12 Practices by faculty
In our interviews and web search, we learned about numerous ways instructors are centering access in their courses and co-creating access with students, outside of restrictive institutional accommodation processes. These practices help us to imagine alternative modes of access that don’t require medical verification – and we know these are possible because they are already happening!
Notably, one of the key pedagogical practices described by several access leaders/instructors centers around a refusal to require medical documentation – such as, doctor’s notes, accommodation letters, or formal registration with SAS – as evidence of students’ access needs (Johnson et al., forthcoming).
“I saw it a lot with my students…where there was kind of this baseline 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…and 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.’ – Theodore W.* (Faculty; as quoted in Johnson et al., forthcoming)
Instead of checking, monitoring, and policing students’ access needs, faculty told us that they believe their students (Johnson et al., forthcoming). 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 requiring 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.
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 (Johnson et al., forthcoming). 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 (see Johnson et al., forthcoming).
- Using custom accessibility statements. [1]
- Offering hybrid and multimodal classroom options.[2]
Putting it into practice
Here are some other access-oriented teaching practices described in interviews:
- 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.
- To learn about custom accessibility statements see the following resources identified in our web search: Wool, 2018; Goldrick-Rab, 2017; Brown, 2017; Accessible Syllabus. ↵
- For many more practices, see the following resources identified in our web search on universal design (Universal Design Ideas; Hamraie, 2020), access-centred pedagogy (Hamraie & Khúc, 2021; Rice-Evans, 2020), and consent-based pedagogy (Polish, 2017). ↵