1 Preamble
The teaching team is responsible for crafting practical and compassionate solutions for implementing accommodations for disabled students. This dynamic resource elucidates current Queen’s policy for implementing accommodations and considerations, stresses the importance of discerning essential requirements, and understanding the duty to accommodate. The authors strove to be as clear and comprehensive as possible by providing in-text definitions of common terms encountered when navigating the FAS accommodations and considerations process, naming avenues of support within the university, sharing internal and external resources, and exploring pragmatic solutions to common accommodations requests.
The authors recognize that the labour demands of implementing accommodations in courses can be strenuous and varied for faculty – some examples include navigating complex institutional policies, having difficult conversations with students, and being unsure of the responsibilities surrounding the duty to accommodate. Sometimes this labour is shared with TAs – we encourage faculty to share this resource with their teaching team if they are also doing the work of implementing accommodations and considerations. It is also important to remember that “accommodations are not designed to give a student an advantage over other students, to alter essential requirements of a course, nor to weaken academic rigor. Rather, the duty to accommodate within the context of a Queen’s University classroom or course means that the institution, through shared responsibility… adjusts the learning experience so that students with disabilities can fully participate, unless that accommodation causes undue hardship” (2023).
The authors have designed this resource to be used at the reader’s whim – feel free to go to specific sections to quickly scan for solutions, information, or resources. We have an introductory section exploring our framing concepts of ableism and disability justice in higher education – these are important but are by no means required reading to get full use out of this resource.
When considering accommodations, the authors recognize that immediate solutions are sometimes required within tight time and workload constraints, but we also encourage anticipatory and flexible assessment design. To this end, Kate Brothers currently provides a consultation service for FAS faculty to work through course and assessment design in a proactive manner with an accessibility-focused lens. Feel free to reach out to katherine.brothers@queensu.ca to arrange a consultation.
A note on language: using people-first language has been the norm for decades, but disability advocates have instead recommended using identity-first language (i.e., ‘disabled person’ instead of ‘person with a disability’) in recent years. In keeping with the disabled community’s wishes, but also recognizing that not everyone wishes to use identity-first language, both will be used in this resource.
