I provide technical expertise on modules and their curriculum, I run the software for our exams so I help Sure, make sure that all our exams go smoothly and that the students get their grades in. And I do assistant lecturing as well on mainly software based modules like data science and computer science. Oh, and the accommodations bid. I was so happy with my answers, and I just kept going. But we do provide a good amount of accommodations for students, probably not as much as you know, we could be again everywhere. Can do better, I think. But a lot of our learning is remote. So we provide, you know, remote learning for one these students are able to log in online. We can provide them their lecture notes before the class, provide assistance with captioning, and then direct learner support afterwards. So that’s that’s the extent of where my accommodations for students sort of ends, and then we have other supports later on for exams and and stuff like that.
Lillian Nave 08:31
Okay, so you didn’t always do this, though, and you had a position before previous position, that really was something that helped to inform your work now, then that when you were talking at this conference, I would thought that was quite interesting, of like, where you were before, why you left, and what does it do for you now, I guess, or is my question, yeah,
Connor Duignan 08:56
so, like a lot of people who did a computer Science undergraduate, I moved into the tech sector right away, and I hated it. I did not enjoy working with tech. I love the subject matter. I love coding, I love solving problems, and I love working on computers. I think the most magical things that humanity has ever created. But I hate the environment at a, you know, either a tech startup or a or big glomish Bank. I did some work at a bank. I think I was on security team. It’s been a long time since I did that, and I found that the work culture, you know, it’s not negative at all, you know, I’m but for me, it was a kind of build up of pressure, the fact of being in this office from the beginning of the day to the end of the day, this sort of ingrained culture. Of grinding, pushing yourself further than probably you should, as well as being in this place that wasn’t suitable for me, and I haven’t mentioned it yet, but I am autistic, and at the moment, at that time, I didn’t know I was autistic, but I could definitely feel the effects of it being in a loud office, being in a bright office, being in meetings where I had to sit still and not act like an idiot, I was constricted and unable to fully relax. I would become stressed out with the work I was doing. I would put far too much effort into the work. I would get frustrated when it didn’t work. I would sit at my desk, bored out of my mind and constantly worried that I was being watched by people and, you know, not being in the same head space as everyone else. I wasn’t engaging at the same rate. I was at a step, you know, I was playing as the song in the wrong key, and I left that sector, because it just didn’t gel and there are accommodations there in that sector, in every work sector, that lets people you know, engage with the work and do what they need to do. But for me, it just wasn’t gelling. Wasn’t clicking. I needed to move on, but this was a few years ago, and things are getting better, but also they could be better,
Lillian Nave 11:53
yeah, so I, I would also imagine that your self described, uh, anti authoritarian nature may have played a part in that too, maybe, oh, sort of pressure filled environment. Yeah,
Connor Duignan 12:11
I would really resent the suits. If a guy showed up in a suit you knew this guy, either he uh, and it was always a guy, but let’s be fair, yeah, this guy either did not know what he was talking about or didn’t want to know what you were talking about. Is this just this divide of these are the people above you who make all the decisions, but also know none of the subject matter. So you have the people who decide how things work, don’t know how things work. And yeah, you can’t stay in a place that makes you angry at being there.
Lillian Nave 12:52
Yeah? What a big disconnect. Yeah, uh huh. Okay, so you, you decided this was not good for you. This was not for you. It wasn’t good for you. You needed to move into a different space. And you’re kind of in this Well, you’re in the education space, but it’s also, it’s sort of, it’s a company ish, but it’s also, it’s a lot of it’s the education space at the same time. How is that previous job like informing how you’re moving about in your current job? I guess I what
Connor Duignan 13:32
I like to say is it gave me perspective at what not to do. I It definitely showed me what my limits were. You know, after six weeks, six months, give myself some credit, six months for the last place, I was completely burnt out, so unengaged, so unenthused with everything. But now working at it’s a slower pace of environment, and it’s definitely a less intense pressure wise environment, but also I know what I can handle and what I can’t, so I can approach things my way. And it’s not that it’s my way or the highway or anything, you know, egotistical like that. It’s that I know what my limits are and what pressure I can be under, and also how best I work. I can be really efficient at my work. I can be really enthusiastic. And, you know, a great person to work with, because I know how to do it. I know say I need to do this for two hours, and I give myself a time to do it, and then I give myself the freedom to go on a walk, to breathe, to get a coffee, to be a person who’s not under this, this pressure, I decompress and suddenly. A, you know, I’m a full size person,
Lillian Nave 15:01
yeah? So it sounds like that need for autonomy is something that you were able to kind of pinpoint or move into you wanted to find a spot, a position that offered that, does that sound right?
Connor Duignan 15:16
Yeah, absolutely. Autonomy is so important. Also, you know, direction is important, and either it’s self direction or it’s it’s given to you by a manager or team member. And I feel like if it’s given by a manager or a team member, like as an autistic person, I really need that direct language. I need that consistent labeling of what to do, how to do it, what methods are appropriate, especially when you’re just starting off in a task. You need that language. You can’t just say, oh, mock that up for me. Will you? Yeah, what does that mean?
Lillian Nave 15:58
What? What? How do you want it? Where,
Connor Duignan 15:59
what format, no, I need the direct language. So autonomy gives me that ability to do it myself, but it also gives me the confidence to ask people what they need. And I’m in this environment where I’m so much more sure of myself, I can sustainably be confident, be more sure of what I need to do and how to ask it from other people. You know, I’ve become a better communicator simply because I, you know, I have that self belief.
Lillian Nave 16:38
Yeah, it also looks like you left a place that was rather inflexible, right? When you talk about, you know, giving yourself time to get a coffee or take a walk, and then kind of dive back into a task that flexibility, and I guess I don’t know how to say exactly that your supervisor or the environment says, I know Connor is going to get the work done, just it might, it might look different than the way I would do it, right? Or that, I guess competence in you.
Connor Duignan 17:11
Yeah, I, I don’t need that supervision. I’m not a five year old. Yeah, I don’t need to be chained to a desk. You know, if you give me a task to complete, it doesn’t matter if I get it done in five minutes or I get it done in eight hours, it’s still done at the end of the day, and I’ve worked at my pace as efficiently as I can.
Lillian Nave 17:36
Yeah, I mean that that’s autistic or not, that seems like a really good policy, right?
Connor Duignan 17:43
That’s, that’s the whole crux of my argument. I and we did that. I did that presentation of the conference a couple of weeks ago, and my whole crux of my argument was that, you know, these accommodations, these allowances, that we can implement for disabled people, it helps us all. It gives us all this freedom to figure out how we work, how efficiently we can work, and how to do it without, you know, crushing yourself under the weight of responsibility.
Lillian Nave 18:14
Yeah, yeah. So, like, I think we’re already, like, talking about one of my questions, which is about, you know, how does maybe an accommodation that we might offer in the educational setting, what it might look like in the workplace, or what might a flexible and accessible workplace look like? And I feel like we’re talking about some things like that, flexibility or autonomy. But what sort of ideas do you have about that?
Connor Duignan 18:44
Yeah, so the presentation I gave, I’ll go back to it.
Lillian Nave 18:48
Yeah, we can in the resources so people can take it.
Connor Duignan 18:53
Yeah, sure. It was very funny. You’ll you’ll love it. It was really short presentation, but I had a couple of ideas. Mainly, we have these accommodations. Because I work in a college. We do a lot of these things for students. You know, we we give them supports around exams and supports around remote working, deadline extension, different ways of learning. You know, so we give all these things to students, because our main desire is these students to pass, to learn and to move forward. But I feel like there is a gap there between that and the accommodations given to workers in in deployment environment, you know, we, we have legal requirements. You it’s in Ireland. It’s called reasonable accommodation. And it’s, it’s a really vague and nebulous wording around being non. Disruptive, but still giving whatever they need to get the job done. And it’s, it’s so vague as to be un useful,
Lillian Nave 20:11
Yeah.
Connor Duignan 20:11
So, you know, we can, we can apply the things that we already do for students, for learning, to our workforce. Because, you know the flexibility that’s there for students, the ability to attend classes online, you can work remotely. You know you can you can provide quiet spaces, areas to unwind and relax without one the threat of the casual meeting. You know, there’s a reason why people read around water coolers and not somewhere else in the office. You know, they want to talk, so they stop there. But if you don’t want to talk, ah, there needs to be a space for that too.
Lillian Nave 21:00
Yeah, some sort of signal or sign, like, Don’t bother me for the next hour, or something.
Connor Duignan 21:05
Yeah, another thing we give to students, and this is, this isn’t even an accommodation. We give to students, but, um, their tasks for an assignment, it has to be clear and direct, you know, or else, you know, you’re not going to be able to grade them, not going to be able to give the correct marks or examine the work properly, but we can give that to our workers as well. We can say, hey, we need this done, and this is how we need it to be done. You have certain freedom in this area. But you know, this is the requirements, and it’s it’s laid out plainly, plain and direct language, and beyond that. Now I mentioned earlier in lectures I give, we have screen readers and meeting captions. These. These are things that they should be implemented as a default in all workplaces. You should be having most of your meetings online, or mostly, most of your meetings should be emails. Let’s be fair,
Lillian Nave 21:59
yeah, yeah, if they can’t be emails, yeah, yeah,
Connor Duignan 22:02
Those can’t be emails. They should be online. There’s very little reason for all of you to cram into a room together to hear one person speak about a topic. You know, workplaces aren’t lectures theaters. You know, you can have space and the time for that kind of presentation, but a work day is a stressful, long, trying event, so having meetings online, even if you’re in the same building, just pop your headphones on, look at a screen and participate as you can. And you know, kind of be free to doze off when it is completely not your subject matter. Yeah, you know, we shouldn’t be so expectant of this visibility. You know, we put so much stock in being seen to be doing the right thing, to be listening intently when there’s no reason to to be, you know, at prim and tidy and proper at all times. And you know, this inhuman level of perfectionism that doesn’t help us. It’s, it’s this social construction to help people, you know, divide each other, but it doesn’t help you in the workplace, and the moment, we can let go of these things and provide the logical solution. Meetings online, that’s a logical solution. You get the same amount of data across, possibly more efficiently. You can fit 10,000 people on a zoom call, but you can’t fit 10,000 people in a conference room. I went off on a little tangent there. Again, very passionate about this stuff.
Lillian Nave 23:51
It made me think about a lot of those things, like, what is the point you have to really think about? What is the point of that meeting? Do all of the people need to be in that room right there, or is, is it an email? Or is it, is it for dissemination? Then, why are you having a meeting? But is it for collaboration? Then, who needs to be there? You know, just like, that’s a very UDL principle. What is the point? And then design for that outcome, right? Yeah,
Connor Duignan 24:19
I think that UDL is, is such a a useful tool in all aspects of life. You go through all the UDL guidelines and principles for, you know, designing courses and and teaching environments for students, and you think, My God, why isn’t this in every aspect of our lives. How do we not design our lives to be so human based this, this human centric basis of UDL is wonderful, and the fact that it is practical while trimming the fact. The the absolutely unneeded, gross overload of, you know, useless text and and things that you know should be gotten rid of because it’s it’s not clear, it takes away from the point that you’re making. I think again, applying UDL principles to the workplace is one of the most important things that employers should be doing, because when you think about it, a meeting, if it’s being given by someone, it’s a lecture, right? If you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation, that’s a lecture. So they should be taking a UDL course, learning how to teach. Because you’re teaching someone, giving any kind of presentation is you’re teaching somebody. So if you think of it, less of I’m I’m a I’m a work man, and I’m doing this work stuff to it doesn’t matter, like we’re thinking of these things as separate entities when they’re not you have teaching, you have learning. And that’s almost every interaction at a work meeting. It’s either teaching learning or collaboration. And UDL, you know, it helps with that. It helps sift through the nonsense, but also make it so that your your subject matter is relevant and accessible. It’s great.
Lillian Nave 26:29
Yeah, totally. I love that you are you’re really bringing a lens that I don’t often have on the podcast, and looking at that workforce readiness, although I do have plenty, but not anywhere near as much as I have just focused on higher ed. And what you’re doing is putting that lens on what kind of we could cut out and what trim the fat. It’s like we’ve always done things this way, kind of, I’m using air quotes on a podcast. Nobody can see those, but we’ve always done it that way, and so that’s the way it’s done, which is a terrible reason to do things in a particular way, but rather like, what’s the point? And how can it be done much more efficiently, much more accessibly, too, if we can think about it a different way. And, I mean, you mentioned, like, that whole idea about FaceTime, like being seen, yeah, putting in the hours. But if you can do the work in five minutes, and somebody else can do it in 30 minutes, you know, do you have to be seen for the other 25 No, like, why? What’s the point of that? Right, besides a lot of extra stress, maybe it’s
Connor Duignan 27:48
for show. It’s, yeah, it’s, you know, the the main reason to sit at a desk and look busy is for your boss to acknowledge that you look busy and you should deserve a raise. But this shouldn’t be the way we organize our society. You know, you, you think of the, you say, the workforce, but that’s what 90% of adults are being in this workforce. And this, this way of doing things is, you know, it’s pervasive, and we need to change the culture. And, you know, if we start at educational institutions like I work at, where we already have this culture for students, we apply that to universities. Apply that as a, as a, you know, a post marker or a, you know, a beacon on a hill, saying, This is how things should be done. We look at things as, you know, what’s the best way to do this? And then we do it. And then we re examine ourselves and do it again.
Lillian Nave 28:55
I mean, there’s, it makes me think about the higher ed in the US. We had the Carnegie system. It’s like three credit hours and and you have to have a contact hours and that sort of thing. And when we went all online through COVID, we realized that that’s not really the determiner of learning is how many times you were all in a room together. Yeah, that doesn’t tell us how much we’ve learned, but we really, we haven’t changed anything, you know, since that necessarily, at least on paper. And you know, in systems that it’s, it’s the traditional thing is, you know, 15 week long courses, three hours a week, or three sessions a week, or, you know, 275 minute sessions, whatever that, because it’s been done that way. But is that the most efficient use of time is it could this? Yes, it could be, by the way, it could be done completely online. It could be done asynchronously. It could be a measurement of output of, you know, many credentials. Sense of micro learning, you know, it. It could be so many other things, and maybe we just need a different way to think about it and approach it, and, you know, kind of trim the fat as as we’ve mentioned. Yeah, the
Connor Duignan 30:17
ways we learn and teach have changed so much over the past few decades that it adhering to a system. You know, I don’t know much about the Carnegie system, but I assume it was invented in the 50s by a bunch of people were born in the 1900s Yeah, the ways we’ve done things has changed the way we understand the human brain and society as a whole has changed completely. So if we don’t re examine these systems, we find ourselves locked into one, a system that is exclusionary. There are a lot of students who simply cannot participate the same way, and you have system that’s inefficient. You know, we could be teaching students more things better in a shorter amount of time by adjusting how we we go about things. So re examination is, is key?
Lillian Nave 31:19
Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. We do need to rethink the way we do higher ed. Now I’m back on the higher ed instead of workforce, but just the fact that so many of our students are not interested anymore in going away for in the US four years, I know it’s three or four years over in Europe, and it’s very expensive, and there’s so much of that expense that is really outside of the actual learning in a class. It’s student fees, it’s, you know, climbing wall in a lazy river. I mean, there are universities that have those things, and it’s great. It’s like going to camp, but it depends on what you think the university is for, and is it for getting a credential. Is it really a time to explore who you are? It could be that too, like so why are you going why do you why are you doing that? But for so many in the United States, we have a lot of folks who are working, who have obligations, and they’re not going to go away in the the way we used to do that. And I know it’s different in Europe too. There’s a lot of folks who live, you know, and go to school in the place where they are, like, there’s not dorms in the way that we have a lot of dorms, you know, dependent, right? Well, we,
Connor Duignan 32:31
I’d like to have some dorms. It would have been great to have student accommodation. Lillian University, I had a really long commute defining what these institutions means is it is important, because you have, you know, the big universities in the States, they are this, this kind of world unto themselves. And it means different things, different people. But you know, they should be separate. You know, if I want to party for four years, yeah, and come out with some really good friends and terrible grades. There should be somewhere for me, but it shouldn’t be also, you know, MIT, yeah,
Lillian Nave 33:11
yeah, you gotta. People are coming into the university with radically different ideas about what they’re supposed to get out of it, for sure. So, yeah, so we, wow, I could, we could keep talking, and we probably need to talk about learning Irish too, because that’s another wonderful conversation we need to have. But maybe we can bring that in when we’re talking about, what does this look like like? So we have accommodations. We have ways that make learning better for students. We’ve thought about what are some ways that it might look like in an accessible or flexible workplace. But what about something like access friction? You know, some supports that can draw unwanted attention, or they could cause disruption for others. And then you introduced this term to me. I think I’d heard it before, but it had been a long time. And you said, what are some ideas for us to square the circle between that access friction, you know, things that are helpful for some but may be disruptive for others. How do we do that? Yeah,
Connor Duignan 34:22
I called this the attention dilemma because it sounded dramatic. I did like it. It was very fun. But, yeah, we’re trying to square a circle. How do you fit around peg into a square hole or vice versa? There’s going to be some accessibility, accessibility requirements that are, you know, they stand out, and it’s going to make a person who has those requirements, especially if they have an invisible disability, feel uncomfortable. And a lot of this is socialization, because these people have been you. So forced to feel ashamed of the requirements that have simply because, you know, we have a bigoted society that is mostly focused on on looks and doing things as they should be. We won’t get back into that. Yeah, but these people, and me included, I have, as an autistic man, I have really high sensory requirements. I hate loud noises, I hate bright lights. I hate the feel of certain textures and not others. I couldn’t tell you why, but all I know is that I feel them quite intensely. And if I’m in an office and I I need to have the lights down. I feel bad because other people can’t see very well, right? You know, if we have to turn the radio off that someone’s listening to or close the window someone’s working outside, I feel like these accommodations kind of get in the way. And what I’m talking about specifically isn’t, you know, my own experience, but this in concept, in general, I think if we think about accessibility, less as a per person thing, and think of it as what the best way of doing things, again, we circle back around. We think about the best way of doing things, and if we want as diverse and as interesting a workforce as possible, we accommodate for everyone. So I came up with three little axioms here just to help explain this. But my first one was accessibility as a default so when you’re having a meeting, have the captions on or have the ability for someone to turn them on, have a screen readers installed on your computers, have the freedom to work from home. This accessibility as default concept means that these are offered straight away. There’s, there’s no culture around using them. It’s just something that’s there. And then my second point was flexibility as a standard. And this is important for me, because I’m, I’m 100% work from home, because I know it’s the best way I work. I get things done way faster and more efficiently, and I don’t get stressed out. I don’t get burnt out at all. But it’s that flexibility that’s so important. If someone needs to take a work from home day or a personal day, or they need the the hours to do something at a certain time and not another time. And flexible hours, flexible working times, and also flexible work requirements. You know, if we have requirements to do something, the outcomes in the you know, the outcomes need to get done, but the way that they’re done can be different. I don’t need to use Adobe Premiere to edit this video. I can use Windows Movie Maker and save myself 500 euro. So you have this, this flexibility built in. There’s no requirements, for the sake of having requirements. And then the third one, my third little axiom, is disclosure without interrogation. And this is important to me, because I think that a lot of people with with autism ADHD, we have that conversation that you’d have to talk to your boss, your HR person, and you say, Hey, I am so and so. I need these require, required accessibilities. I don’t want to have to explain everything. I don’t want to have to go into it and say I have sensory processing disorder. So when I see a bright light, it gives me a headache, or if I hear a loud sound, it gets me stressed out, and I can’t think, and I don’t want to talk at length about explaining that my disability has, you know, it’s, it’s ongoing, or it was there, I can just say that’s what I have. And you’re given the respect. Then at that stage that say, Okay, perfect. And if they want to know more about it, they can look it up themselves. They can ask you respectfully, but
Lillian Nave 39:35
not as a determiner of if you get that accommodation. Yeah,
Connor Duignan 39:39
yeah. Yeah, accommodation, well, one, it’s there by default, if we’ve already been following my actions Exactly. But you know, it shouldn’t be dependent on it, and if I’m choosing to disclose it for, you know, whatever reason, either as a as a reason to. To access these, these accommodations, or just, you know, be prideful of myself. I would like that respect to be, you know, accepted just plain, thanks. Yeah,
Lillian Nave 40:16
as another person, here are my needs, you know, just like I need to breathe this air and, you know, and I need this flexibility for me to perform the things that you would like to be performed. And if you’re interested in what I perform, then this is going to be just fine. But if you’re interested in watching me or having control or making me compliant, then we’ve got a problem. Yeah,
Connor Duignan 40:41
yeah. This be the feeling of being watched is definitely non fun,
Lillian Nave 40:50
and yeah doesn’t work. It doesn’t
Connor Duignan 40:52
work. It doesn’t work for anybody. I don’t think any, any person enjoys being watched or judged or Yeah, yeah, single out for any reason. I think we, we gotta approach these things more holistically, more human centric, because in the at the end of the day, we’re all humans, that’s, that’s something we have in common, yes, and, you know, we should treat each other like it. And, you know, fight to these structures and procedures that we’ve invented for ourselves. There’s reasons for them. Some point, sometimes that, you know, not all the time we can, we can break these rules, because sometimes they need to be broken,
Lillian Nave 41:40
yeah, because we don’t know exactly why those rules are there in the first place. Yeah, we need to question those rules. John mustache
Connor Duignan 41:48
from 1890 didn’t know everything. Okay, right?
Lillian Nave 41:52
That’s right. Well, you did say they’re born in the 1900s I was born in the 1900s so, well,
41:59
me too. I’m not that young.
Lillian Nave 42:01
Good, so well, I feel like that. Those three maxims about accessibility as default, flexibility as a standard and disclosure without interrogation, is great advice to employers, and is that your advice to employers as they try to provide work, a workplace that works for the diverse workforce in today’s world. Is there anything else you’d want to add? Well,
Connor Duignan 42:27
yeah, I think my advice is great. Yeah. I’d like to say maybe this isn’t reality, but in my mind, diversity and inclusion especially, is is really important in creating a workplace that isn’t limited by prior ideas. You You’re not going to innovate. You’re not going to revolutionize by hiring the same old people over and over again, by, you know, keeping people below other people for whatever reason, and by providing accessibility at this this baseline level, it lets everybody in. And then, you know, I hate to use this term, because it’s so cliche, but cream rises to the top. And if we give everybody the chance to be cream, then the metaphor falls apart, but we have a lot of cream. Yeah? Yeah. You know, if we give everybody chance to shine, yeah, you’re gonna have a sky full of stars. You know, isn’t that pretty? Yeah?
Lillian Nave 43:36
True. It is, um, it is when you get when you allow people to do the work they’re going to do the work, you know, yeah, allow them to be the best, to have that strength based, talent focused approach, which is something that I definitely talk about a lot on the on the podcast and everything. Is the a lot of things that you talked about today, that we’ve talked about, are barriers to really performing well for some Yeah, and, I mean, some people may want some good, some supervision in so they could ask questions or as they’re learning something, yeah, but that is different than like being watched while you’re supposed to be doing something like trust. Do you trust your people? Do you empower them? You know, these are all really good workforce strategies, it seems Yeah, yeah. So let me ask a little side question here, because it’s about what you’re learning now, yes, and because we had a great discussion, I learned that about somewhere between two and 4% of the population of Ireland knows Irish, and that’s that’s increasing, and you are one of those that’s learning, and that’s something that’s a good thing. Or how is it that learning is happening for you and that’s a good thing?
Connor Duignan 44:56
Well, learning Irish is a good thing because Irish is cool. Cool, yeah, first off, it’s cool, yeah. I’m learning Irish a few different ways. I’m using Duolingo as a way of just doing it every day. Get having that practice, keeping it in your mind. Learning a few pieces of vocabulary every day is really useful. But like, I hear people complain about Duolingo, and they say, I don’t know any Spanish except Me gusta, but yeah. One, you’ve been using it for a month, so good luck. And two, you’re not using it right, because it is basically just this little reminder app to keep going, and it’s, it’s this baseline to learning that is that’s, it’s useful. Like the Irish course on Duolingo is kind of terrible. It’s, it’s really bare bones. It doesn’t go it kind of stops halfway through the language. It doesn’t go through everything that you’d like it to, but it does let you practice every day and helps you hone in on the things that you you’re not comfortable with, whether that be the verb structure or the prepositional pronouns, which are very interesting. So that’s great. I also do the other other things I do, I read in Irish. I recently got a copy of The Hobbit in Irish. Wow, which is an Hobad as well. It’s great, because with my limited level of Irish, I’ve basically the vocabulary of a seven year old, yeah. So if I read a children’s book, especially a children’s book that that is one floored and interesting, but also one that I know it’s, it’s a really useful learning tool, because I think, hang on, yeah, I know the first line of this book, it’s in a hole in the ground. They live the hobbits. i bpoll na talamh bhí Bilbo ina cónaí, there’s, uh, I know what that’s supposed to mean, and I can infer the gaps of my knowledge. And suddenly I’m learning vocabulary and learning the flow of the language. And then the last thing I do is I talk constantly in Irish with my fiance, and she hates it. She’s learning as well. She’s, she’s, she’s trying, yeah, but I do it when she’s doesn’t want to. And when she replied, replies in English, I think, Oh, God, yeah, I’m annoying her. And I keep going. So I speak in Irish, especially now, I hate to disparage your people. You know, I love Americans, but I love making fun of Americans. There’s so many tourists in my town, so I make fun of them in Irish. Oh, yes. So they have no idea what I’m talking about. And it’s great. It’s and I learn Irish because, well, one it was taken away from us, my people, the Irish people, we had this linguistic and cultural tradition that went back 1000s of years. Irish is a really old language, and we had a literary tradition that was unique and beautiful. We had great poetry, and this, this wonderful poetic language that uses metaphor and similes in such a an interesting everyday way, and it was taken from us deliberately to impose colonial control
Lillian Nave 48:45
and outlawed. No one could speak Irish. It was outlawed, wasn’t it?
Connor Duignan 48:49
It was outlawed in various ways. It was prevented from being taught. And, you know, it was also, you know, commingled in with the Penal Laws that were directed at Catholics, but especially during the famine, when a lot of Irish speakers died or were forced to emigrate, Irish was suppressed by the Crown, so we lost it, and it wasn’t until you have the Popular Irish movements like the GAA. So that’s the Gaelic Athletic Association. So it was, it’s this sports association that started in Ireland in the 19th century. But it was a a counter revel. It not a counter revolution. It was a counter cultural revolutionary movement because it was promoting Irish speaking and old Irish games reviving these parts of our culture that had been suppressed. And, you know, in Irish, it’s “cumann lúthchleas gael”, you know it’s it is the game association of the Irish. And by learning Irish, you’re resisting the the British state. You. And, you know, after the Revolutionary period, we kind of lose that again. We get into this malaise of Irish learning, and it becomes a part of our education system. Every person in the country has a cúpla focail or a couple of words, but they don’t know how to speak the language because the curriculum was invented a long time ago quite poorly. It’s implemented quite poorly and taught quite poorly. There’s special schools that are great. They’re called Gael scoils and gael coláiste that means Irish schools and Irish colleges, they speak Irish every day. Every subject is an Irish. So you can pick up the language quite well, and then you can actually teach Irish as a literature, as opposed to a foreign language. But in everyday schools, you have Irish as this dread subject, this impenetrable mess of letters on a wall that you don’t know how to speak because the way you’re being taught is so rigid and so unengaging. It doesn’t involve you in the language. It doesn’t associate you culturally or politically with the language, and that’s the reason you want to learn it. Why you want to learn French or Italian or Spanish, it’s because you want to engage with that culture, interact with these people. But a dead language, and Irish isn’t dead, but effectively it was. It is dead in Leinster, there is no Leinster dialect. It died out, so it’s a reviving language. But what’s, what’s the reason to speak it? And you know, for a lot of kids, the only reason they’re given is because you should speak Irish, whereas if you approach it as this, this historical legacy, this cultural legacy and the anti colonial legacy. You know, there’s politics to everything, and learning Irish is politics. It is reclaiming history, and that’s that’s why I want to learn it. And I think if we instill that, that lesson into our youth as they’re learning it, and even into our populace as a whole. And we think of this, this unique gift that our culture has to express itself beautifully and to connect itself to a past that was almost erased. I think then everybody would want to learn a cúpla focail as opposed to struggle through 14 years of school with it. Yeah,
Lillian Nave 52:44
wow. I can see a thread through our whole conversation of anti authoritarianism and yes, and why that agency, the learner agency, which, of course, is a UDL principle learner agency is so important, and that connection and the desire and the authentic learning, it’s you’ve given you know, quite the understanding of why is so important. And I think it marries quite well with what we were talking about before, but that is to see human flourishing, we need to allow for human flourishing. And yeah, that means taking down those barriers, allowing for that and letting that beautiful human whether they’re a worker or a learner, to be the best that they can be in whatever language that is, right? Yeah. Oh, well, thank you so much for an enlightening conversation, a beautiful conversation, and I really appreciate your perspective. I love engaging with probably, if we were in the same class, I would have come home every day and been like, oh, that, Connor. I can’t believe that, Connor. And now I look at those students as saying, I wish I had that chutzpah, you know, I wish i i could have been a little bit more like that, and it probably would have served me well in my schooling too. So thank you. Thank you for being exactly who you are. Is what I’m saying.
Connor Duignan 54:23
That’s very kind of you to say. And thank you so much for having me on it was really interesting conversation. And you know, I’d love to be a part of this, this world that you’re in. And thank you for letting me speak at length about Irish which is a passion of mine, and I’ll say go raibh míle maith agat, that means “thank you 1000 times” and slán go fóil, which is “health to you”. So thanks so much.
Lillian Nave 54:52
Thank you very much. And I have no idea how the transcription is going to go for this, but I might seek you out for a little bit. Make sure that we we have it correctly in the resources and transcript for the episode. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of The think UDL podcast. New episodes are posted on social media, on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and blue sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website. ThinkUDL.org, the music in each episode is created by the Oddyssey quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with two D’s, by the way, comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast. And if you call it Appalachian, I’ll throw an apple at-ya! Thank you for joining I’m your host, Lillian Nave, thanks for listening to the think UDL podcast.