13 Practices by students
Students engage in various practices to mobilize systemic responses to ableism and build access in their own institutions. In our web search, we learned about recent and ongoing student-led movements demanding systemic changes to address inaccessibility and insufficient accommodation processes. Student activists use a variety of tactics to change accommodation systems at their universities: students form coalitions, lead campaigns, and start campus movements, they initiate legal action, and they offer action plans and alternative paradigms for systemic access on their campuses.[1]
“We put together a [resource] created by graduate mental health consumers…that peers, professors and administrators, people in the university can [use] to learn more about mental health…or how to deal with traumatic content in classroom settings, and, you know, how it could affect students…. We all decided it would be better to have something that was kind of student-led, grassroots” – (Student E)In addition to larger student-led movements, which serve as pedagogical sites of study and learning, student interviewees described many other ways they organize and educate their campus community about ableism, anti-ableism, access, and related issues. Several students described different educational programs and training opportunities they co-developed with peers, focusing on increasing campus awareness of topics such as Universal Design for Learning, trauma-informed pedagogies, and student experiences of ableism. Many students highlighted the urgency of this work, due to a widespread lack of familiarity with accessible and trauma-informed approaches in the university.
As noted earlier, student access leaders provide various types of support to peers navigating narrow and arduous academic accommodation processes. For some students, this involved supporting peers to get to and from meetings with SAS or offering insights into the accommodation process (Johnson et al., forthcoming).
Other students told us about the work they did to organize information sessions about academic accommodations in different languages and still others told us about their wok as part of student advocacy groups to support peers who did not have medical documentation. For student access leader Akoya Kiyama*, this involved “talking with professors sometimes on [a student’s] behalf to try to…get extensions or to explain that they may have anxiety issues maybe about presentations”.
As such, students engage in many different practices to hack and transform oppressive accommodation systems while supporting each other. However, this work – educating their campus community about (anti)ableism and providing peer support – adds an extra layer of labour for student (Johnson et al., forthcoming). These findings do not imply that existing accommodation systems are adequate because students are finding ways to ‘make it work’. In fact, students are forced to take on the labor of peer support, innovation, advocacy, and resistance, to navigate and improve these systems.
- For example, students at Emerson College have outlined a 13-page Action Plan for Disability Equity at their college (Access: Students Disability Union, 2021). Similarly, disabled student activist Megan Lynch (2020), at the University of California (UC), outlined action steps and demands in the UC Access Now Demandifesto. In these examples, students are spearheading movements for systemic solutions to systemic problems (i.e., ableism, racism, and classism). ↵