13 Practices by students

Students are leading collective demands for systemic changes in HWIs. Student activists deploy a diversity of tactics to change accommodation systems at their own universities: students form coalitions, lead campaigns, and start campus movements, they intervene with the student accessibility services offices to negotiate satisfactory accommodations for students without medical documentation, they initiate legal action, and they offer action plans and alternative paradigms for systemic access on their campuses.^[1]

“[Disabled students had been] advocating for, advocating or voicing out, or…representing disabled people at our campus individually before. But right now we are [doing so] as like one whole club. We have come together right now” – Pranav (student)

Students are creating the conditions to demand access-centered higher education by fostering community on campus. One of the main alternatives to academic access learned about during our research was about the existence and role of Disability Cultural Centers (DCCs) on campus. None of the CIPA team members knew about DCCs before this project. The first DCC opened in 1991 at the University of Minnesota (Campus Life, 1992). DCCs now exist on many U.S. campuses (Elmore, Saia, & Thomson, 2018). We learned that many DCCs serve as a site of belonging and connection for/by disabled students, as well as promote anti-ableism education and access-making initiatives. DCCs provide alternatives to isolation and the individualization of access (see Saia, 2022; Chiang, 2020). For example, student access leader Pranav Sarma told us that the Disability Culture Club at the Rochester Insititute of Technology provides a space for disabled students to gather on campus; its members find ways to consistently intervene in campus operations to advance anti-ableism in spaces too often designed without disabled people in mind: we go to that meeting and provide [a] voice as a disabled person for disabled people.

“Our group is actively advocating for the implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) at our university as an alternative to the current accommodations model that relies on students disclosing their medical diagnoses”  – Jesse (student)In addition to DCCs, student leaders are working in other ways to build access and shift responsibility for access to the larger institution. Two practices were emphasized in our findings: (1) students are organizing and working to provide education on anti-ableism, accessibility, Universal Design for Learning, and related issues campus; and (2) students are negotiating and intervening with SAS to secure alternatives/deviations from dominant academic accommodation processes that can better serve students.

We also found that student access leaders provide various types of support to their peers navigating narrow and arduous academic accommodation processes. For example, we identified several digital resources from students to students with prompts and guides to successfully obtain academic accommodations.^[2]

In addition to sharing tips and tactics with one another, students told us about other peer support practices including:

• Reviewing medical documentation and other prepared materials for peers before SAS intake
• Reviewing accommodations provided by the student accessibility services office to check for errors and make sure their peers access needs are being
• Assisting peers with negotiating assignment extensions.
• Hosting accommodation information sessions in multiple languages for peers.
• Accompanying peers to and from their

“If someone wants to drive to their pharmacist or to their appointment, we help them. If someone wants an appointment buddy, we help them. Sometimes there are also spaces where we vent out of frustration, or if we want to discuss something like about a accessibility issue on campus”  – Pranav (student). As such, students engage in many different practices to hack and transform oppressive accommodation systems while supporting each other. However, this entails an additional layer of student labor—that is, on top of the labor students are tasked with to acquire academic accommodations for themselves, they also undertake peer support and activism against racist and ableist HWIs and academic accommodations processes. These findings do not imply that existing accommodation systems are adequate because students are finding ways to make it work. It’s quite the opposite—students are compelled to undertake the labor of peer support, innovation, advocacy, and resistance, in order to successfully complete accommodation processes and/or improve them.