Episode 6: An Open Access Introduction to Medieval Disability

This episode talks about the value of open educational resources (OER), especially for medieval studies, as well as discusses the beginning stages of the creation of an OER Introduction to Medieval Disability. 

Topics: open access, medieval textbooks

Bibliography:

“Increasing Accessibility and Access to the Medieval through Open Textbooks.” New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession. Special issue on “Access.” 6 (2025).

Mentioned in Episode:

• Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing
• Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe
• Medieval Disability Glossary
• Myth-Busting Medieval Disability Poster
• Why Do I Have to Take This Course?: A Guide to General Education

Credits: 

Music - Medieval Theme 01 by Strobotone is licensed under a Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Transcript

Welcome to the Accessible Medievalist! I am Dr. Kisha Tracy, your host. 

For quite some time, I have wanted to create an introduction to medieval disability for the undergraduate level. There are very few resources for teaching medieval disability to undergraduate students because it is only now becoming a topic of consideration even at the graduate level. Thus, there aren’t a lot of organized textbooks that include everything needed to teach this subject. 

Without a dedicated textbook, it is difficult to lead students effectively through the background information needed to contextualize the topic of disability in this period and geography while simultaneously introducing students to the concepts of disability studies more broadly. This textbook would fill a very necessary gap and help students have a more robust and cohesive experience and help instructors, even those not working directly in the field, be able to include medieval disability into their courses more easily. For instance, I was recently asked to give a virtual talk by the Director of Social and Behavioral Sciences Program at Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota; in discussions with her before and afterwards, while she teaches courses for students becoming counselors, etc., she would like more resources to understand historical disability herself and then incorporate it into her teaching. This is an example of the impact such a resource could have.

In the last decade or so, I have become a staunch supporter of open educational resources or OER. These are publicly available materials that, depending on how they are licensed, can themselves be reused, adapted, or remixed. In particular, as a professor, I focus on the use of OER in college courses. In an article I wrote for the journal Pedagogy and Profession’s special issue on “Access” in 2025, titled “Increasing Accessibility and Access to the Medieval through Open Textbooks,” I discuss some of the main reasons I have been moving towards the use of OER. To quote myself:  

Accessibility of course materials, in particular, can have many meanings. First, it can refer to the ability to take advantage of resources, which can mean having an actual physical and/or digital copy of course materials. It is no secret that the cost of higher education textbooks has been on the rise for some time and has an adverse effect on student success. In 2018, Nicholas B. Colvard, C. Edward Watson, and Hyojin Park (263) made note that “textbooks and ancillary materials are a key variable [in the equation of student debt], especially since many students find it challenging to budget for the cost of books because they typically don’t learn about the true scope of those expenses until the beginning of a semester” and that these costs are particularly burdensome for “low-income individuals and their families,” perhaps even to the point of preventing these individuals from either enrolling in or finishing a degree. These circumstances have only intensified with the financial insecurity of the COVID years and beyond…According to the 2023-2024 Hope Center “Student Basic Needs Survey Report,” “59% of students experience at least one form of basic needs insecurity related to food or housing, including: 41% of students experiencing food insecurity, 48% of students experiencing housing insecurity, and 14% of students experiencing homelessness” with “73% of respondents fac[ing] basic needs insecurity when we consider other basic needs (mental health, child care, transportation, and internet/technology access) in addition to food and housing.” Further, a considerably higher percentage of Black and Indigenous students experience at least one form of basic needs insecurity than White students.

How do we continue to ask students struggling to secure food and housing to prioritize purchasing generally overpriced textbooks when there is a clear path forward to help with these costs?

My major contributions to open educational resources have been the publication of two textbooks through the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL) project. The first, Why Do I Have to Take This Course?: A Guide to General Education, is designed for any General Education course and for advising. It is, to my knowledge, unique: a comprehensive guide to help students think about the history of General Education, why they take General Education courses, and their significance and application to their personal, professional, and academic lives. The second textbook, Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing, creates a method for first-year composition students to think, research, and write about social justice topics, especially marginalized heritage, including topics such as disability, racism, LGBTQIA+ issues, indigenous issues, climate change, etc., through the lens of curatorial activism.

It is fortunate that in the last few years more opportunities for funding to create or adapt OER have been appearing, but they are still limited. In that limited funding available, both at institutional levels and through other means, the focus is often on return on investment, on courses with high enrollment or on general education courses that would be useful for multiple institutions. This approach has made sense as it speaks very clearly to the goal of OER to lower textbook costs on a significant scale for students. However, it does not take into consideration courses with topics that contribute rather to access of materials that students would not normally receive, rather than an aggregate amount of savings.

An Introduction to Medieval Disability textbook is not and will likely not be a priority for most publishers or even most open access textbook development funding as it is very niche and does not contribute on a significant scale to student textbook costs. The creation of this textbook is about access to materials concerning a marginalized community, but it is unlikely that it would make much of a contribution to lowering textbook costs. The field is itself small or it is a topic that is taught as a lesson within a course rather than the entire focus of a course. To quote myself again from my Pedagogy and Profession article:

General medieval literature textbooks, however, are often unable – or unwilling – to keep up with the current issues in medieval studies, particularly those related to diversity and marginalized communities. Yet, textbooks with the goal of rectifying this oversight tend to be singularly focused and do not necessarily include a broad range of literature, which makes them difficult to use as the primary book in a survey course that is intended to cover an expansive chronology and/or geography.

OER is particularly well-situated to remedy these issues because it does not rely on publishers who are concerned with market shares in terms of what they decide to produce, and it is flexible for multiple uses in a variety of pedagogical situations, even brief lessons. 

But here is where I have good news! I applied for and received funding to make this open access Introduction to Medieval Disability happen over the coming summer! My university offers Faculty Development Fund grants established by Amelia V. Gallucci-Cirio, for whom our library is also named. The fund supports activities and projects that promote the study of Italian language, culture, and Western civilization, including research, academic programming, and publication. The purpose of these grants is not primarily to fund or support OER, nor is it mentioned in the fund guidelines. However, an open access textbook on medieval disability does support the goals of the fund. It directly relates to the study and culture of Western civilization in particular, as my main research expertise is the European Middle Ages, although I would like to make global connections in this book. It also contributes to scholarly publication in as well as undergraduate study of Western civilization, particularly of a marginalized community that does not receive the focus of other areas of study. In addition, while the focus of this book would be on Western civilization more broadly, not Italian exclusively, there are several ways in which I can highlight and emphasize Italian culture to honor the specific focus of the fund. For instance, the Trotula is a text on women's medicine compiled in southern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Another example is a skeleton found in Longobard (Verona), 6th-8th centuries, with a knife-hand prosthetic (check out  my previous episode!). A third is the Zibaldone da Canal by a Venetian merchant, which describes the properties of certain herbal remedies, including those that address nightmares, anxiety, and headaches.

So what might this open access Introduction to Medieval Disability look like? I envision that it would introduce students both to the topic of disability in the Middle Ages as well as to the broader study of disability. I began the broader introduction in my Heritages of Change textbook, and I may be able to adapt and expand the sections on “Definition(s) of Disability” and “Models of Disability” to this book. 

There would be introductions to the different types of sources that we can analyze, including literature, archaeology, material culture, art, etc. Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field, and medieval disability even more so. To get as complete of an understanding of the experience of disability, we need to examine as many types of evidence that we can. In terms of literature and other written texts, the Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe is an open-access volume (available both through the publisher and JSTOR) of primary sources with introductions focused on each work’s disability connections. This will be helpful as a resource for this type of analysis. I have also been working on a book on medieval disability heritage that has helped me collect a variety of other artifacts as well. 

I want to make sure there is a balance in the book between  physical as well as invisible disabilities, and I also want to address language and translation issues, social integration, treatments, and technologies, among other topics. In Heritages of Change, I included a brief section on “Issues in Historical Disability,” one of which is language differences. An additional open access resource, the Medieval Disability Glossary, provides discussions of specific words that will be useful to draw on for examples. 

In particular, I want to address  popular misconceptions about historical disability, which has been an effective way for me to introduce medieval disability to undergraduate students. I have written before about five “myths” of medieval disability that I have identified, and I created a “myth-busting” poster, which is available for anyone’s use and education. It’s linked in the description of this episode!

I would also like to make this book useful for not only college-level instructors but secondary school teachers as well, who, in my past presentations, have indicated a desire for such a resource, meaning that I need to be aware of the dual audiences as I am writing.

I have a network of experts that I can draw on to help with various sections of the book. I have found that this is another advantage of OER. It lends itself well to collaboration with others, perhaps including short statements on specific topics or ideas, which also increases the number of voices and perspectives. I have also been able to ask what would be useful in such a resource as this one and have received some excellent feedback. I’m always open to hearing suggestions, so please let me know if you have any!

I am excited because the Introduction to Medieval Disability project will complement the Accessible Medievalist very well! These podcasts will be helpful both in terms of content as well as increasing multi-modality. 

Stay tuned for further updates on this work and definitely for its release, which should be in September!