Call to Action and Next Steps

Call to Action: Key changes to be considered include:

1. Recognize that change is needed now! The first step is for HEI institutions to recognize that their way of creating access must change. The current system is not providing access for all, and many students, especially those multiply marginalized, do not have access to education in this system. Racism, ablism, sanism and their intersections are deeply embedded in the current approaches to access and must be challenged. This is not going to be a small adjustment but a substantial transformation of access resources, practices, and processes.

2. Move towards a more systemic, upstream approach to providing access. Move from an individual model (often medical) that burdens and excludes disabled students to a model where the institution takes seriously its responsibilities for providing accessible education for all. These changes will require adjustments in the amount and distribution of resources for access, as well as to the infrastructure of creating access. This is necessary if HEI institutions are to genuinely improve equity.

2. a) Dismantle bureaucracy around access requests that places burden on individual students and fuels a culture of surveillance where student needs and experiences are continuously monitored by professors, staff, and even peers. Including the removal of medical documentation from the accommodation process. (There are institutional models that can be used as guides and examples, such as Cornell University and Arizona State University! Moreover, during the COVID-19 pandemic, York significantly relaxed and eased accommodation processes for students. York has done this before and can do it again!).

2. b) There must be alignment across the entire institution to prioritize and promote access. In other words, university leadership, faculty, departments, SAS, technology, pedagogy, policies and so forth, all need to be supportive and appropriately resourced to roll-out an access-centered approach.

3. Educate, train and provide resources and mentorship for a collective approach to access. While it remains the institutions’ responsibility to provide accessible education, moving away from an individual model to a collective, justice-oriented, intersectional approach to access requires interventions to shift who is educated about, and involved in, access creation.

3. a) This could include developing accessible pedagogical training for faculty and instructors to become familiar with teaching techniques and flexible assessment methods that best serve the diverse and complex access needs of students with disabilities. In this way, students with various access needs can engage the teaching-learning process using their learning strengths to respond to the demands of the academy.

3. b)This also requires the ongoing involvement of strong, capable student voices which requires the provision of adequate resources for student advocacy groups. Students need to be compensated for their time and labour in advising and supporting system change. The university needs a robust and resourced student advocacy community to continue to improve access systems.

The next step of this project is a collaborative design process, intended to bring students together to review these findings and advise about how they might be applied at York University and what the potential impacts might be of different strategies. These curated suggestions will then be shared with the York administration to continue the dialog about future changes.

We end this report by amplifying several calls to action/demands made by student organizers identified during our web search activities. These student organizing activities, identified during the first phase of data collection, provided the bedrock for our own investigation and thinking about alternatives to academic access. We are indebted to the organizers involved in these campaigns and the many access leaders who took the time to tell us about their ongoing efforts to make the university more accessible to students underserved by existing accommodation systems.

• In the UC Access Now Demandifesto author Megan Lynch (2020) lists numerous demands, action steps, and benchmarks that must be met in order to dismantle ableist infrastructure at the University of California. We highlight two of these here:
  • Lynch (2020) calls for universal design as an alternative to individualized accommodation systems: “Instead of having a poor inaccessible design be the default, with special permission needed for rationed accommodation, make the accessible design the default” (p. 7)
  • Lynch (2020) also calls for fair compensation for disabled leadership in the redesign of new access pathways: “Disabled student/staff/faculty representatives from each campus should be paid to consult on precisely how changes should look at each given campus (not excluding extension programs, medical facilities, off-campus facilities, labs, and field stations)…Disabled students need to be paid for their time and expertise” (p. 7)

• In the Access Advocacy Project, the Access: Disabled Student Union (2021) at Emerson College offers an Action Plan as a “starting point” for college administrators to take concrete steps to address ableism (p. 2). We summarize two of the action steps here:
  • Student organizers at Emerson College call for the “implementation of trainings and educational programs about disability, accessibility, anti-ableism and disability justice for all Emerson staff, faculty, and students” (Access: Disabled Student Union, p. 3).
  • Student organizers at Emerson College also demand that instructors at the college “be held responsible for implementing access-centered pedagogy in their classrooms” including the provision of accessible materials to students and the inclusion of accessible testing strategies (Access: Disabled Student Union, p. 6).

• In Beyond Accommodations: Accessible University Education for Disabled Students in British Columbia, disabled organizer Rachel Cheang (2020) outlines six main recommendations intended to inform the development of accessibility policy in British Columbia. We highlight two here:
  • Cheang calls for an “elimina[tion of] the need for medical documentation in requests for accommodations” (2020, p. 13).
  • Cheang also recommends that funding be “reallocated” from “police departments to disability and mental-health services on campus” (2020, p. 15). Cheang argues that this change is necessary as the reliance on police services to conduct wellness checks on campus is “life-threatening” for Black, Indigenous, and racialized students and thus universities must invest in anti-carceral and anti-racist forms of care for students (2020, p.15).

• In the Maddening Carleton: A Mental Health Framework, students Ahmed et al. (2022) outline an alternative mental health framework to support and care for students at Carleton University. They outline seven recommendations with short- and long-term changes. We highlight two of these here:
  • Ahmed et al. (2022) recommend that barriers to academic accommodation be dismantled (p. 21). In the short-term, they argue that “mental distress [be accepted] as an adequate reason for accessing academic accommodations” and in the long-term they argue for access-oriented pedagogy that would reduce the need for students to seek individualized accommodations (Ahmed et al., 2022, p. 21).
  • Ahmed et al. (2022) recommend that tuition be lowered to meet students’ financial needs (i.e., existing tuition is a barrier to university access for many students) and reduce financial strain/stress (p. 26). In the short term they recommend that international students pay the same as domestic students and in the long term they recommend that tuition be removed altogether as a step toward broad access in the university (Ahmed et al., 2022, p. 26).