I sat through a teaching session with some children this week, in what was an eye-wateringly bad, cringeworthy, accessibility-worst-case scenario. And a few basic principles popped into my head while I watched the speaker shame and marginalise children who were desperately trying to find ways to engage with the material and show their enthusiasm for the topic.
- Cut your one hour talk into 5 minute pieces
- Is there seating?
- Will ambient noise in the room be amplified or dampened by acoustics?
- How can you share information through discussion and mutual exploration?
- Assume you will be interrupted, how can you plan so that interruptions will not feel to you as facilitator and powerful-person-in-the-room like a challenge but a form of eager interested participation
- Members of your audience may assume that you don’t want to hear from them. How can you show that this will be different from other lectures they’ve attended?
- Your participants may need to fidget. If you expect them to be still it will be oppressive for them. How can you create opportunities for motion?
- How are you accommodating a person who can’t process auditory information?
- Some people may participate differently – shaming people for not holding up their hands or participating in conventional ways is cruel.