12 Practices by faculty
Individual faculty are intervening with commitments to meeting students’ access needs without relying on documentation. In interviews, many access leaders/instructors told us that they refuse to ask for medical documentation including doctor’s notes, accommodation letters, or formal registration with SAS as evidence of students’ access needs.
“[Students often started from the] assumption that ‘I [the student] have to give you [the instructor] all of this stuff and all of this private information about my experience, so that you will believe me because I’m not a liar or a bad person’…I just kinda paused and said, ‘Hey, I get that it was tough. Not gonna look at that stuff. You need a bit of extra time. Let’s go from there.’ Because what type of learning environment is it where someone feels like they’re being judged and marginalized and discriminated against?”
– Theodore W. (student/instructor)
“I guess the first thing, kind of the principle that I follow is to believe all students. So, I actually kind of have a long-standing policy of not reading peoples medical files, accommodation records, accommodation letters, etc., unless they really want me to” – Rachel G. (faculty)
The practice of providing students accommodations without relying on supporting documentation can counter systemic inequities ingrained in the typical academic accommodation system. The faculty we interviewed described this practice of refusal as resistance to racist, classist, and ableist accommodation systems that rely on a culture of surveillance. Instead of checking, monitoring, and policing students’ access needs, faculty told us that the starting place is trusting and believing students. Refusing to require accommodation letters and/or medical documentation is a practice of believing that sick, disabled, chronically ill students with and without documentation, students experiencing a new flare up and require a different way of participating than that described in their accommodation letter, students that need extensions because they work, students experiencing racism in their classes, students who do not have a warm place to study, all belong in higher education classrooms.
Instructors/faculty also told us about other access-oriented pedagogical practices they use to emphasize access as a collective responsibility in the classroom. When instructors design their courses with built-in access practices and pedagogies, the burden of proof and labor on students to undertake bureaucratic and energy-depleting academic accommodation processes can be eased. Thus, the responsibility for access shifts from individual students to the larger classroom and learning environment. Other access-oriented pedagogical practices faculty told us about include:
- Implementing grace days, flex days, and guidelines in place of deadlines.
- Providing generous time limits when designing any classroom activities or assignments.
- Providing multiple options for every assignment, so that students can choose the format that works best for them.
- Embedding closed captioning in their lectures.
- Implementing access check-ins.[1]
- Using custom accessibility statements.[2]
- Offering hybrid and multimodal classroom options.[3]
Putting it into practice
Here are some other access-oriented teaching practices described by faculty:
- Access check-ins at the start of the term and at regular intervals throughout the term.
- Flexibility built into assessment and course design such as hybrid formats, grace days, a set number of flex days, unlimited flex days, and guidelines in place of deadlines.
- Adopting diverse teaching techniques (e.g., role-playing, guided reading questions, learning circles, arts-based and experiential learning) and assessment methods (e.g., online puzzles and polls, word bubbles, group work) that invite engagement from a strengths-based standpoint for diverse learners.
- Recognizing multiple modes of learning: e.g., providing access to slides, speaking notes, transcripts, video recordings, glossaries, plain language summaries, and using a variety of technology to aid in access.
- Ensuring a multiplicity of voices and representation in reading material, guest speakers, and perspectives. Consider costs to students and open access to material.
- Co-creating classroom space to find an optimal way of sharing space together and advocating for resources such as ergonomic chairs, mics, movable desks and chairs.
- Modelling a social justice environment which includes addressing difficult topics and asking for forgiveness when a mistake is made.
- Managing classroom interactions is critical to providing a learning space that is accessible. This includes ongoing classroom management of how we relate together and with each other, while proactively addressing situations that are racist and ableist.
- Providing space for lived experiences in the classroom that are nonjudgemental and encourage learning and unlearning.
- In interviews, we heard from several instructors that they use access check-ins as a strategy to not only open conversations about access with students, but to jointly make decisions about the learning space and ways of being together that prioritize access. For example, Rachel da Silveira Gorman told us that “one of the first things [they] do on the first day” is open space to talk as a class about accessibility with students and, by doing so, “mutually come up with a way of relating to each other”. Rachel goes on to explain that, while students can discuss access needs in class as well as in 1-1 discussions, class-wide access conversations provide an occasion for the whole class to “work out…the optimal way of being in a physical space together”. ↵
- In interviews we also learned that in addition to access check-ins, many leaders in accessible teaching use custom accessibility statements on their syllabi as a strategy to co-create accessible space. Indeed, this was a key practice described in various resources identified in our web search (see Wool, 2018; Goldrick-Rab, 2017; Brown, 2017; Accessible Syllabus, 2015). Whereas boilerplate statements typically direct disabled students to register with SAS in order to obtain accommodations needed to participate, custom accessibility statements invite students with or without documentation to discuss access needs with their instructors and jointly make decisions about what the learning space will look and feel like. As Tanya Titchkosky told us in our interview, boilerplate statements say to disabled students “You are welcome, [but] please go elsewhere”; custom accessibility statements, in contrast, are used to “signal that we are going to do something differently here…[they] signal to students and other faculty that disabled people are welcome”. ↵
- For many more practices, see the following resources identified in our web search on universal design (Welcome to Universal Design: Places to Start, n.d; Hamraie, 2020), access-centred pedagogy (Hamraie & Khú, 2021; Rice-Evans, 2020), and consent-based pedagogy (Polish, 2017). ↵