Category: accommodation

403. Of Many Minds

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, mental health
July 23, 2025

Since the pandemic, universities have focused attention on student mental health. In this episode, Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Lee Skallerup Bassette join us to discuss faculty and staff mental health and wellbeing.

Rebecca is the Director of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  She has 17 years of experience teaching undergraduates and is a Certified Scrum Master and design thinking workshop facilitator, an ICF-certified coach, and the host of The Agile Academic podcast. Rebecca is the author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal and the coeditor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education. Lee is the Assistant Director of Digital Learning at Georgetown University and is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ProfHacker. She is also the editor of Affective Labor and Alt-AC Careers and co-hosts the All Things ADHD podcast. Rebecca and Lee are editors of: Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff, which is scheduled for release later this summer.

Show Notes

  • Pope-Ruark, R., Bessette, L. S. (2025). Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • The Agile Academic podcast
  • Pope-Ruark, R. (2022). Unraveling faculty burnout: Pathways to reckoning and renewal. JHU Press.
  • Moner William; Motley, Phillip; Pope-Ruark, Rebecca; and Roth, M. S. eds. (2020). Redesigning liberal education: Innovative design for a twenty-first-century undergraduate education. JHU Press.
  • Bessette, L. S. (Ed.). (2022). Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. University Press of Kansas.
  • All the Things ADHD podcast
  • ProPublica series on mental health: America’s Mental Barrier

Transcript

John: Since the pandemic, universities have focused attention on student mental health. In this episode, we shift the focus to faculty and staff mental health and wellbeing.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca Our guests today are Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Lee Skallerup Bassette. Rebecca is the Director of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has 17 years of experience teaching undergraduates and is a Certified Scrum Master and design thinking workshop facilitator, an ICF-certified coach, and the host of The Agile Academic podcast. Rebecca is the author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal and the coeditor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education. Lee is the Assistant Director of Digital Learning at Georgetown University and is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ProfHacker. She is also the editor of Affective Labor and Alt-AC Careers and co-hosts the All Things ADHD podcast. Rebecca and Lee are editors of: Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff, which is scheduled for release later this summer. Welcome Lee and welcome back, Rebecca.

Rebecca P Thank you for having us.

Lee Yeah, thanks so much.

John: Our teas today are: Rebecca, are you drinking tea today?

Rebecca P I am drinking a Starbucks iced black tea lemonade, and enjoying it quite a lot.

Rebecca A good way to start the summer.

John: And Lee?

Lee This is a Mango Maui iced tea. Well, I made it into an iced tea, but this is a Mango Maui herbal tea.

Rebecca Sounds interesting.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca I’m drinking English tea time this afternoon, John.

John: Very good. And I am drinking an oolong tea today.

Rebecca So we invited you here today to discuss Of Many Minds. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the book?

Rebecca P Sure. I’ll take that one. In 2020 through about 2022 I was working on a book on faculty burnout, and that book came out in November of 2022 and as I was researching that book, I was talking to a lot of people who had a lot of stories about their own wellbeing and their own mental health and how that connected to the burnout stories that they were telling me. And it was a big part of my journey as I was experiencing burnout as well. And we were going through a period of time in the midst of COVID where, of course we were spending a lot of energy and a lot of time thinking about student wellbeing, obviously. And we were starting to question, what about faculty and staff wellbeing at the same time? So that led into some conversations with some folks, and eventually hooking up with Lee and proposing this collection. It was originally going to be stories and critiques, and by the time we started getting the stories and the stories were just so powerful that we decided to just go with the first-person essays.

John: How did you select the essays for this book?

Lee We put out a call in our various social media networks, spread the word. Again, it really helped Rebecca having a book out on burnout, and myself having a podcast about having ADHD, so we were able to really spread the word about it, and then really we just wanted to honor the authors of the stories. The selection process was very much a labor of respect in terms of ensuring that the stories were told in such a way that was authentic to the person telling it, and in a respectful way, and that were relevant for our readers. To give an example, there’s an essay that we kind of call a bonus essay at the end, which is one of the few that gave advice. It was a little bit more student facing, but certainly was advice that you could give to anyone, and we really thought it was important. And so even though it didn’t fit into buckets that we had set up to section off the book, we were like, this is still an important piece, and this is an important perspective, and so we’re going to find a way to include it. And so it was really with the attitude of inclusivity as well that we wanted to be as inclusive and expansive as possible when it came to the variety of voices that we published.

Rebecca To help frame our conversation, can you define neurodiversity for us?

Lee No. [LAUGHTER] So, neurodiversity is… there’s some debate on it, and in the introduction to our book, we tried to keep it as expansive as possible. And so we, for our purposes, included mental illness. We included cognitive disabilities. We considered mental health and any kind of diagnosis, either self diagnosed or officially diagnosed. So we have stories from bipolar, autism and ADHD, depression, PTSD, anxiety. I know I’m missing some, it’s not an exhaustive list. We really wanted to be as expansive as possible and inclusive as possible in our definition of neurodiversity. Some people will say that mental health issues might not be considered a part of that, and it is limited to things like ADHD, dyslexia, and even then, sometimes dyslexia isn’t neurodiverse, it’s a learning disability. So again, there’s a lot of debate, and we just wanted to say that if your brain works a little different, be it on a social level, on an emotional level, on a cognitive level, on all three levels, we want to hear your stories.

Rebecca P And that’s where the title came from, too, the Of Many Minds piece. We feel like we focus so much on the logical aspects of our minds, but there are so many other elements that we bring into our workplaces and into our lives that we wanted to make sure those were represented well.

John: What are some of the most common types of mental health issues or mental illness that faculty have been experiencing, whether at increased rates or being more willing to vocalize the existence of mental health issues, which used to be much more hidden.

Lee One of the things is that, particularly this book, brings up and Rebecca had previously published a book on burnout and burnout stories, and what this particular book brought to light is in a lot of cases, the depression, the burnout, the anxiety that the people who were telling their stories eventually came to realize is that the reason they were depressed, the reason that they were burned out, the reason that they were anxious was either because of a diagnosed or, very often, undiagnosed condition, such as ADHD, such as bipolar, such as PTSD, such as ADHD. And so in their efforts to try to mask, in their efforts to try and fit in, in their efforts to try and appear normal, quote, unquote, normal, they were putting such stress on themselves that that led to other conditions coming up, and it was very often the depression, the burnout, high levels of anxiety, that led them to seek help, and that help led to the diagnoses very often. Not that it wasn’t a universal experience when the people tell these stories, some of them, they knew the diagnosis and tried to push through anyways, because ableism is a hell of a drug. But for the most part, for these stories, for those people who are neurodiverse in higher education, a lot of the mental health issues stemmed from their attempts to mask whatever other neurodiverse condition or conditions they happen to have.

Rebecca P And a lot of people were finding out or starting to think about themselves and the way they process things in different ways when they had their children being diagnosed. They would talk about that being kind of the start of their story or their journey, or students coming to them and then realizing that they have some of the similar characteristics with the student accommodations, or could benefit from some of those accommodations as well. So it really crosses the board, which is, again, why we wanted to have such a wide spectrum of folks. We’ve got a variety of folks with different autism diagnoses as well as ADHD, CPTSD, those kinds of things, OCD, a lot of acronyms…

Lee Yeah.

Rebecca P …but they were coming from this perspective of feeling like what’s going on, what’s happening, and how do I process this? And it’s those stigmas and that masking can be so exhausting that it can lead to things like burnout. So having the diagnosis, or even a self diagnosis, becomes a real turning point for many of our contributors who speak about their diagnosis or the path to diagnosis, and what that allowed and unlocked for them after being diagnosed.

Rebecca You started hinting at some of these things, but can you describe some of the challenges facing neurodiverse faculty and faculty that are experiencing mental illness?

Rebecca P So I think the biggest issue a lot of folks with neurodivergence or mental illness in higher ed face is really related to stigma. So it’s not an internal issue, it’s an external issue in a lot of ways. So they’re facing these preconceived notions about what an academic should be, or what someone who works in higher education should quote, unquote, be, and they’re coming in as their authentic selves and feeling like they really can’t be those authentic selves. So they end up spending all that energy masking. They spend all that energy trying to hide who they are and not participating in the ways that they want to, and often when they try to… we have several stories in there that really talk about folks who really tried to do some advocacy work around these issues, and were kind of shut down in different ways. So folks in higher ed weren’t really listening or weren’t open to these conversations. I think a lot of faculty have preconceived notions about what students bring accommodations in for and may have some negative perceptions that way, and those translate into their perceptions, potentially, of colleagues who exhibit some similar behaviors or mindsets.

Lee I think part of it is, and I write about this in the conclusion, is how we understand professionalism, and there’s stigma, but then there’s also stereotype, and there’s this idea of professionalism. And it is incredible the number of contributors who, due to stigma, described the ideal professor: white, older, male, upper class, married, hetero, all of that kind of stuff. And so it’s not just the people who are neurodivergent who have this kind of idea and thus a stigma attached to them, it’s also our colleagues in higher education who have this idea of what an academic should look like, or how they should behave, or how productive they should be, and what that productivity should look like. And one of the ones that has stayed with me is one of the essays was about someone who was denied promotion because they didn’t socialize enough with the department, and so they were like, “We’re not sure if you’re really invested and a part of this community,” and this was somebody whose neurodivergent condition absolutely exhausted them at the end of the day of socializing with students, socializing with colleagues in the hallways, doing everything they needed to do, which they understood. It wasn’t really masking, but it was just like this takes up so much of my energy that there is literally nothing left for me to be able to go out afterwards. And they describe the process of going home, turning off all the lights, and just being and being able to recharge, but that… it’s not even an accommodation. It’s just like we expect you, like a good colleague, a professional colleague looks like somebody who comes out for dinner and drinks with people at least once a week and comes to all of the after hours activities that we do. So we’ve all internalized this idea of what a productive professional looks like in higher education, and any sort of deviation from that is… the case that I’ve given is probably one of the more severe, was punished. And that adds to the stress, and that adds to the feelings of alienation, and that adds to depression and anxiety and burnout.

John: And we’re living in somewhat interesting times, going back to the pandemic, the rise of faculty burnout, as we’ve talked about earlier, and we’re in an environment where there’s not a lot of support at the federal level, for a higher education in general, in fact, it’s being outright attacked in many ways. Might all of that help create an environment where perhaps anxiety, stress, and depression might be normalized, as well as with the rise of contingent faculty, where many, many faculty members are trying to do many more things than ever before, than in earlier periods when we had a larger proportion of tenured faculty with perhaps fewer demands placed on their time.

Rebecca P Yeah, I think there are a couple of things going on there. I think that we’ve got pandemic, we’ve got racial injustice, we’ve got AI, then we’ve got the White House right now, it’s what else could blow up? Don’t put that out there in the universe, but it has been kind of a collective trauma for years for everyone. And if you’re spending a lot of energy fighting stigma, fighting stereotype, masking, you don’t have a lot of energy left for fighting the good fight in a lot of ways, so you have to take care of yourself as well. So I think we are in a high anxiety…. obviously, we haven’t seen the statistics yet, but we can estimate that things like burnout and anxiety and depression are probably going to go through the roof right now for a lot of people, and there’s a lot of anxiety attached to that. And then you factor in other differences, and it becomes even more stressful. So how do they do that? And we can factor in the workload level of folks who are tenured, non-tenure track, adjunct. There’s a lot of neoliberal sentiment in the way we look at higher education these days, and how we perform in education these days, what is measured, and I think that becomes really challenging for folks who have different cognitive processing or another issue that might help in other ways to alleviate some of that anxiety. It’s difficult to figure out how to get your way in and out of that anxiety.

Lee Yeah, and this was probably one of the hardest parts, is how to conclude this book. What kind of advice should we give? And it varies as like: dismantle ableism? remove stigma? It’s all very high level structural issues, as you said, have better federal support for mental health treatment. There was just a… I think it was ProPublica did it, but I just saw that insurance companies are willfully making it more difficult to access mental health services, to keep the costs down. So it really is these individual stories within a much larger societal system that is working very hard against, not just neurodiverse folks, like at this point, it’s everyone. A friend of mine used to put it that the neurodiverse and the disabled folk are the canary in the coal mine, that if it’s hitting us, it’s going to hit the rest of y’all soon. In terms of being able to say, “uhhh, it’s hopeless,” because it’s not, and if it was hopeless, then we wouldn’t take the time and the effort and the energy to edit a book like this, that there’s power in sharing people’s stories. There’s power in gathering folks together around these kinds of stories, to start conversations within your academic unit, within your center, within your team, around these kinds of issues to be able to then start addressing them, where we might not be able to dismantle systemic ableism, but we certainly can make it better for the handful of individuals that we have direct impact on, and you hope that that grows from there.

Rebecca P Yeah, and those first-person perspectives are so important in this case. The stories are just so powerful that you really just have to sit with them and really think about, how have you participated in this process or in this social structure, and what do we do in higher education to be the open system and the place where everyone is welcome? There’s a lot of characteristics of higher education that fit very well for neurodivergent folks, but there are also just large scale ableism and sexism and things like that can cause these huge gaps in participation. So there’s some big challenges there, but we’re hoping that this is one step in getting people to kind of really understand from a first-person perspective what other people’s lives are like in our disciplines that are in our industry, and move from there into conversation.

Rebecca I think a lot about higher education’s initiatives to promote things like inclusive teaching, inclusive pedagogy, and Universal Design for Learning, and other ways to establish inclusive environments for a wide variety of students. But what are some of the ways that we can improve the environment for our diverse faculty, our neurodiverse faculty, our faculty experiencing mental illness, to really think about inclusion in this other space, and not just around students.

Lee I think one of the ways is to be able to talk about removing stigma. We probably all experienced this during the pandemic or even afterwards, and maybe even still now, where it’s like, “make sure you’re taking your breaks, make sure you’re taking your time off,” but then when you do, you’re made to feel bad about it. And so, again, one of the stories talked about they had to take a medical leave due to mental health struggles, and nobody talked to them, nobody offered meal trains for them, and they were contrasting their experience with their colleague who had to take a leave because they had cancer, and that this was kind of acceptable, but it was just really stark. And again, it’s a very stark example of ways that we treat mental health differently than physical health, very often, that if you get really sick in a way that we recognize, there is a community that forms around you, if you get sick in a way that is not recognizable… and Rebecca, you talk about this too, around how so much of our professional identity is around our brains. When something goes wrong with your brain, it almost feels like, well, we don’t want to catch that, right? or we don’t want to deal with that or we don’t want to deal with that reality and confront that reality. So that’s one of the ways, is that it is just treat it like any other illness, as you would treat it for faculty. Now, the flip side of that is that some places don’t treat physical illness [LAUGHTER] very well and make you feel bad if you take any sort of sick leave, parental leave, any of that kind of stuff. But the other way is, for me, is just having open conversations in ways where, when thinking through, how do you work best? And again, at least tenured faculty and tenured faculty tend to have a lot of flexibility in their schedule. I prefer to teach in the afternoons and evenings because it takes me two hours to get started in the morning, or I can’t teach in the evenings because I’m so burned out from the day no matter what, that seven o’clock at night is a problem. We think of universal design. How are we expected to participate in meetings? My podcast co-host, she always says, “I can either look like I’m paying attention in a meeting, or I can actually be paying attention in a meeting, because the process of looking like I’m paying attention in the meeting takes all of my cognitive energy, and therefore I actually have retained absolutely nothing of what was discussed in this meeting.” So again, having those conversations, asking the questions, not jumping to assumptions around. “Oh well, they’re not listening because they’re staring out the window or doodling,” or they can’t come to the social events or any of these kinds of things, so that there aren’t these assumptions that are made, but instead open conversations that are had.

Rebecca P One of our contributors talks about trying to get mental health and neurodiversity included in the inclusion work that was happening on their campus, and really trying to be an advocate for that, getting on all the DEI committees that this person could get onto, trying to form kind of an autism community employee research group at their institution, and really just being kind of fought for that. He was fighting for it, but he was getting a lot of pushback, that it was very difficult for people to think about inclusion in that sense. So we need to broaden what we’re thinking when we think about inclusion, to make sure that we are including difference of all sorts, which includes mental health and neurodiversity as well.

John: And as you noted, a lot of people have been diagnosed later in life with being on the spectrum or with ADHD or other issues. Is that something, perhaps, they should share with a colleague, so that their colleagues can better understand why they don’t fit in, combined with more institutional support, perhaps, for just general training on neurodiversity, because as faculty learn more about the behavior of individuals who are on the spectrum or who have ADHD, it might make it a lot easier for removing some of that stigma, maybe.

Lee Maybe, well, and that’s always the danger. We know, and again, through the stories, there are, as you said, institutions that were very resistant to these kinds of things. There are other institutions and colleagues who were very accepting, but often even talking about it didn’t help, because the people on the other side of the conversation were not interested in having a conversation, were not receptive to these things. So I think that that is “yes, talk about it,” but be careful. Again, there’s this idea of protecting yourself, where you probably know your institution, your department, your units’ politics best and if disclosure is something that might be, at best, ignored and at worst, punished, because that is always the risk. It’s particularly for contingent, particularly for staff, and even we had tenured folks where it got so bad that they gave up their tenured positions. As an individual, yes, it feels so good to get the diagnosis, but then the acceptance more broadly of that diagnosis [LAUGHTER] is not always a wonderful experience, unfortunately, and that’s why I think it’s that being open to have conversations and listening and unpacking those biases that you have, and those stigmas, those are the important things. So if somebody does come and say, “I just got an ADHD diagnosis, I just was diagnosed with PTSD, and this explains X, Y and Z in terms of what’s been happening with me,” to be able to listen and to hear it, and then to move forward in productive ways.

Rebecca It can be really difficult for faculty to find community in these spaces when you have to decide to disclose, who to disclose to, and then does that lead to maybe meeting some other folks who have disclosed or allies to kind of form a coalition so it is easier to speak out and to advocate when there’s numbers, [LAUGHTER] when you’re not just alone, but it’s hard for faculty to find those connections, because there is so much masking that has to happen to feel protected in your position.

Lee Well. It also speaks to the silos that tend to exist in higher education as well. How many faculty, again, depends on the size of your campus, obviously, but we tend to get it’s like, “our department is the university,” and so maybe your college, depending on how big or small your college is, but if you’re like the College of Arts and Sciences, it’s sort of like, “well, I’ve got my department and maybe a couple of colleagues who are studying something related, and I’m a humanities person.” So it’s like over in history, or maybe over in religion or that, but mostly it’s like, you know the people in your department. And so, even for neurotypical, the challenge of belonging is that if you don’t belong in your department, there’s very little effort to help you belong within the larger institution, very often as faculty, which is also why contingent faculty tend to feel so disconnected, is because the primary point of belonging is the department, and depending on the department, most of them make it very clear that contingent faculty are not a part of the community and that they are not welcome. So there’s that added challenge as well, of like, how do you even go about finding community outside of your academic discipline?

Rebecca P Yeah, and I think too, following that even further, that you get to the point where “do I disclose so that I can belong? Is that coming out process part of advocacy now? Do I now have to be the advocate for this?” And maybe you just want to belong in your institution. You just want to belong in your department. You don’t necessarily don’t necessarily want to have that advocacy role. We kind of expect it of people when they disclose and we don’t necessarily want to be forcing that onto someone.

Rebecca I think that’s why it’s really important for those who are comfortable speaking out and advocating, whether you have a diagnosis or you’re neurotypical or whatever, that those that are comfortable or in spaces or in positions of power that can speak out, it’s important to help move a culture in a space. Can you provide some advice for educational developers, instructional designers, etc, folks that are maybe doing some professional development work on campus, on how to support neurodiversity and faculty who might identify as having a mental illness or might be having mental health challenges? What should we be doing?

Rebecca P I think the first step is learning. I think there’s reading to be done. There are resources to be accessing so that you have a sense of what folks are up against. Our book contributes to that by giving you some first-person narratives to have conversations around, so you don’t necessarily feel like you’re calling people out in your space. You can talk about these cases. So I mean, I really hope it gets picked up as a book club piece for a lot of places, so that they can have those conversations around this. But it’s gonna take some additional learning, and maybe that’s training. Maybe that’s just some good reading about these topics. Maybe it’s a Coursera class or something about understanding neurodivergence, but I think there’s learning to be done for all of us in conversation and in the research that’s out there.

Lee Yeah, and I think that the thing that works against all of us in all of this is just time. My advice is time and patience, because even then, you can do all the reading on ADHD, you can do all the reading on autism, you can do all the reading on depression or PTSD, but it’s going to be different in every single person. Again, on our podcast, All the Things ADHD, my co-host and I have a joke, or we’ll say to each other, “it wouldn’t surprise you to know that my experience is completely different,” or “that thing that helps you sounds like my nightmare.” And so it’s really being able to take the time and that openness to be able to say, “Okay, what do you need from me? How can I help?” And some of that is really also gaining a self awareness. Part of it is the diagnosis, and then accepting it and just being like, “Okay, I need to figure out what works for me now,” rather than trying to make everything that everyone says should work for me, work for me. So it’s fairly typical. I give an example, Right now we’re working on getting ready to launch all the summer online courses, and so I’m a learning designer, I’m working with faculty. I have a grad student working with me as well in building these courses. I’m fine for 95% of it, but the last 5%, I struggle to get that last 5% done. “Add the captions to this video,” to me is more daunting than “build this course.” And so, as an awareness, I have to be very clear with the people I’m working with, and I’m sorry if I keep repeating myself, but I have this to do list, and I want to make sure that I really get in and understand it, so that I do it, because these are the things that I struggle with, and it’s really hard for us to talk about the things that we struggle with. We are supposed to be experts, particularly in higher education. We are supposed to be the subject matter experts, the knowledgeable ones. And so to kind of admit fallibility and to say these are the things that I need help with, and then to be able to ask for them. And so I think it’s a two-way street in that like, ask them what they need. And if it’s an unconventional ask, don’t just scoff at it, probe it a little bit. But on the other side, try to ask for what you need. Try to figure out what it is you need, that if you’re bad at that last 5% don’t just tell the Learning Designer, okay, yeah, no, I got this last 5% be like, “No, I’m like, Could you do the captioning?” Again, there might be stuff in contracts and all unions, but if we’re having these conversations, if we gain an awareness ourselves about what we need, and then we are greeted with an openness to hear those needs that makes such a huge difference in terms of productivity, if we want to reduce it to that, but just in terms of the experience being a more pleasant one.

Rebecca I think this conversation really pokes at a lot of things that need to be discussed in our campuses, and we need to lead some of these conversations to get the word out. And your book might be a really great platform to do that through a reading group. Can you tease a little bit more about some of the specific topics that are addressed in some of the essays?

Rebecca P Oh, goodness, it’s such a wide spectrum, like we’ve mentioned, we’ve got folks different places on the autism spectrum, ADHD, anxiety, depression, all kinds of folks who really are coming from all over the corners of higher education. So it’s really well represented. You’ll be able to find someone that you can connect with in the reading of these stories. And we have some sections around masking. We have a section around stigma, specifically, we have a section around higher education structures that can exacerbate for folks these experiences. So there’s just so much to draw from that you’ll find someone that you connect to or that you maybe see yourself reflected in.

Lee There’s also a lot of other kinds of intersectionality, talking about gender, talking about sexuality, talking about race, and so those are also in there, and they are linked in terms of the ways that, how can you tease out: Is this because I am visibly queer, or is this because I am autistic? Is this because I am a woman in higher education, or is this because I have ADHD? Again, all of these things come up as well, and so this is also an opportunity to really start those conversations on a more broader definition of inclusivity, because it isn’t always just only one.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Rebecca P What’s next? Well, the book will come out. [LAUGHTER] Yay! So we hope to be having lots of conversations with different groups of faculty around the country about that book, especially if it gets picked up and read. So we’re looking forward to that. I personally am currently working on a book about women’s leadership and burnout in higher education. So that’s my project for the rest of the year.

Lee Yeah, the book is coming out in August, and so we wanted to take the opportunity over the summer, when things calm down a bit, to talk about, do we want to do a podcast where we have some of the contributors come on who are willing to talk a little bit more about their essays, answer these questions, and so we can put up a website, all kinds of fun stuff that right now I just can’t think about. No more spoons, as they say, there are no more spoons for that. Hopefully it will spark conversations. Hopefully we will be able to go and Zoom in to campuses to talk about these experiences. Hopefully other neurodiverse faculty will feel empowered to come forward with their own stories as well. And you hope that this creates more opportunities for conversation, more opportunities for storytelling, more opportunities for connection in all of those kinds of ways where we’ve opened the door a crack. It is really only just a beginning, but hopefully it just starts something that other people can take up and keep going with in terms of their own. People always ask us, like, “is there a campus that’s done it really well?” And we’re like, “No, not really, no.” And so what you hope is, in 5, 10 years, because academia moves slow, but that’s fine, we will have examples of institutions that are doing it very well, that will have case studies for this and models that other institutions can emulate. And so again, like there’s what we hope comes next is: “Here’s a starting point. Go forward with this and create. Feel empowered, feel creative, feel less alone and go in and in small ways, make things better.”

John: Well, thank you. I’m very much looking forward to reading your book when it comes out in August, and it’s an area that all institutions can do better with, and all faculty perhaps can do better with, in terms of creating a more supportive environment for everyone.

Lee Definitely.

Rebecca This is a great project, and we’re looking forward to your future projects as well.

Rebecca Thank you so much.

Lee Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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402. Preparing for Title II

Posted in access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, edtech, educational technology, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, professional development
July 16, 2025

Updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act regulations require public colleges to increase their efforts to ensure that digital content meets accessibility standards. In this episode, Sean Moriarty joins us to discuss strategies to foster a culture of access across an institution. Sean is the Chief Technology Officer at SUNY Oswego. Sean and Rebecca have worked collaboratively on digital accessibility initiatives at SUNY Oswego since 2017

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act regulations require public colleges to increase their efforts to ensure that digital content meets accessibility standards. In this episode, we discuss strategies to foster a culture of access across an institution.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Sean Moriarty. Sean is the Chief Technology Officer at SUNY Oswego. In this role, Sean provides leadership for the continued development of a client-centered, agile, robust, accessible, and secure digital campus environment that advances the university’s strategic goals. Sean and Rebecca have worked collaboratively on digital accessibility initiatives at SUNY Oswego since 2017. Welcome back, Sean.

Sean: Well, thanks a lot. It’s good to be back with you two.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Sean, are you drinking any tea today?

Sean: I am. I am having an Irish Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: I almost drank that knowing that you were probably drinking that. [LAUGHTER]

Sean: Yes.

John: And I am drinking a pure peppermint tea today.

Rebecca: And no fear, I’ve got English breakfast. [LAUGHTER] Got the British Isles represented.

John: So in January of 2019, we had you on to talk about SUNY Oswego’s work to build a culture of accessibility. And five years later, in January of 2024, members of SUNY Oswego’s workgroup on accessibility practices joined us to talk about one of our initiatives, the 10-day accessibility challenge. And several weeks ago, we had Mark Greenfield on the podcast to talk about the recent updates to Title II of the American with Disabilities Act (or ADA). Today, we’re planning to follow up on those earlier conversations and talk about some of the practical steps that SUNY Oswego is taking to address Title II. Meeting the requirements of Title II can seem pretty daunting if a campus hasn’t been actively engaged in digital accessibility practices. So where does a campus start, what were the first steps that SUNY Oswego took to address digital accessibility?

Sean: So first of all, thanks for inviting me back again. It’s always good to talk to you two. You mentioned that I was on in 2019 which does seem like a lifetime ago when you think of it being six years ago, but also the pandemic happened in between, and this really brought, I think, a whole new vision and awareness around digital accessibility and the role that it had in terms of helping students to navigate the teaching and learning that we went through during that period of time. And I think the work that we’ve done beforehand really paid off during the pandemic, and I think the work that we continue to do really helps with students. But if we go back to your question like, where do you start with something like this? The way that we have approached it here at Oswego is that the responsibility for creating accessible content falls to the people making accessible content. When we first had our OCR complaint, in 2017 that was, we saw just really how deep the hole was in terms of the content that we were creating and the requirements to go in to make it all accessible. So I think the way that we’ve gone and really done it is to focus on educating people on how to create accessible content and making them aware of their responsibility in terms of doing it, and trying to simplify the process as much as we can for everyone as we went forward.

Rebecca: I think one of the key things that we focused on was building a coalition of folks who wanted to build the momentum around digital accessibility. So prior to the OCR complaint, there was through our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, we had a work group on accessibility practices that had representation of constituents across campus that has greatly grown over time. And so now there’s representation from many units and now faculty, et cetera, that does a lot of the professional development on our campus around digital accessibility. But around the OCR complaint, Sean also formulated the digital accessibility steering committee, and now those two groups are connected.

Sean: When we first had the OCR complaint, we really focused on the website in particular and having it reach standards. And I’ll just say we were one of 31 SUNY schools out of the 32 that had complaints against it. So everyone was going through the same thing at the same time, but once we went and got the website up to standard, we realized that it’s an ongoing task in terms of going and keeping it that way. So really, we got the group together, that started with our web services team and also included Accessibility Services. And Rebecca was a partner, certainly, in all this work, and Rebecca has a unique skill set in the sense that she teaches graphic design and teaches web services, but she also happened to be working with you at the time, John, right in our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. So it really helped that we could go and integrate these teams together and to bring the work that we were trying to do and expand the scope as we went forward. Another important component, I think, of it, was how we went and integrated faculty inside what we were trying to do. And started with our first accessibility fellows… in 2019 I think that was. And our goal was really just to have someone from each of the different colleges to be a part of the team and kind of look at accessibility, particularly in their discipline, learn about how to use it, and then act as an advocate inside their area of expertise. But actually the first year, we had seven people step forward, and that was a good investment, I think, in terms of going and working with those people. The next year was 2020, and we had four people. And when the pandemic hit, by that point, really, we had 11 people who had gone through accessibility training and were really ready to step in and really acted as advocates and helped all the people inside their departments to go and to navigate what lay ahead as we went through the pandemic and our shift to online learning as it was for months and months to come.

Rebecca: I think if we were to talk about what we’d recommend for other campuses to do to start, it’s really to start with the coalition of the willing, or the folks that are most likely to advocate for digital accessibility, or might be in adjacent spaces focused on equity issues, for example, and to find representation across campus. So we have folks from the library, instructional designers, the teaching center, faculty. We have folks in Disability Services, folks in our student affairs unit as well, that are doing a wide variety of work and can act as a liaison in all those different areas to transform the practices of folks on campus. And I think that strategy has served us well.

Sean: Yes, for sure. And I think also, as we get more people involved, more people look and see other areas that we should involve as we move forward. And I know Rebecca has done a lot of work, and the people in the work group in areas such as orientation and how we bring students in. We also have the person who runs Slate on our campus, which is our enrollment application, that we go and interact with students as they apply to college, and then get information back and forth. But he was a graphic design graduate of our school, and was a student of Rebecca’s at one point, and he’s been able to go in to implement all of the same principles and really go to bring this kind of technology and this way of thinking to the way that we work on campus, and bring students in.

John: Just to clarify one thing… earlier, you mentioned an OCR complaint, and just to make sure everyone is on the same page with us, by OCR, you are referring to…

Sean: Yeah.

John: …the Office of Civil Rights.

Sean: That’s correct, John, yep.

Rebecca: …and then the Department of Education.

Sean: Yes, and actually, and just to go back to that, in 2017, over 2000 universities had OCR complaints against them, particularly around the website, and a number of them were in SUNY as well.

John: So, now, as we’re coming up to the April 2026, or ‘27 for small communities, compliance deadline, what are some of the concrete steps that are being taken to ensure that all digital content, web content, and digital apps, including those created by faculty, staff and students, will meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standards by that time.

Rebecca: So one of our strategies is actually to use the current WCAG standards, which are actually WCAG 2.2 double A in part because they include some important guidelines around mobile technology. So we’re always gonna adopt the most current WCAG standards, so that we’re always ahead of things, rather than adopting an older, outdated set of guidelines. [LAUGHTER] And so we have a Title II plan that we’ve worked on collaboratively that has essentially four components. The first is raising awareness and making sure folks know what we mean by digital accessibility, so defining that, and then also what Title II is, developing a professional development strategy, which we can talk about, and implementing policy and procedures, especially around procurement, and then finally, making sure that we have an assessment strategy and have a way for folks to evaluate their own progress and know where they stand, so using accessibility checkers and things like that.

John: So you mentioned these four steps. Could you elaborate on this a little bit?

Sean: So we’ve really tried to think of it in these four steps. The first one is raising awareness. And we’ve really been focusing, and actually, the way that Rebecca and I have got the plan here, and the steering committee of the plan it’s like a component for each season, although we will continue on with many components as these seasons progress. So awareness, we’ve spent a lot of time this past semester and during spring of 2025 focusing on awareness, making people understand what Title II is. We call it digital accessibility in our campus because we’ve really focused on having the digital campus as a core component of the way that we deliver education here at Oswego. The second component, that we’ll work on over the summer, is preparing policy and procedures, procurement is going to be a large component, I think, as we move forward, and I know we’ll talk more about that later. But we want to go and focus and make sure that we’re ready to move forward once we hit September again. Then we’re also preparing training and being aware of how we’re going to go and develop people as we move forward once we hit the ground in the fall when school returns. And then there’s the assessment feedback, and I know Rebecca just touched on the point, we want to be able to give people feedback so that they understand, if they’re creating accessible content, how to make it better, and whether it’s inside Word, inside the Brightspace environment, or the digital learning environment, or whether it’s on the web, people should be getting feedback and understanding if they’ve created and posted accessible digital content for others.

Rebecca: One of the strategies that we’re using for professional development, which might be of particular use for this audience, is organizing around content types, so everyone on campus is a content creator of some sort, whether you’re creating emails or documents, presentations, et cetera. And so the professional development that we’re doing is largely around these kind of content types that might have slightly different skill sets necessary to make those types of content. So we have email, documents, slide decks, multimedia, charts and tables, forms, social media, kind of page layout and design, folks that are using the learning management system, and how to navigate that and make sure things in that system are accessible. And then folks that are editing content on the front end of the website, as well as those that are doing more of programming or development on web or software applications.

Sean: Well, I think what’s interesting too is that the way that people create content really isn’t necessarily role based in terms of what we’re doing. One item that we really haven’t mentioned up to this point around Title II is how it affects students and how students will be required to create accessible content as well. We’ve really thought of this in a couple of ways. There’s what happens inside the classroom, and faculty can be responsible for that, but there’s also the clubs and how they have students interact with one another, and the social media, different technologies that they integrate too. So as we have this content type of training, if you’re doing social media, you could be in marketing communications, or you could be running the fencing club at school, and you’re going to need to have this kind of training and awareness to go and to be responsible. So the training will be good for both of those groups of people, and it really cuts across where you are in the organization.

John: Remediating materials created by an entire institution would seem to be pretty much an impossible task, requiring a tremendous staff, unless perhaps individuals are charged with that responsibility. So what ongoing professional development and training opportunities are being provided to faculty and staff to create accessible content effectively, beyond that initial awareness and beyond those initial departments that were reached by the accessibility fellows.

Sean: You’re right. I think, in that remediation, the quantity of work makes it impossible, which is why we took the attitude about six years ago, that we’re going to go on a step-forward basis, and this is where we’re at and we’re going to start creating as much accessible content as we can. And we really started by investing in training for our staff and our trainers. If I go back to 2018 and ‘19, and that would have meant sending people out to the WebAIM training out in Utah, which was a great investment, I think, for our staff and for their awareness, and they were able to go and to bring that kind of training back and start our own programs. But then we started a series of other kinds of trainings, which would include our CELT breakouts for our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, where we would go and focus on different accessibility items. We already talked about the Faculty Fellows in terms of going and helping them with their training. And we have created a lot of on-demand training, whether it be on our accessibility website, and utilization of Deque.

Rebecca: So, Deque is Deque University, which is an online training platform. You can get subscriptions too. So the SUNY system has a subscription to Deque University, and that provides really great opportunities to learn about specific software. So if you wanted to learn digital accessibility skills in the Microsoft suite, the Google Suite, or web platforms, etc, so everyone has access to that on our campus. We’ve also developed a Brightspace course called Access: a Quest Toward Inclusion, that we’re rolling out on our campus. We’ve done a couple pilots, and that’s fully rolled out as we speak right now in the summer. And in that course, not only do we have some technical skills, but also conceptual ideas around how digital accessibility fits into ideas of inclusive pedagogy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, student success, et cetera, so that it helps connect those pieces and how digital accessibility also dovetails with UDL and some of these other strategies. That course is built upon an earlier experiment that we had on our campus called the 10-day accessibility challenge, which we rolled out in January of 2021 to support faculty as they were teaching online during COVID, and that we have a whole podcast on.

John: We’ll include a link to the earlier podcast discussions of that program and of other related topics. How many faculty fellows have been through training?

Sean: At this point, we’ve had 24 faculty who have gone through the fellowship training.

John: And you mentioned workshops, and those are generally taking place at least twice a year. And there’s probably eight to 10 workshops at least twice a year on all these topics.

Sean: Yes, and actually we focus on accessibility for a couple days in the January winter breakouts and training sessions that you have, which would be the time where we bring in the new accessibility fellows, and they go through specialized training. But the training is really available to everyone on campus. And, like I said, we really focus on that for a couple days.

John: So this is a pretty big task that you’re discussing here. And how did you effectively secure commitment from campus leadership to allocate those initial resources: the human, the financial and the time allocation for digital accessibility, especially when many on campus might not fully understand the urgency or the scope of moving to digital accessibility.

Sean: So when I think of the commitment, I think the OCR complaint really opened people’s eyes. And it raised awareness in terms of what was required to go in to do digital accessibility properly, and we’ve really looked at it from two components: one is how it ties to our mission in terms of student success, equity, fairness, and the second component of it is the risk and risk mitigation in terms of how, if you’re not going and doing this stuff, you might get sued. So I think both of those items really talk to two different components of the university. So around financial components, they’re really interested in mitigating the risk, and they can see where doing this work will go and avoid any lawsuits that we might have. But I think from the classroom side and academic side, we really want to go and focus on why this ties into the mission, and how we can go and really serve the students. There’s a second component, I’ll say, in terms of how we go and secure commitment. So the leadership is one component of it, but I would also say there is this component on campus that really believes in it and will go and do the work required around it. So when I think of Rebecca and her team and the instructional designers that she’s worked with, and really other people inside CTS, and then the faculty that we’ve dealt with, they’re committed to going and doing it and providing a structure and a framework for them to, in essence, either have extra service pay or to have time cut out of their schedule to go and to do it, was a wise investment, and showed that the university really was serious in terms of what we’re doing, and that’s what we offer for the faculty fellows, in terms of the structure around going and supporting it.

Rebecca: I think one thing that Sean’s not directly addressing is his pivotal role in all of this, and someone in his position, and getting someone who is a chief technology officer, a chief information officer, really on board is really integral to getting this work done. So we were doing a lot of ad hoc stuff in the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching through our work group, which was kind of a grassroots group that was just doing the work because we were passionate about it and thought it was important for our community to be a part of, but when we brought the need to bring this work into the classrooms, beyond just the website, which is what the OCR complaint was about, initially, Sean was really collaborative and wanted to work with us and provide resources and advocate for resources, and so that digital accessibility steering committee that we mentioned at the top of the show has become really integral as a space to discuss critical issues, to prioritize things that might need to be funded or advocated for, so that the work here can get done. So, for example, we use Google on our campus, and the Google platform doesn’t have built-in accessibility checkers. So one of the things that the work group brought to the steering committee was the need to invest in a checker. So we invested in grackle so that we have an accessibility checker for folks that are using Google Docs and Google Slides, et cetera. So that platform has been really important for fellows and for our work group to raise issues, and then for that steering committee to make some decisions about priorities, and then Sean’s task is that to advocate for that and either fund it through his budget or request funds elsewhere. [LAUGHTER]

Sean: Yeah. Well, I think when we have put forward a budget and we have money set aside, I would think for our accessibility initiatives, it’s less than you would think would be necessary. But I think when we think of what’s required, it is this investment in people and then in the technology to go and to make the work easy, and then it’s also in time. You wouldn’t underestimate the amount of time that’s needed to go and to provide for people to go and to get on training. When I think back to the time when we did the 10-day challenge and thinking these things through, I mean, first of all, they were a lot of fun to go and to do, but we also gained a lot in terms of going and moving our initiative forward as we went and invested. So the time is an important component, but it really comes down to prioritization. When I think back to the last few years, IT departments… when I think of how we can go and be involved in the diversity and the equity and the inclusion and the items that we were working on at the time… this was really a key component, I think, and one of our major contributions to going and helping largely around the equity that we provided to the students and really focused in on student success. So I think the initiatives really went hand in hand with what we were trying to accomplish.

Rebecca: Building in the 10-day accessibility challenge and our Access: a Quest Towards Inclusion Course, are really helpful because they provide scaffolded and structured learning, so that complements the on-demand resources that we also have available. So departments have advocated for their constituents to participate in these challenges or in the course, and that means that they’re prioritizing or allocating time to do that work, which I think is helpful.

John: You mentioned the issue of Google not providing the tools that are needed to help check accessibility, there’s also a lot of other software that’s being used on campus from third parties. Can you talk a little bit about how procurement strategies might have to change here and at other institutions in response to the need to make sure that mobile apps that students are asked to use are accessible?

Sean: Yeah, I think this is a large component, and I would say, for us, kind of the next frontier in terms of going and figuring out how we’re going to do it. So I think what makes it difficult is the testing that you need to do on the software that you’re looking to go and buy. And reading the VPATs and the ACRs, which are the accessibility compliance reports that software developers are supposed to provide you when you purchase software. So it takes a certain skill set to be able to go in to do that, and that skillset’s highly in demand and is difficult to go and to teach, but I think this is an area that we’ll focus on over the next year. So when I talked about policy before, it was around developing this software acquisition policy and procedure that we’ll go and integrate and for us, it’ll include all of the security work that we’re doing, and it’ll also include the accessibility and compliance checking that we’re looking to be able to provide to software end users.

Rebecca: One thing that we don’t always think about when we’re considering third parties is third-party content that we might be getting from publishers or PDFs from library databases and things like that. So those are all materials that we’re using for teaching and learning that are coming from third parties that do need to be evaluated, that maybe traditionally, we’re not attending to in that way, that we really need to build into our practices. So often we think about procurement as something that we’re spending money on, but it also, in the way that we’re thinking about it means that anything that we’re acquiring to share with others. So that may not cost money, but we still need to test it.

Sean: Yeah, it’s a skill set that we’ll really need to go and develop, but it really is necessary to ensure compliance.

John: Might this become a little bit easier, though now as third-party platforms are threatened with the loss of sales, as all public institutions are required to meet these accessibility requirements as we move forward?

Sean: I certainly hope so. There’s also a law in New York State that software developers need to provide software that’s compliant with what we’re looking for around the accessibility. I will say, though, that building software is kind of like steering a large ocean liner, and depending on where people are, it can be difficult for them to go and to change where they’re going. So I think I would certainly see this in the future, but we’re not there now, for sure.

Rebecca: But as universities kind of band together and put the pressure on I think we will see this change over time.

John: And one of the nice things about being part of a system is some of the work can be shared across institutions. And I believe there are some efforts to do that across institutions in the SUNY system.

Sean: Yes, I would say inside SUNY we’ve really worked together, and I give SUNY System Administration a lot of credit for prioritizing this, and they have a core group of people that have really prioritized it, and Rebecca and I have worked with those people, and they’ve really moved us forward a large amount. An example would be the Deque University training systems that are available. But there’s also other examples of where there’s a lot of training that’s provided by our Center for Professional Development, and they’ve really taken on items such as Universal Design for Learning and provided many opportunities for faculty to go and to incorporate those practices inside the classroom for themselves. I’ll also add that they’ve started a new program this year on accessibility advocates and allies that Rebecca is leading this year, and it’s really to go in to take our accessibility fellowship program, and there’s 11 accessibility and advocate ally fellows this year, and they’re working and seeing how they can go and further the work on their campuses to get these core groups working together and move the needle forward around accessibility.

John: Traditionally, when working with students or faculty with disabilities, much of this was handled by campus disability offices, where the focus had been historically on providing accommodations. We’ve been moving towards, and Title II is certainly going to reinforce, a shift from providing reactive accommodations to a proactive inclusive design model. So this is something we’ve been doing for a while, but what strategies have you found to be most effective in fostering a campus-wide culture of accessibility, especially for those who might be somewhat new to digital accessibility.

Rebecca: I think that depends a little bit on the audience. So for administrators and decision makers, helping those individuals see how this work ties to the mission is really core and critical. When we’re talking about faculty, we can integrate that work into other things that we’re talking about in teaching centers, like inclusive pedagogy, evidence-based practices, Universal Design for Learning, all of those things, with accessibility also support student success. And then, if we’re talking about student affairs folks, who really focus on the students, the whole student… when we’re thinking about student success… that’s also a way to tie this accessibility work into the mission and goals of their division as well. So I think tying it to what people are already doing and what they already care about is really critical in shifting the culture of access for sure.

Sean: So you did mention, historically, when this work is done reactively, it all falls to like, Disability Services or Accessibility Services, but I’ll just say that those people are still integrated into the work that we’re doing, and are key parts of our coalition, I would say, and of who we’re working with to go and to focus on the student service, but we have spent a lot of time really going and developing this coalition and looking at the different roles and responsibilities that each people has. And really, Rebecca and I have tried to go and develop a model in terms of how we go and look at this work and what we’re trying to do and how we move it forward. And we use an acronym called RAMPS, which is really a key set of tactics we have developed to cultivate a culture of access.

Rebecca: So RAMPS stands for request, amplify, model, prioritize, and support. And you might wonder why RAMPS? Well, we associate ramps with kind of the sloping planes that you might use to access a building. You’re on wheels, for example. So it’s already tied to the land of accessibility. So we were hoping that would make it a little more memorable. And then, in addition, the word ramp can be used as a verb, meaning to speed up or expand or increase quickly. And so we see this as a set of tactics that really can accelerate this culture of access. And so if we want to dig into each of the tactics in a little bit more detail, requests specifically means requesting colleagues, peers and others to use a specific accessibility practice, so use a microphone or captions or something like that. Amplify or amplify voices and perspectives of people with disabilities, this can look like raising your hand in a meeting and asking what kinds of accessibility features might be built into a particular event or software or other platform. Model is model best practices in your everyday work. So things like, every time you create a document, you’re running your accessibility checker, you’re using alt text and those kinds of things, so that people see that you care about it because you’re doing it. This is particularly important for leadership to do. Prioritize, is prioritize accessibility by allocating resources, and by resources, we mean time, funds, and personnel, and then support… support others in their accessibility journey through coaching, education, processes, and procedures, and so this can look like a wide variety of things, but making sure that as people want to develop in the space of digital accessibility, you’re helping support their technical skills, but also developing their workflows and other things where they might face a few hiccups along the way.

John: So could you provide some other examples of how administrators, faculty, staff and students can employ RAMPS tactics to help advance accessibility.

Sean: Yeah, so when I think of administrators, whether it be the presidents, provosts, vice presidents, deans, directors, and so on down the line, we’ve gone and developed a list of tactics. So, as an example, request units to review their policies and procedures to ensure they’re meeting the legal requirements, but looking around what they’re doing around accessibility and the content, amplify the why of accessibility practices, and I think that’s really an important component in terms of how it ties to the mission, because people often see it as more work than just putting material out, but remediating is way more work than it is to go and do it right the first time. Model, model accessibility practices on correspondence and particularly presentations that go out from your office. When we think of prioritize, I think of team time for professional development and the resources that are required, and support that would be through appropriate budget and resources that can be provided for these types of projects. I see the responsibility of CIOs, and what we do, and really around prioritizing Title II initiatives by ensuring availability of accessibility tools, ensuring that there’s professional training and support available, and ensuring accessible procurement practices are developed and implemented, and then support by really partnering with the other people on campus to ensure that we’re producing the results that we’re looking to produce.

Rebecca: We think about instructors and the role that instructors play, the tactics might look different in those settings. So for example, instructors can request that students follow accessibility guidelines like the WCAG 2.2 double A standard, just like they might APA or MLA style guides, and so that could be something that’s a graded component.

John: We could always hope that they do better with that than they do with the citation styles.

Rebecca: True, [LAUGHTER] but reinforcing it with grades or as a rubric component is helpful. We can also model using accessibility checkers, not only by checking our own work, but showing students how to do that as well. One way that instructors can prioritize this work is by participating in professional development related to Universal Design for Learning or UDL and accessibility.

John: So, what metrics do we use here, and what metrics might other campuses perhaps consider in monitoring the progress of meeting accessibility practices.

Sean: So, when I look at it from the technical point of view, I look at ensuring that we’re gathering these metrics and being able to provide people feedback. So we use tools such as ALLY, and we also use SiteImprove. So ALLY would be inside the learning management system. SiteImprove is an application that will go and browse your website and let you know what the accessibility content is and where there might be areas that need to be improved. And then we’re able to go and provide that feedback back to people so they can understand what they’re doing. We also look at people that are requesting accessibility workshops, people speaking up about microphones and using microphones or other accessibility practices. I’ll also say that we’ve really tried to focus on understanding where we’re at, and we’re going to move forward at the fastest pace we can but this is really when you go and develop culture, it’s really difficult to go and to leapfrog from one stage to another. You really just make progress by making steady progress and by doing the work that’s there. So we just focus on getting better each semester.

Rebecca: Yeah, some of the stuff that we’ve done includes analyzing some of our ALLY data to see whether or not the fellows have made an impact in their departments, to see if that’s improved their ALLY scores, and it has. So that’s exciting. It means that that’s a worthwhile investment. Sometimes it’s these really specific metrics where there’s scores, but when you’re really looking at culture change, some of the things that you actually observe are spaces like our Faculty Assembly, where maybe one person, often me in the past, would be the person saying, like, “Please use a microphone. Please do this. Please do that.” And now I don’t have to say anything. And there’s many other people who will speak up in these settings to request certain accessibility features be used in a wide variety of settings, and I’ve seen students, faculty, and staff, all make these kinds of requests in public settings. So that’s real advocacy work that’s happening, and is a real difference from where we started.

Sean: Well, I also think of people who have come to training, and when you think of culture like we have people in events that have come to our accessibility training and trying to understand better. The people running the orientation are really trying to go and ensure that they’re creating accessible content to provide to the students. So sometimes we’ve recruited those people, other times they’ve been recruited by others who are part of the culture, I guess I would say. So, I think when you see how it’s grown organically, in that sense, it’s really satisfying.

Rebecca: I think along those same lines, we can see a wider variety of individuals offering workshops during our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching’s breakout sessions in the spring and in the winter, and that just demonstrates how many more people are deeply engaged with the subject matter compared to previously.

John: So one of the things that really struck me was the comment about using microphones. It’s still an issue. We ran an AI symposium yesterday, and we had a number of people attending remotely, and some people in the back of the room said, “Well, my voice is loud enough so anyone can hear” and sometimes faculty in large classes will still do that. And it is important to get that reminder out that while people who are near you certainly will hear you, the people who are further away or who have hearing impairment won’t, and there’s a lot of people with hearing impairment who do not necessarily reveal that.

Sean: Yeah, it’s a real issue. Actually, one of the things I’m proud of, too, is how we’ve really worked to go at big events such as graduation and commencement, which we just hosted and brought in an application that’ll go and provide real-time translation of what the speaker is saying for people in the audience, and we post that on a QR code, both in the program and on the screen beforehand, so that people can hear and understand what the speakers are saying. And when you have an audience of over 4000 people, there’s going to be a lot of people who have hearing impairments who really will benefit from that kind of service that you’re providing.

John: So what do you see as some of the biggest challenges that institutions must face in meeting this Title II deadline? I know we’ve done a lot here, but a lot of campuses are much further behind.

Rebecca: I think even though we’ve made a lot of progress here, we still have challenges that we’re going to face, and one of them, and I think this is true across most of higher ed, is student-generated content has not traditionally been a focus. So this is really when students are sharing work with each other. Previously, we’ve certainly focused on things when they share it more publicly, [LAUGHTER] but they’re sharing it with each other in the class. That’s going to be something that instructors need to think about and may need to become integrated into our learning objectives through general education or some other spaces to reinforce learning some of those skills.

John: And that’s something that can be sold to students as a useful skill in that as more and more companies start moving towards making their digital content more accessible, there’s going to be a lot of employment possibilities there.

Rebecca: I know it’s been a great benefit to a lot of my former students. [LAUGHTER] Some disciplines also have specific challenges that we need to really come up with better strategies for. Some of this work is starting and is there, but it’s not streamlined. Some software packages just don’t have accessibility features built into them. So there’s workflows and habits that need to change, and changing habits and workflows and anything you’re used to is difficult, and people, by their very nature resist change often. So that’s something that all institutions are going to have to work with and address. And I would say, in particular disciplines with notation, so things like math, chemistry, music, all have some unique specific challenges. Or if you think about disciplines like art history that are heavily image based, and thinking about how alt text might need to shift depending on why you’re analyzing a particular image in a course, sometimes it might be more esthetic, sometimes it might be more important to be a more poetic alt text to fit the needs. And so education around some of those really unique features of disciplines is something that we just really need to work together on across institutions.

Sean: I’ll also add, I think procurement is going to be difficult for many colleges in terms of going and having the skill set, which I mentioned before, and also a lot of schools will have problems with resources in terms of training, in terms of having people to go and to train, and depending on where you’re starting from, I can certainly see it being a challenge. It’s an advantage to us to be in a system so that we can go and aggregate some of our resources together. But I can understand how it’s difficult for many of the colleges to go.

Rebecca: I would also add, though, that although these are challenges, these aren’t insurmountable things, these are all solvable problems, but it might need some collaboration and changes of processes to make it happen.

John: Well, we’ve addressed a lot of issues related to movement to meet the Title II requirements. We always end, though, with the question: “What’s next?”

Sean: So I think the first item is, like the game is afoot now, it’s time to execute on the next components of our strategy, which is around training for the content providers at Oswego, and focusing on meeting people where they’re at in terms of going and both offering the training and in terms of going and upskilling them as we move forward. And I think the second component is to invoke the student clubs in the equation and the students as we move forward, and partner with them to help ensure that they make the requirements and take responsibility for their social postings or documents, as well as integrating where it fits into the academic side of the campus. And I think really, one of the third parts is not to look at April 2026 as like this magic day when the project is over. It’s just another day, another milestone, we’ll l not be 100% perfect at that point, and it’s just a continuing project that will go on for years to come, I would think, and to make sure that we have a solid base to constantly be building on, so it becomes less work for people to go in and do, and it makes it easier for them to integrate into their workflows.

Rebecca: I think one ongoing thing to remember moving forward is that accessibility is not an on off switch. So we need to remember that there’s continuous improvement, and we can always work as technology develops to make things more accessible and to keep reevaluating where we’re at so that we can make those improvements.

Sean: I’m going to add one more component that’s what next, and it is our integration of the AI Fellows that we have on campus. So we started an AI Fellow program early this year, but I see the AI Fellows and the Accessibility Fellows integrating their work in the coming year, and to see how that can really go and help us to move this forward. That might be an area that can help us to leapfrog some of our actions forward and our ability to create accessible content.

John: And I did just see an article about several campuses introducing AI tools to read the names of students during graduation, which might actually sometimes give better pronunciations than some of the readers might otherwise, although we’ve had some very good readers here on our campus.

Sean: Yeah, AI is going to have an impact everywhere. So I’d look at where the intersection of these two areas is for sure.

John: And we’ve had a few podcasts where people have discussed how AI tools may help meet accessibility and UDL requirements, and we’ll share links to some of those in the show notes as well.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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396. Title II

Posted in access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, edtech, educational technology, equity, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, online learning
June 4, 2025

While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible, specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title II of the ADA. In this episode, Mark Greenfield joins us to discuss the new regulations and what that means for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.

Mark retired as the University at Buffalo’s Web Accessibility Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S. Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US.

Transcript

John: While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible, specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title II of the ADA. In this episode, we discuss the new regulations and what that means for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Mark Greenfield. Mark retired as the University at Buffalo’s Web Accessibility Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S. Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US. Welcome, Mark.

Mark: Thanks for having me.

John: Thank you for joining us. Today’s teas are:… Mark, are you drinking any tea?

Mark: I am drinking tea. It is a Blackberry sage.

Rebecca: That sounds nice. I have just some decaffeinated breakfast tea, thanks to John making me some hot water. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have a peppermint, spearmint, and tarragon tea today. I’ve already had a lot of caffeine today.

Rebecca: So Mark, we’ve invited you here today to discuss new regulations in the U.S. related to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and digital accessibility. In order to ground our conversation today, though, can you share a definition of digital accessibility?

Mark: Sure. So when we’re talking about digital accessibility, the goal is to make sure that everything we’re doing online works for people with disabilities. And it’s interesting, as I kind of explain, over the last few years, what I do for a living, how many people don’t know that that’s a thing, when, in fact, not only is it a thing, it’s a very important thing. And I like to also use the words digital accessibility rather than web accessibility, for a couple of reasons. One is that with web accessibility, you’re talking about a very specific technology where, with how technology has changed over the years, it really is much more than just websites. The other reason I like to use the word digital rather than web is that it lets people know that this just isn’t the purview of web developers. It actually impacts anybody who’s creating content online. So when I have a lot of conversations with faculty, if I talk about web accessibility, they’re assuming this is IT, and IT compliant, without realizing the impact that a faculty member has when it comes to making sure that their materials are accessible.

John: You mentioned that digital accessibility requires that the needs of people with disabilities be met, but are those the only people that benefit from digital accessibility?

Mark: So there is a lot of myths around how many people are impacted when it comes to digital accessibility. Most people, in their mind, automatically default to somebody who is blind or somebody who is deaf, when in fact, there’s a number of different indices on how many people have a disability. The number I use is 20%; about 20% of the population has a disability that impacts their ability to use technology. And when you’re thinking about the different kinds of disabilities, it’s visual disabilities, people who are both blind and have low vision and are colorblind. I think the number is 8% of the male population is color blind, so if you’re using color to provide information and using red and green as your color combination, somebody’s not going to be able to differentiate that. Then beyond visual disabilities, you have auditory disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, motor disability, somebody who can’t use a keyboard or can’t use a mouse, and also cognitive disabilities. And this is something I think is important for educators when you think about dyslexia and other types of learning disabilities, this falls into the realm of digital accessibility. But the other thing to remember is that, even though we’re talking specifically about people with disabilities, almost everything you do related to digital accessibility, improves the user experience for everyone. What can be frustrating for the general population can be a barrier for somebody with a disability. I’ve always been a huge advocate of user-centered design usability, and there’s a direct correlation to accessibility with that. And my message to web developers always has been, when you’re addressing accessibility issues, you are improving the overall experience for everyone.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit as we’re kind of framing this idea of digital accessibility, what some of the specific skills are related to digital accessibility, especially for content creators?

Mark: Sure. So there are a lot of things that make a website or a document accessible. Some of it does get complicated, but much of it is very simple to do, and something that I think everybody should just build into their workflow, whether you’re creating a web page or creating a document. So some of those include: color contrast, so the difference between the color of the text and the color of the background, there are specific contrast ratios you should be thinking about, but understanding to make that contrast workable for people who have low vision, and think about using your cell phone out in the sun. That would help in that situation as well. Related to colors, making sure that you don’t use color to convey information. I see a lot of schedules where an available time slot is green and an unavailable time slot is red, red/green is the most common color blind combination. So if somebody can’t see that difference because you’re relying solely on color to reflect that information. So another thing that everybody should think about is what I call semantic markup. And what semantics mean is that you’re describing the function of the information rather than what it looks like. So think about a heading. What you don’t want to do, whether you’re in Microsoft Word or using Google Docs or making a web page, is take your heading, make it a larger font and bold it, because that’s just addressing what it looks like, but not what the function of that content actually is. So when it comes to headings, when it comes to lists, when it comes to links, those are all things that can be marked up in a way that assistive technology understands what that is and will work properly with that. Again, very easy to do. Another thing is with images, making sure that you have provided alternate text, which allows a screen reader or other assistive device to be able to know the content of what’s in that image. Again, very easy to do. Another thing related to that is with videos, making sure that they’re captioned. Again, the tools are such now that you can do captioning much quicker than you could even five years ago. So really, no reason not to caption all your videos. And one of the things when I talk with faculty about captioning is that this really can be part of Universal Design for Learning. When I was working at the University of Buffalo, we had a large international student population, and they benefited from having captions on the videos, because they could understand the content much better. Making sure that when you are using a form, whether it’s a PDF form or whether it’s a web-based form, that you have labels for the input, again, important for assistive technology to understand how that form is working. I also want to make sure that when it comes to web pages, that your content will work with just a keyboard, not relying on the mouse. This is a skill that I recommend everybody learn. It takes about five minutes to learn how to navigate a web page using just the keyboard. Push your mouse to the side, and there are just a handful of keys you need to learn to be able to navigate a web page. This is very important for two reasons. One is most automated testing tools cannot determine whether the keyboard is working correctly or not. The second is that when it does not work correctly, that can be a complete barrier for somebody with a disability. One of the examples I use is that there was some administrative software at the University of Buffalo that we used, once you were into the software, it was fairly accessible, the problem was to log into it with your name and password, required the use of a mouse. So anybody who needed to use a mouse, it was a complete barrier; that tool was unusable. So really a good skill for everybody to learn.

Rebecca: You used assistive technology a lot in your last description, can you just describe what that is for folks that might not be familiar?

Mark: Sure, so assistive technology is developed specifically for people with disabilities. The most common assistive technology are screen readers, and there’s a variety of screen readers. Many of them are free. In fact, I recommend that people use free screen readers. On the Windows side. NVDA is a free screen reader, which is really powerful; on the Macintosh side, VoiceOver is included on both the iPhone and on a Mac, so again, very easy to learn how to use those. Those work for people who are blind. And one of the things about screen readers is that there are people who use those who can see but have other disabilities. So it’s not just somebody who has a visual disability. Another type of assistive technology is known as a mouth stick. So this is somebody who does not have use of their hands, but can still use a keyboard by just putting the stick in their mouth and then pressing on the keys instead of using their hands to do that. More sophisticated assistive technology is something like a Braille keyboard. So there are keyboards that allow you to type and get feedback using just Braille. So pretty advanced technology. And one of the things we’re starting to see is, I’m wearing AirPods right now, and those AirPods can be used as a hearing device as assistive listening, and that’s one of the things I’m happy to see is that a lot of mainstream devices now can be used as assistive technology.

John: The history of legislation related to disabilities is fairly recent, beginning with the Americans with Disability Act (or the ADA) that was enacted in 1990. At the international level. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2006. In it is the explicit claim that accessibility is a human right. The first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released in 1999 with a 2.0 version adopted by the International Standards Organization in 2012. More recently, laws have been updated throughout the world to more explicitly address issues of digital accessibility. As one example, can you talk about the recent updates to Title II of the ADA in the US?

Mark: Sure, so Title II of the American with Disabilities Act had rules established last April, and this was, in my opinion, a really important event in the history of how the web and disability come together. The important thing to remember about the American with Disabilities Act is that is a civil rights law. So that should be the message. This is about human rights and about civil rights. As you mentioned, the ADA was adopted in 1990, which predates the web. So the web went public in 1993. I was fortunate enough that I was there like a week after that it went public, and guessed that the web might be a thing. I taught myself how to program and away I went. But it’s always been case law, rather than regulations from the government about what does disability actually mean. And it was a long process. The real start to the current regulations was in 2010. That rule making was then dropped in 2016, picked back up and finally adopted last year. So this has been a long time coming, and one of the things to remember about the ADA Title II is that now we have a specific technical standard that we can reference. And for the ADA Title II, it is WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, level AA, and we can talk more about what all that means if we want to talk more about what all that means. But anyways, this was the first time that there was a specific technical standard that people could reference. There was an interesting case with Domino’s Pizza. This was like four or five years ago. Domino’s was sued because somebody who was blind could not order a pizza online, so they took Domino’s to court, and one of Domino’s defenses was, “Tell me what it means to be accessible, and I’ll make it accessible. There’s no standard. How do I know if I’m making it accessible or not?” For me, that was an interesting argument. However, eventually that case did go to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court chose not to hear it, so Domino’s didn’t win on that argument, but it raised a really legitimate point: that having a technical standard would be so helpful, and this is why the ADA Title II regulations are so important. A couple other things about the ADA Title II regulations. This is specifically for state and local government. That is what Title II is. And all public colleges and universities fall under Title II. Private colleges, however, are not part of Title II, and some people who work at private colleges may think, “I’m off the hook. I don’t need to do this,” when, in fact, that is not the case at all. For anything outside of state and local government, it’s business as usual. That means that you still absolutely can be sued in court, if you have accessibility issues, but they’re not going to use the WCAG standard necessarily as the measuring stick. It’s going to be up to the court to decide what are we going to use as a measuring stick. In fact, there was just a case in Louisiana in February where the state of Louisiana said we don’t have to do this until next April. And the courts are saying, “Oh, yes, you do. This is still in effect, even though the deadline for Title II isn’t until next year.”

Rebecca: So, Mark, you’re talking a little bit about the laws in the U.S., but this isn’t just a U.S.-specific thing. Can you talk a little bit about what’s been happening globally, in a general sense?

Mark: Yes. So, globally, there has been a tremendous increase in legislation specific to Web and Digital Accessibility. In the European Union, they’re actually a little bit ahead of the United States, because their accessibility laws deadline is this June, and pretty similar in terms of what the expectations are technically, but they’re again a year ahead of where the United States is. Ontario, same thing. Ontario has had a pretty strong accessibility law in place for quite a while. So, in many ways, the US is catching up to this. One of the things that is nice about the WCAG standards is that they are internationally recognized. So almost every law that you see specifically references the WCAG standard, which I think makes it much easier for consistency, to understand what is expected when it comes to web and digital accessibility.

John: How do the changes in Title II impact our educational system, specifically higher ed, in terms of its effect on institutions, students, and faculty and staff?

Mark: So, Title II regulations are actually a major change with the way that colleges and universities need to think about Web and Digital Accessibility. And that major change is that the ADA Title II regulations move to a model of full accessibility, rather than accommodations. For anybody who is familiar with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, that is an accommodation model. If someone has a disability, it is very specific to their situation. This person is blind, is trying to access this information, and we’re going to create an accommodation that will help that specific person. The expectation with Title II is that everything is fully accessible from the get go. So this, for institutions is a major change philosophically in terms of how you need to think about meeting your accessibility goals… huge, huge change. For faculty and staff at a university, I think the Title II regulations bring the importance of this to the forefront. I am a longtime advocate for accessibility beyond legal requirements. In fact, I would do everything that I normally do when it comes to creating a website if there was no law, because it just is best practice and usability and all of those kinds of things. But with law, that gets people’s attention, and I think with the Title II regulations, this is getting people’s attention because you are breaking federal law if you are not making your sites accessible if you’re a public university. So I think that changes things for faculty and staff, where there’s a level of seriousness now and a level of training that’s needed that perhaps wasn’t there before. When it comes to students, I think this is an opportunity for students to learn about accessibility and why that matters. One of the questions I get is that, technically, students posting information onto a class website or a class activity within their learning management system, that needs to be accessible. And a lot of administrators, faculty and staff, are kind of pushing back against that, saying, “How are we going to make that happen?” Well, the answer is, you train students how to do it. It’s not that hard to do the basics. Every student I’ve ever talked to has been fascinated by the fact that you can make things accessible for people with disabilities. There’s a level of empathy there that perhaps isn’t there with people in my generation. So I think this is a great opportunity to train students on what accessibility means and give them the basic tools to make their content accessible.

Rebecca: I’ve heard some conversations with decision makers across higher ed about whether or not these regulations will be enforced because of current executive orders related to DEI, the dismantling of the Department of Education and the reduction of the federal workforce. What is your sense of the stability of the law and the momentum of the work on digital accessibility in higher education?

Mark: So that is a great question, and my answer may change an hour from now [LAUGHTER] than what it is right now. That’s fair. [LAUGHTER] It is very, very fluid. That being sai, one thing about the Title II regulations is that the current administration cannot legally just throw those out. They were established in April of 2024. I believe it’s 180 days have to go by, and then it’s kind of written in stone at that point. So the current administration can’t say, “Never mind. We’re going to just ignore these.” That’s legally not what they can do. Now, whether they do that anyways, we’ll see what happens. So that’s one thing to think about. The second thing to think about is that much of what happens in the courts around accessibility are private lawsuits. That has nothing to do with the Department of Justice and how they prioritize Title II. Anybody can bring a lawsuit against you at any time, and now you’re in the court system, and it has nothing to do with the administrative branch of the government, so you are always exposed to a lawsuit, and that’s where most of this activity happens. The other thing to keep in mind is that most states also have laws around accessibility. For those who are in New York state, there are pretty strong laws around web and digital accessibility. So even at the federal level, you may not think you need to worry about this, but at the state level, you absolutely do. As far as the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, I’m actually pretty good friends with a lot of people who currently and formerly work there, unfortunately. What has happened with the OCR is that the central team still exists, and again, I’m saying this in April of 2025, but that team still exists, but it’s been drastically cut in size. And the big question is, how quickly can they respond to complaints? Because they have like 10,000 complaints on the docket, not just for accessibility issues, but beyond accessibility issues. So how quickly can they respond to those, that’s open to anybody, who knows what’s going to happen with that. So I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think it would be misinformed to think that you don’t have to worry about this, however, because, who knows? The bottom line is that, as I mentioned before, we should be doing accessibility work, regardless of the law, there is tremendous value there. So one of the things I do as a consultant is when I come on campus and I meet with senior leadership, is I talk to them about how important is web and digital accessibility to everything that happens on your campus. It used to be that we would talk a lot about mission and vision statements, which always included the words diversity and inclusion, which web accessibility fits right in with that. That’s a piece that I’m concerned about right now, is whether we can connect accessibility to DEI initiatives. One of the interesting things for me when I was at the University at Buffalo, as the Web Accessibility Officer, I reported to the Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and that was something I told the administration I wanted to do, because it sends a much different message about why we’re doing this when it’s part of diversity, equity, inclusion, rather than being part of the IT office, where now it’s an IT compliance issue. Now would I take that same strategy right now? Probably not, because of some of the challenges around DEI. I am hoping that people push back on this a little bit, because the ADA is federal law. So to me, there’s a complete disconnect between what’s happening around DEI nationally and what the law actually is. Now, how courts interpret that, how the current administration interprets that, is anybody’s guess. I understand why some people are gun shy about talking about DEI and then adding A into that as well, but I think that there are federal laws around this, and I think there is solid ground for continuing to do this work. So who knows what’s going to happen again? It’s a very fluid situation. It’s an unfortunate situation, because last year, after waiting for 15 years, we finally got these Title II regulations, and now a lot of that work is being questioned about how this is going to move forward.

Rebecca: I think, as you mentioned before, about the global context, too, that underscores the idea that it doesn’t really matter what the current political climate is, that globally, there’s an initiative in this direction, and we’re likely to continue seeing it. We’re gonna get behind if we’re not doing it here.

Mark: Absolutely.

John: Now, when faculty and staff and others creating digital content are creating new material, if you start from the ground up and are not retrofitting accessibility onto older work. It’s pretty easy to create accessible content, but there are areas, though, in some disciplines, where it’s a little bit more challenging for faculty. That includes areas where there’s discipline-specific notation, such as chemistry, math, or music, or limitations to machine-generated captions for content that is sung or in multiple languages or spoken by non-native speakers. How should institutions handle content with these more complex challenges?

Mark: This is a very, very important topic. I recently read a statistic that people with disabilities constitute 10% of our national workforce, but only 2% of STEM professionals. So that disconnect tells me that this is really an area that we need to think more about and to address. And as you mentioned, basic accessibility is relatively simple to implement, but there are places where accessibility can be a challenge, whether you’re talking about chemistry notations and math formulas and those kinds of things. What I recommend that campuses do is that they really work hard to create awareness among those faculty members in those disciplines to understand what some of these additional challenges are, and then providing the support and resources to help them meet those challenges. The good news is that these challenges are not new. So there are a variety of tools that are being created to help with math formulas and scientific notation and others. So I think it’s really important that the faculty understand, 1. we’re going to have to take that extra step, and 2. that a campus provides those resources. And related to that, I think it’s important that at least one person on a campus really is paying attention to these additional types of tools. And they’re improving every year, and I think it’s important to stay up with how those improvements are happening, and have somebody play point on campus so they can connect the dots with the vendors who provide these tools and the faculty members who need them. There’s also a lot of good information out there on how to make, for example, STEM materials, accessible. So if you Google that, a lot of places will come up. I have done some work with the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, the AEM, and they have a lot of great resources. They’re very much involved with Universal Design for Learning… bring the accessibility component into that. So that is a place where you can get a lot of great resources about how to make these more challenging educational materials accessible.

Rebecca: One of the other areas that I know often raise challenges for faculty, but other folks in higher ed, are third party content like learning materials, content platforms and services, PDFs of articles with complex charts and graphs are often a concern. What role does higher ed institutions need to play in moving the accessibility needle in these other spaces, with these third party vendors.

Mark: Third party vendors and procurement is the most challenging aspect when it comes to your digital accessibility program. The phrase that the Office of Civil Rights always uses is we’re going to look at your program, services, and activities. When you think about a campus’s program services and activities, they are almost always happening on third-party products, whether it’s your learning management system, whether it’s your student information system, your alumni system, on and on that list goes. But the reality is that it’s third-party products where the rubber hits the road. So this is really, really important. One of the challenges with the ADA Title II rules is that they don’t apply to vendors. Those are private companies. They don’t need to legally make their products accessible. So what does higher ed need to do to kind of help fix this situation? One is to recognize the buying power, the collective buying power of 4500 colleges and universities across the country, and start to put the appropriate level of pressure onto the vendors. As I say that, the approach I try to take with vendors is rather than it being adversarial, let’s think about this as a win-win opportunity. I happen to know the heads of accessibility at many of the major educational technology companies, and they want us to complain, because in these big organizations, it’s up to the product manager to determine how accessible a given product is, not up to the Accessibility Officer for that company. So we need to put pressure on vendors, and I think there is opportunity for us to do that collectively, rather than individually. This is something I have been talking about with a number of people nationally, about how do we become more efficient in terms of how we approach vendors? And two things to think about: one is testing can be challenging to determine whether a vendor’s product is actually accessible or not. So rather than 4500 colleges doing their own testing, is there a way to combine that and just kind of share best practices, share results? Good idea in principle, but in practice, many times lawyers get involved with this and they’re concerned about legal risk if I, as Mark Greenfield, representing the University of Buffalo, say product X is not accessible, the people at product X don’t agree with that, so we’re going to take you to court and question that. So unfortunately, the lawyers have been involved with that, but there are ways around that, which we continue to work on. And then the second thing, again, is the collective buying power. I have been pleasantly surprised over the last couple of years about how serious publishers and the major educational technology vendors are taking accessibility. They are making progress with being honest and objective about what the shortcomings are, and putting resources to address those shortcomings. So I think it is really important that we continue to do that kind of work. One of the things I was disappointed with with the new ADA regulations is that they only applied to Title II, which is state and local government. I wish they would have also addressed Title III, which is the private entities, the vendors would fall under Title III. For a whole bunch of reasons, it would have been nice for them to address both of those at the same time, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. So I think we really need to be an advocate about why this matters, and kind of use our collective buying power to encourage vendors to push them kind of in the right direction.

John: The focus on improving the accessibility work on many campuses have focused on faculty and staff but had not addressed students in most campuses, probably. What role do our institutions need to play in moving the accessibility needle in these other spaces for classwork from students or from student clubs and organizations, for example?

Mark: I would love to see college campuses be much more proactive when it comes to training students about the importance of accessibility, why it matters, and just very quick and easy things that anybody can do to make their content more accessible. I remember 20 years ago, I taught a general education course at the University of Buffalo, it was called UB 101, where we basically gave them the components: this is how you kind of survive in college in your first year, and what all the various offices do, and some other advice and guidance. I would love to see any campus that has a course like that, you know what? Spend the day, spend an hour talking about accessibility, what that is and why it matters, and show them the basics on how to do it. Again, my experience has been students are very happy to take those steps to make something accessible, and I think they would just eat that right up. And I think it’s a good service. I am a little disappointed that here we are in 2025, 30 years after the web was invented, and 35 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, and yet we have made little progress when it comes to the accessibility of higher education websites and documents, and that’s very frustrating to me. I think one of the ways to start to improve this is let’s start to work with students and have them understand, and not just computer science students. There is a group called Teach Access, which is working with computer science faculty to make sure they’re incorporating accessibility in their teaching. But I think it needs to go much farther than just Teach Access and computer science majors to everyone on campus. And again, this is not that hard to do. A real quick story for you. One of the favorite projects I have worked on in my entire career was working with a group of third graders to make a blind athlete’s website accessible. It was a fascinating project. The athlete’s name was Rachael Scdoris. She runs in the Iditarod, and she was legally blind. Through the ADA, she actually sued the Iditarod to have a spotter 1000 feet in front of her, so she had some sense of where she was going in the middle of Alaska. She won that lawsuit. When my daughter was in second grade, as a class project, they followed the Iditarod, and my daughter chose Rachael Scdoris to follow. She was young and blonde, and my daughter identified with her, so when I found out she was blind, I went to her website and found out that it was completely inaccessible. So I didn’t contact Racha el directly. I contacted her agent and told him, you know, this probably isn’t the best look, because Rachael is actually pretty vocal about accessibility and disability. And at first I said, “You know what? Maybe I’ll fix this for you.” But then I had a better idea, let’s train my daughter and some of her classmates how to do this. So I took a group of third graders, taught them how to code websites, this is back in 2006, 2007 and they recreated Rachael’s website and it was perfectly accessible, including captioning the videos that were on her website. So when people tell me that this is too hard, I tell them, “No, it’s not. I had a whole group of third graders who could do it.” The bigger lesson from that was when I asked the third graders, “Why does this matter?” It was all about empathy. “Of course, we’re going to do this to help as many people as we can.” So instilling that mindset in the students, I think, would be a big step forward to help us address why we are still kind of challenged by making everything accessible.

Rebecca: I mean, we are institutions of learning.

Mark: Exactly.

Rebecca: We’re well positioned to educate an entire generation on how to do this work.

Mark: And when you think about how important the web and digital is now compared to a generation ago, I think COVID actually brought this to the forefront when we moved everything online. Now, all of a sudden, everybody’s really paying attention to what happens online and accessibility as well. But as you think about the program services and activities, more and more of those are moving online all the time. So it makes the importance of Web and Digital Accessibility all the greater. And there is an opportunity to train the next generation to really just be aware of and understand what this is all about.

Rebecca: It’s really easy for folks to get hung up on the legal obligations, especially as we’ve kind of framed the conversation around Title II. But can you talk a little bit more about the value of digital accessibility and why we should be doing it anyways?

Mark: So again, one of the misconceptions is that it’s a small part of the population that has a disability, when, in fact, it’s 20% of the population, and that is just people with permanent disabilities. We’re not talking about somebody with a temporary disability. So for example, if you broke your arm and couldn’t use a mouse anymore, or a situational disability, whether you’re in a library watching a video where you can’t have the sound up, or those kinds of things. So there’s a lot of value, just in terms of the percentage of people, but beyond that, one of my goals is to get people to think about accessibility, not as a cost center, but as a strategic investment. Forrester Research a few years ago, did a study on the ROI, the return on investment, of both usability and accessibility together. So this was not just about accessibility, but usability and accessibility are definitely joined at the hip, and really you can think about those very similarly, but the ROI they found was 100 to one. For every dollar invested in usability and accessibility returned $100 of value. So think about it that way, the value beyond. Again, I was talking before about students who maybe English is their second language, and the value of having captions on a video. So there’s just a lot of opportunity there. And the thing is that it’s really not hard to do the basics of accessibility, and if you start with that mindset, it is relatively easy to do. Another message for my web development friends is don’t try to make everything as fancy as possible. Simpler is better. So, as an example, without getting too technical here, there are a variety of ways that you can add alternative text to an image. The simplest way and the best way is to use the alt text within the image tag within HTML, instead of trying to get fancy with ARIA and other fancy programming, which you can kind of accomplish the same thing, but you’re much better off keeping it simpler, because, even as we speak in 2025, the way that web browsers, assistive technology, and the operating system all interact varies tremendously, and ARIA doesn’t always work. So you can get a combination of things where it’s not working on NVDA, where it does work in voiceover because you’re using ARIA. So again, a message I have to developers is, try to keep things as simple as possible. This is a usability thing as well. There’s not a day that goes by that my wife doesn’t hear me say, “What’s wrong? This website’s awful because of usability issues,” and that’s, quite frankly, still the case with higher education. Part of my consulting business is doing audits, not just accessibility audits, but doing just general accessibility and usability audits. And I have yet to find a college or university where I can’t write a 20-page report about the usability issues that a site has, and a lot of that has to do with people just trying to be too complicated.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Mark: Fascinating question when it comes to technology, and technology changes so fast. So I’m going to tell this story. Again, I’ve been doing IT work for 45 years. Gordon Moore was the CEO of Intel and Moore’s law is that computing technology doubles every 18 months. He said that back in the early 1960s, we’re here in 2025 that is still the case. The challenge is that it’s difficult for us as humans to get our arms around exponential change. I like to share the story of the inventor of the game of chess. So an inventor comes up with this new game called chess. He takes it to the Emperor, shares this game with the Emperor. Emperor loves the game. The inventor says, “Here’s what I want for a reward on the first square of the chess board, I want one grain of rice, on the second I want two grains of rice, on the third square I want four grains of rice, eight grains, 16, exponentially. We’re going to grow that until we’ve done all 64 squares of the chess board. I ask people, “How big of a pile of rice do you have after you’ve filled all 64 squares?” People are amazed that that pile of rice is bigger than Mount Everest. When I started working at the University of Buffalo, 1987, we wanted to buy a Cray II supercomputer, biggest, baddest computer on the planet. Cost, I believe, $17 million in 1987 dollars. We even, as a research university, couldn’t afford it, so we rented time at Calspan down the street at $10,000 an hour. Anybody who has a second generation Apple iPhone or newer has more computing horsepower in their hand than a Cray II supercomputer. That’s what exponential change is. So in your mind, you’re saying, “That’s great. Over the last 30 years or 40 years, we’ve made that much progress. In another 40 years, we’re going to also make that much progress.” That is not exponential thinking. In the next three or four years, we’re going to make that much progress again. So to loop this back to kind of where technology is going and where accessibility is going and what’s next, one of the things I’m paying attention to is voice technology. I gave a talk at an international voice conference a few years ago and talked about how voice could improve accessibility, and it’s really interesting about what the application of voice technology can do, because it can free us from the interface of having to use a computer and a mouse, where now you don’t have to worry about a lot of the disabilities that come into play right now. So the future is multimodal, multi-surface interfaces, which can take into every combination of things and really address accessibility. I was very encouraged that at this voice conference, people are taking accessibility very seriously and trying to build some tools into the voice interface. Related to that is artificial intelligence, and many people are predicting that ultimately the user interface for AI is going to be voice. Now I go back to watching a Space Odyssey and thinking about HAL, and that interface with HAL was a voice interface, so I can see a lot of that coming, and there is real opportunity to address accessibility issues with that. We need to take caution in terms of how quickly we use AI to improve accessibility. One of the big controversies in the accessibility world now is the use of accessibility overlays, which are products and tools where they tell you a single line of code can be installed on your website and immediately address all of your accessibility issues. In the last couple of years, they’ve been talking about AI as the driver of that, the reality is they don’t work. And I am very disappointed in most of the overlay companies who are, quite frankly, telling lies about what these products can do. And for anybody who’s thinking about using an overlay, or currently using an overlay, know that that that can get you sued. There are actually a number of court cases right now specifically addressing the use of overlays on websites, so be very cautious about that. Also, a lot of talk now about how artificial intelligence can be used to remediate documents and remediate websites. I think there is a lot of opportunity there, but it is too early to have that working the way it should be working. For example, in Microsoft Word right now, AI will generate alternative text for you. My experience has been that’s good, maybe one out of 10 times. So you really need to pay attention to that. There’s an old quote. It’s known as Amara’s law, and it says we tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. And I think that is the case with AI, where everybody’s kind of running out to say AI is going to fix everything today. Not the case. But I am very encouraged down the road about what AI can do. And let me just kind of close this with, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a book in this talk. I have a tendency to mention lots of books, and a book I would recommend everybody learns is called Haben: the Deaf Blind Woman who Conquered Harvard Law. It’s written by a woman by the name of Haben Girma. I’ve actually interacted with her a few times online. She is just awesome and such a passionate advocate for people with disabilities. People are amazed that she could graduate from Harvard Law School being deaf blind, but she did, and she is a huge advocate for that. If you get the opportunity to hear her speak, she always is talking about how there is an opportunity for innovation when it comes and she’s encouraging all of the technology people to really think about innovation and how we can use technology to improve people’s lives. And that certainly is something I hope we see again, even as educational institutions going forward, how can we provide that platform for this innovation?

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a great book. Thanks for recommending it. Thanks so much for joining us today. It was great to talk about accessibility, a topic I never get sick of talking about.

Mark: Thanks for having me.

John: And it’s a topic that all institutions need to be addressing to a much greater extent as we approach that deadline. So thank you again.

Mark: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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283. Neurodiverse Hiring Initiative

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, co-op, disability, diversity, equity, experiential learning, higher education, inclusion, internships, learning, pedagogy, social capital, social justice, teaching
April 5, 2023

Neurodiverse students often struggle to get co-ops, internships, and their first job because they face significant social barriers during the process of securing such opportunities. In this episode, Kendra Evans joins us to discuss a program at the Rochester Institute of Technology that helps this population of students build the skills needed to navigate the hidden rules of interviewing and supports them through their internship experiences.

Kendra is the Coordinator of the Neurodiverse Hiring Initiative (or NHI) at the Rochester Institute of Technology [RIT]. NHI facilitates myriad programs that build the confidence and job readiness skills of autistic job seekers, provides guidance and support to employers, and creates unique opportunities connecting hiring managers with RIT’s highly-skilled neurodiverse applicant pool. Kendra is pursuing her MBA to better make the business case for neurodiverse affirming workplaces.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Neurodiverse students often struggle to get co-ops, internships, and their first job because they face significant social barriers during the process of securing such opportunities. In this episode, we discuss a program that helps this population of students build the skills needed to navigate the hidden rules of interviewing and supports them through their internship experiences.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Kendra Evans. Kendra is the Coordinator of the Neurodiverse Hiring Initiative (or NHI) at the Rochester Institute of Technology [RIT]. NHI facilitates myriad programs that build the confidence and job readiness skills of autistic job seekers, provides guidance and support to employers, and creates unique opportunities connecting hiring managers with RIT’s highly-skilled neurodiverse applicant pool. Kendra is pursuing her MBA to better make the business case for neurodiverse affirming workplaces. Outside of RIT, Kendra is a community organizer and serves on various boards. She has three teenage children and a springer doodle puppy, loves her Peloton and logic puzzles, and her last meal would be a soft pretzel and an IPA at a ballpark, preferably Wrigley Field. Welcome Kendra.

Kendra: Thank you for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: … Kendra, are you drinking some tea?

Kendra: I am drinking some tea. I was going to Ted Lasso you and saying I’m really more of a coffee gal. But for the occasion, I’m having a little Earl Grey here in the afternoon.

John: Many of our guests do drink coffee or Diet Coke or water.

Rebecca: I did have a silent share. I don’t know if you saw but I was cheering for the tea. I’m so excited that you had tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have Prince of Wales tea today.

Rebecca: And John and I are on the same page because… this is very unusual… but I have the same tea as John.

Kendra: Well…

John: I think that’s the first time in over 280 podcasts.

Rebecca: We chose them independently, and then realized we had chosen the same.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the Neurodiverse Hiring initiative at RIT. First, though, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your path to becoming a coordinator of this program?

Kendra: Sure. I actually started my career as an elementary school teacher and started off very early, realizing that my training, my master’s degree in education, didn’t actually prepare me for the students in my classroom. And so I went on to get a number of different certifications for the teaching of reading to dyslexic students, for a Lindamood-Bell training for processing disorders. And the more I broadened my skill set for working with learning differences, the more and more I kept coming in contact, and was being referred to work with students on the autism spectrum, mostly because of my passion for executive functioning, and how to basically improve those skills in everyone. And so I started as an elementary school teacher, I did that for a few years, became a learning specialist. Then when we relocated to Rochester, I opened my own small business. And while I was working in my brick and mortar social learning environment, RIT found me, my supervisor, Laurie Ackles, and the rest is history. So that’s where I came from. And then of course, I can tell you about the program itself. But that’s my trajectory was basically I’ve taught students pre-K now through higher ed.

Rebecca: You’ve hinted a little bit at your passion towards this work. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of the initiative?

Kendra: Sure, well RIT started helping students transition from high school to college back in 2008. And one of the reasons that many students choose the Rochester Institute of Technology is because of the career and cooperative placement, we have a very robust, it’s like an apprenticeship program. In order to get your degree and most of our majors, it’s required that you have onsite experiential learning. And after my team had really moved forward in helping students with their social and their self advocacy and executive functioning, and all of the things needed to succeed for the academics in college, we realized that many of our students, even though they had come to RIT for this job experience, were unable to get their foot in the door. And therefore, when you can’t get your co-op that’s required, even though you’ve successfully completed all of the other content area requirements, they weren’t graduating. So this became the next barrier to employment and purpose and belonging in that meaningful adult life that we’re hoping all of our students succeed at. And so, thankfully, we have a gift funded initiative, thanks to the many parents that are very supportive of the work that we’ve done over the years. And so in 2018, we received this gift and pretty much were given carte blanche in order to do the work as we saw what our students needed and what employers were looking for. And in 2018, we started getting our students those first co-ops by partnering with employers and working on job training, and it’s gone from there.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the barriers that you indicated that the students were having or facing trying to get their foot in the door for those co-op experiences?

Kendra: Sure. Well, interviewing is still a dominantly social process, right? We have to pick up on cues. We have to modulate our voice, we have to code switch, we have to dress appropriately. There’s all kinds of unspoken rules that our students are not prepared for. Even though they have the same hard skill set from RIT that their peers have, the social barriers were just really great. And so that’s one of the main difficulties with our students. Also, job descriptions can be a barrier for my students as well, because if employers are not distinguishing between “must-have” skills and “nice-to-have” skills, my students will often not apply to something if their exact major isn’t listed, if they’re like, “Oh, I’ve only had one course in C++, I haven’t had two, maybe that’s not enough.” Those were things that were keeping my students from even applying. There’s also things on the employer side that in addition to the way we’re looking to interview, when we’re looking for a best fit, that concept of best fit in the social aspect of the interviewer can inadvertently exclude this highly skilled talent pool simply because they don’t necessarily give you a warm and fuzzy, let’s say, or they don’t answer a question in an expected way. And so I often make the business case for: “Are you looking for expected? Aren’t you looking to get a job done and bring innovation, let’s talk about what is unique about my students, what they’re bringing that you already want, and what’s going to be different, that’s going to set your company apart.” And so those are some of the barriers in how I work with employers and with students to make that match and just make sure that we’re all speaking the same language,

John: what are some of the skills that the students you’re working with have that would be useful that are not generally recognized in an interview,

Kendra: There are so many. My students are passionate intellectual problem solvers. And I’m not saying that the rest of the RIT students aren’t. But that is definitely something that I will put forward. These are individuals who strive to do their best, they look at problems differently, and they’re going to stick with it. There’s a problem to solve, they’re going to follow it from beginning to end. I often say, and this is very general, but I’m neurotypical, I’m an extrovert, I’m going to spend time at work doing things not always just my work. Whereas I will tell you that my students can hyper focus on that task at hand, and they’re going to work very efficiently to get it done. So there’s just a multitude of things I could talk about, but their problem-solving skills, their stick-to-itiveness. And just their different way of approaching a problem. We don’t all want to be the same. It inhibits the creative process. And if you want to be innovative, we all know that you have to have creativity and a bunch of minds coming together.

Rebecca:So it sounds to me, based on what you’re describing is that you’re helping facilitate matching students to opportunities. Is that the role that the initiative is taking? How are the students getting the placements?

Kendra: So my role, when I describe it, it’s really three main goals. The first is to work with our students, to talk about those unspoken rules, to make them more job ready. The National Association of Colleges and Employers have identified 16 skills. So I work to let them know, “Hey, you’re actually being judged on these things. Let’s talk about them. Let’s practice and let’s teach you how to talk about your experience,” because oftentimes, they don’t realize that they have that. So I work with the job seeker. I work with the employer to implement universal design, so they’re not excluding anyone. And so actually, universal design helps all employees, not just autistic employees. And then yes, I’m the matchmaker, the bridge, the pipeline between the students and the employer. And we come up with creative ways to do that, including reverse job fairs, we partner with our career services office, we have information sessions that are low sensory and low stress, that’s a lot of what we do, is just to make sure that this is an environment that models best practice and how my student is going to be the best performer for your company. So those are the three main aspects of NHI.

John: You mentioned reverse job fairs. Could you explain what that is for people who have not heard of those before?

Kendra: So at RIT, we call it an affinity reception. And if you can picture a job fair, think back to our first jobs where you go into this large auditorium, you have 250 employers, and all the job seekers are dressed in their blazers like I happen to be today. And they go up to their 30 seconds of fame where they’ve got to give an elevator pitch, they got to wait in line, your recruiters are tired and cranky, and the sound is cacophony. It’s a lot. What we do is we bring our students and they sit at the table, we have fewer employers that are coming around which the students get to know who they are ahead of time. We prep for all of that. But then the employers circulate around the tables to our students as opposed to the reverse. And I’m also there as a facilitator to reach out to the employer: “Who are you? What is your name?” It makes the introduction. So I am frequently the matchmaker in all of these situations. And it really lowers the sensory overload, it reduces the stress factor, especially if you know who you’re going to see, you can prep for it. And you also don’t have to navigate, moving around, bumping into people, the crowds, the noise and we, even in that space, have a breakout room as well, so that students can take a break from the table, go refresh, have some water, regulate ourselves, and then come back out and do it again. So that’s kind of the theory as opposed to students coming to you, you’re coming to the job seeker.

Rebecca: We often talk about universal design for learning in a classroom setting but you were also talking about universal design in this interview setting. Can you talk a little bit about what that looks like?

Kendra: Absolutely. Just like we would translate an accommodation plan from college to career, the concept of universal design is universal, really. And so in this particular case, things that are very helpful for my autistic jobseekers, which I’ll be honest, very helpful for me, things like, “Could I please have the questions in advance so that I can prepare my best answer?” I’m not going to be surprised and therefore anxious and shut down when we’re going to have our conversation. Things like being able to disclose if I need to have a fidget under the table, and why I’m doing that, being able to talk about the lighting in the room, or like, “Where am I going to go? What can I expect? Who’s going to be there? How long is the day going to be?” …just various things like that. Those are some very small modifications to the process that universally help any job applicant feel comfortable, and therefore bring their most authentic and best self to the interview.

Rebecca: Sounds a lot better to me.

Kendra: Indeed. Ideally, we want an interview to be where we’re learning about each other, we’re learning about the job to be done, and we’re both assessing if we think this is going to be something that we want to engage in together. And the balance of power is always off in those interviews anyway, and especially for the first job out of college, or even co-ops, or before that, right? I’ve only been in college for a year and a half. And my students are already interviewing, right? They’re 20 years old, they’ve never had a job before. And now they’re going into this big data analyst co-op position. That’s a lot of stress for anyone. So anything we can do to minimize the stress and maximize the ability to share the skills that I have. And that’s another thing that companies are doing as well, is changing the interview process, so that instead of all of the questions, it’s “Alright, we’re going to bring you to campus, we’re going to give you a problem, we’re going to have you work on it with some of our other applicants in a team. And we’re going to see how you solve a problem, as opposed to how you talk about how you solve a problem.” So it really is much more skills based. Another thing that if you’re going to have not only getting the questions in advance, but breaking those questions down and making them single step, so that I don’t get lost in some huge, rambling answer is very helpful and making sure that they are less open ended and more, “What is the skill I’m trying to assess with these questions?” That’s another Universal Design tactic that helps a lot. And then one last thing that I’m seeing more and more companies use is, are platforms like HireVue, where they can record their answers. The virtual world, this way nobody has to fly to the new Microsoft campus anymore, we can do it from the comfort of our home offices and have as many recordings as we want. Again, all of us misspeak sometimes, it’s nice to have that do-over because I really am trying to showcase what I can bring to your company and my students bring a lot.

John: So it sounds as if employers are starting to recognize this and learn new skills. What role do you play in helping them learn alternative ways of interviewing?

Kendra: It really depends on the company. And we work with big anchor companies. I’ve talked about Microsoft, I’ve taught SAS, Southwest Airlines, they’re now big players in the field that are realizing that diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t diverse enough if it doesn’t include neurodiversity. So there are some big dogs in the field that are bringing their HR programs, and they’re really working to make sure that they’re doing best practice. Companies like that will often come to me and say, “Hey, we’re doing this, who do you have for me in these fields?” And I am, in that case, mostly just a matchmaker, I help shepherd my jobseekers through the program. I check in with the recruiter: “How’s it going? Where are they in the process? Do you have any questions?” And I’m a matchmaker to make sure that that pipeline is direct, and they’re getting who they need. There are other companies, and these could be startups, these could be other big companies, but they come saying, “Hi, I’m an HR manager, I’m a data analyst, I’m someone right,” it could be anywhere in the company, that they have someone in their family in their network who’s autistic. And they realize, hey, this is something that would benefit my workplace. This is something that would benefit my person, what can we do? And so if you’re at the very beginning phase, I do a lot of nurturing with those companies talking about where can you get more information? Who are the models that you can look at. I’m here for a consult, do you want to interview some of my students, because a lot of what I do at that stage too, is destigmatizing. Autism, it is a spectrum, and so some people come in thinking that, “Oh, I’m going to do some charity work.” And that’s not at all what we’re doing. In fact, at this point, I’m doing you a favor. This is a talent pool in worker shortage. Trust me, companies really get it at this point in time.

Rebecca: You’ve match made, they’ve joined an organization for their co-op for their experience, how have you worked with companies to help that onboarding process and to make sure that they have a good experience once they’ve gotten the experience?

Kendra: One of the wonderful platforms that we partner with is an organization called Uptimize, and they do online trainings for employees, employers, and they have online training modules. I always give the disclaimer, we don’t know each other well, but I’m a highly critical person, and I hate to waste people’s time. So I don’t often send out professional development if I don’t truly believe in it. And I’ll tell you that I did these modules that were shared with us by Uptimize, and I learned things. And so one of the things that we have with them, because they have a whole suite of trainings, but we have Neurodiversity 101, and a basic module for hiring managers, for HR professionals, as well as supervisors. And so when a company is ready to take our students, I can give them unlimited licenses to share with the team, to share with the executives to share with everyone to try to build awareness, because the truth is, with the increase in diagnosis of autism, we’re all working in neurodiverse teams already, we just don’t always know it. So again, universal design is helping who you already have, and also opening up this talent pool that you’re not accessing currently. So there’s widespread benefits, and I’m giving it to you for free. If you want more, you can then go partner with Uptimize, and they’ll do all kinds of accessory training. But here’s a great introduction that we can give to our hiring managers. I often talk to them ahead of time before they take one of my students. The two main barriers once I have the job with you, would be housing, and transportation, learning how to navigate a new city, being comfortable navigating it, figuring out where you’re going to live for these 10 weeks. I remember doing that as a neurotypical, A-Type 20 year old. And so that’s hard for anyone, it’s exceptionally hard for my students. So that needs to be considered. companies aren’t really providing housing or transportation now, but if you’re going to boast about your neurodiversity hiring initiative, you at least need to have answers for me on how you’re going to direct them to these housing sites, here’s what we’re going to do, how is that going to work. And then I also just help make sure that my students are following through on all the onboarding paperwork and things from my end. And then if you’re an employer that we have a partnership with, I’m available to you. I’ll tell you that most of them don’t reach out to me during the co-ops, but I’m here. So if we need to troubleshoot, if something’s going better or worse than you expected, let me know, let’s take it to the next level. It’s about being the best supervisor you can, regardless, and I’m just an extra tool when you work with my students.

John: It’s wonderful that you have this program at RIT. But is this very common in the rest of academia?

Kendra: Well, there are about 75 to 80 programs across the country that are working in various ways at various levels, some are brand new, some have been around almost as long as we have, in order to help support students through this academic process of college. The goal of college is education, of course, and meaningful employment would be my objective at the end of college. So not all of them are handling it in the same way or have the same programming that we do. But that’s in total, there’s about 75 to 80 across the country at this moment in time, that support through the transition from high school to college. And just as I said, we started with that as well. And now we are helping transition into the workplace.

Rebecca: You mentioned early on about feeling not prepared to support the students you had when you were an elementary school teacher. And I have heard this many times, a faculty member at a college or university saying the same thing, maybe not prepared to teach [LAUGHTER] and then also not too prepared to support this particular group of students or many sets of students that are very different from one another. Can you talk a little bit about strategies that faculty might want to be aware of that could help support students like yours more effectively?

Kendra: Oh, absolutely. The more partnerships we can have with our professors and across campus, that’s one of the things when we talk about where this program is going, that’s something that is critically important, both to the academic success, and then, of course, into the workplace. So my students do very well with written communication, typically, and since most of us are using some kind of my Mycourses or online shell for information, please go ahead and upload those PowerPoint slides, please go ahead and put your notes online. Those are not crutches, if you will, those are actual accommodations that are just best practice. I let you all know that I’ve already got a master’s degree. I’m working on my business degree now. And I’m a graduate student in business. And I get that, as a neurotypical, like that’s just best practice so that I can go further than these notes. Doing those kinds of things, super important. Setting up a culture in your classroom where you can take a break if you need to, and just saying that out loud, so that it’s kind of a culture of the classroom, being aware of what could be overstimulating in your environment. In our lecture halls, it’s not as if we have a whole lot of control, but if you’re in a smaller setting, to just go ahead and look at those things. And sometimes some of us talk more than others. I talk a whole lot, we can have a neurotypical person that’s going to suck up the air in the room. That’s something that we’re used to. Giving students strategies ahead of time or if you notice that, pulling them aside, because they want to be their best selves. I’m constantly raising my hand because I love your topic. I’m very excited to please and I want to engage and if you say something, “I notice how excited you are Kendra, if you could pick just two times that you’re going to share out loud during class, and then write down everything else and email it to me, you can give it to me after class.” It’s just basic classroom management kinds of things. And it’s training our students not just to be good students, but to be good citizens, and to be good employees. And it’s how do we do that give and take that maybe some of us take for granted that we learned turn taking, and we were really good at it, and sometimes people need to be encouraged to take more turns, that would be the other end of the spectrum is that when I’m teaching my career ready bootcamp, the reason that I’m here, I usually have those two different groups. And that’s true among neurotypical people as well. So if I’m going to suck up the air, give me some strategies, so that I’m not alienating my classmates and I’m still engaging. And if I’m too afraid to talk, tell me how you want to hear from me, I can email you before class. Give strategies that show that you want them there and that teach them how to be part of the mix, regardless of whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, or a neurotypical or neurodivergent. Those are some of the really best practices that I can say: share all of that written material, [LAUGHTER] and make sure that you’ve created a culture that just meets people where they are. And like I said, this is universal design. It doesn’t matter if you’re autistic or not. These are just best practices that help everyone. This is something I’m passionate about, and it traces back to my earliest days as a first-grade teacher. As I told you, I went through Orton-Gillingham training to teach dyslexic students because I came out with a master’s degree, and then had no idea how to teach reading. I had no idea what I was doing. That’s whole language, it’s all the stuff. And when I would come back from this very intense training that is specifically for dyslexic students, and I wanted to teach it in my private, high-end, elementary school, I had to justify why I was doing that. Well, why does my student need this particular program, and I was able to say, “Orton-Gillingham breaks language down into pieces. And if I teach this way, it’s the way that this particular subgroup requires in order to learn how to read, we’re keeping reading from them, if I don’t teach it in this one way, but for everybody else that gets it broken down, this is helping them with all of that language that you’re going to hit later on… the words that are not first-grade words, they’re going to be able to decode it, because that’s how their brain works, and I’m just giving them new pieces of the puzzle.” And so when I talk about how I’m teaching reading to first graders, or how I’m teaching job readiness to 22 year olds, it’s the same idea. It’s just: how do we help everyone? …and tailoring our design to be more inclusive, it’s just what we should all be doing.

John: Right now we’re running a reading group that focuses on Inclusive Teaching by Viji Sathy. And Kelly Hogan, and much of what you’re describing seems like the type of structure that they encourage people to use, and small group discussions and providing ways for all students to be comfortable. And we’re seeing that a lot, that there’s so many things converging in terms of things that are effective in helping people learn show up in many different approaches in terms of studies of how we learn, studies of effective teaching methods, studies of creating an inclusive environment. And pretty much all these methods benefit all students, but they particularly benefit those students who don’t do as well without the support provided. And it sounds like this is another form of inclusive teaching.

Kendra: It is. I couldn’t agree with you more. Regardless of the age, we all need to feel safe in the environment. And I’m not going to feel safe if someone’s interrupting me or talking over me. I’m not going to feel safe if I don’t feel like the teacher wants to hear what I have to say. I’m not going to feel safe. If I don’t understand the information or I have sensory overload. It doesn’t matter, we all need to feel safe first. Second, the next buzz would be belonging in higher education, and how am I connecting to my peers and connecting one on one to either my teacher or my professor? How is that working? And then you have the content that comes after all of that. So we really do have to work on our classroom management, we really do have to work on that personal relationship with our students. And then it’s the same in the workplace, we need a safe workplace where I don’t have to mask but I can be my authentic self and therefore I can bring my whole brain capacity to the job, I’m not worried about if somebody’s going to notice something about me or I’m going to feel uncomfortable or they’re going to feel uncomfortable. It translates across the lifespan of a learner.

Rebecca: And most of these things are not difficult.

Kendra: You’d asked about my relationship with either professors or with employers. And I’ll go back to the employer piece because the concept of ADA and IDEA can be scary and intimidating to human resource managers. And so when I talk about what is a reasonable accommodation for my students, most of the time, it’s me asking for a supervisor to just be a very direct and explicit supervisor. It’s things like: can they wear their noise-cancelling headphones while they’re working to kind of drown out some of this din? Are they able to work at home? Are there hybrid options that are available? Is it okay if they take their shoes off under the desk? These aren’t even things that cost the employer any money. These are just sensory regulatory issues, and then it goes into things like: Can you please set a regular weekly meeting with your employee so that my student knows when to come to you. And it goes back to that Which type of person am I? Do I ask way too many questions all the time? Or do I never ask a question and then it’s a barrier for me accomplishing the task. So if I know that I’m going to meet with Kendra every Monday, and I have to bring my list of questions that helps both sets. It also, as the employer, gives me the ability to check in on where you are and advance, because that’s the goal. Even if you’re not considered a teacher or professor anymore, that’s what a supervisor is. Our goal is to elevate our employees and help them reach the next level, at least, that’s my definition of what a supervisor does. So. I like to share that, yeah, and these things are not big cost. They’re big returns on your bottom line, is what it is. So if I can be myself at work, I’m going to work while I’m there. And that’s really what it is.

Rebecca: You talked a lot about at the beginning that the Institute started with the transition from high school to college. Can you talk about some of the things that are important to support neurodiverse students in that transition?

Kendra: Oh, definitely. So there are five pillars to the program. And the one that we’ve talked about would be career and co-op. So we’ll go ahead and move that to the side. Social is a really big piece, that sense of belonging, self advocacy, how do I ask my professor? What are the deadlines? Can I leave the room? Self advocacy and all of those areas. Wellness and health is a really big deal. And the fifth one is executive functioning, where I’ve done all of my studying. That’s what we do, is a lot of executive functioning. So those are the five pillars of the program to help them transition. And we do a lot of work. Also, just like we onboard for a job, we do special onboarding for our students as they come in and their parents. And I think that’s a really important shout out is that oftentimes the support system for all of us gets overlooked… it’s our partners in life, it’s our children, it’s our parents, it’s all of those people. And for students on the spectrum, these are parents that have had to be varsity parents for a really long time to navigate the 504s and the IEPs and all of the social learning that has to happen in K through 12. And so onboarding the parents that this is a young adult, they’ve gotten into RIT, you did this. They’re here, they got this, and we’ve got them. So to do that transition on: “here’s what to expect.” And it’s all the same things. It’s like, “Where are you going to go? Who’s your point person? How are you going to do this when a problem arises… because it’s going to… where do you go?” …and I don’t say that, because you’re autistic, I say that because I can look at both of you and say, something’s going to happen that we have to navigate. And we have to stay emotionally regulated, and we have to problem solve, and we need to know who to ask for help. These are life skills for any person. Again, it’s back to universal design. But that’s part of what SSP, our spectrum support program does, specifically for our parents and students, is a lot of that onboarding and letting them know that we’re here and you earned this, you did this, you’re going to be okay, you’re going to survive, you’re going to thrive, this is going to be great for you.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit more about the executive function part of the program?

Kendra: Well, I always like to talk about executive functioning. So the first thing I’m going to do is tell you my favorite executive functioning 101. I want you to picture a stop sign, S T O P, and when we’re talking about executive functioning, we’re talking about space, time, objects, and people. So if I need to function in any environment, I need to stop and think about those things. Think about an elevator, what’s the space like? How long am I going to be there? Am I supposed to talk to the person? You go through space, time objects, people, and when you transition into college, it’s a big difference, because in K through 12, a lot of that’s managed for you. And then you get sent off to college. Oh my gosh, the schedule changes, the classrooms are different. I have to get from my room to all of this. And I have to factor in travel time. How long do these long papers take? How do I chunk those assignments? So everything we do is space, time, objects, people, and I’ve been using that since I was a first-grade teacher and all the way up because you can chew on that, everybody can understand this is what I’m thinking about in this environment. And so we do a lot of visual scheduling so that you can see your “must dues.” Where are your blocks? How do you plug in the things that you need to accomplish? We do planning on here are all the assignments that are coming up. How long do you think this will take? Time management is often a hiccup for my students. Again, think about the people in your lives. Some of us are really good at some pieces of executive functioning, and some of us are not. I can tell the time down to the second most places, people think I’m a savant, but I can’t organize to save my life. I have 22 tabs open right now on my computer. I struggle with that, and I’m neurotypical and high achieving and mid career and all of those things that you’re supposed to check the boxes off. So when we’re helping our students transition from high school to college, how do you navigate those four things? And some of them you’re going to be stronger at than others. Everybody is. So what are the tools so that you can be independent and accomplish your goals here? And that’s a lot of what we do. And of course, as I told you, there are those five pillars, so when it comes to career and co-op, I have a whole other set of how we’re talking about space, time objects, people. We also talk a lot, as I said, about social and about well being. I remember being horribly homesick. I didn’t like my roommate. There’s all of those things that all of us have to navigate. And so when you don’t like your roommate, because you didn’t get that single, what do you do? How do you navigate this? When you’re lonely, what does that feel like? What are the alternatives? And then of course, if something does happen, we always plug the students into those campus resources. So how are you doing? What do you think? Let’s walk down to counseling. Let’s just walk down together right now. They know they can advocate for themselves, but they also have somebody that’s going to walk on this journey with them, and that’s really important. And it brings, I think, peace of mind, both to the student and, of course, to their families that they’re sending out of the nest for the first time.

Rebecca: I think the things that you’re talking about in terms of executive function should be an all first-year classes, [LAUGHTER] it should be built into the curriculum.

Kendra: I think every professor would thank me, if it was, [LAUGHTER] and I say that about my career ready bootcamp. I would have been so much better off, if I’d have this kind of training going into my first job. It’s universal design. If we were doing this kind of prep for everyone, I think every employer would be happier. But my students specifically need the explicit instruction on “This is what they’re looking for. When you do this behavior, this is how they feel, and this is the outcome when that happens.” You need those behavior maps in order to teach the lesson that is not coming in through osmosis. And to be fair, one of the reasons there’s such an employment divide is, autistic students and adults, they’re not getting jobs, they don’t have any work experience at all. So if you’ve never been in a work environment, how are you supposed to know how to behave in one. I remember, again, as a learning specialist in elementary school, we would go over social situations like a birthday party, any birthday party, I don’t care who it is or what age, there are certain components that you can expect so you can stay self regulated. You can know how much time it’s going to take, you’re going to know you have to bring a gift of some sort, again, space, time, objects, people and here are the classic things. It translates into adulthood and the workplace. Like you need to know how do you code switch? What does that even mean in this new environment? And you can show how you’ve mastered it through your lifespan and here’s just the next frontier. We spend a lot of time doing this, and I will just say, in terms of our program, I’m excited that we have this funding, I’m excited to be able to do this at RIT and for that kind of buy in. In this last year, we used to offer career ready bootcamp, just once per year. I was able, being full time and with the buy in now, we offer it three times, which means if the average incoming population that works with SSP is about 30 students and I was able to get 24 students through the career ready boot camp in this first year. So that’s something that they’re all going to get to take. And so now that we’ve got this model that’s working really well and is self sustainable and that we hope we can take to other colleges to do this. We’re working on different ways to support the student across their learning journey at RIT. And so we’re doing some alternative, like a spring break trip, I’m actually taking a cohort of eight students to New York City in March so that we can go visit four different employer sites. And we’re gonna go over beforehand the T chart of what do you see? And what do you hear? And in these specific categories. Is it an open space, is everybody in a cubicle? Are they talking to one another? Or are they working by themselves in headphones? What is the culture that you observe? How are people talking with a list of, like, what are you looking for? Be a social detective, so that we can then come back and debrief and I’m intentionally going to very different environments, so that they probably haven’t been in a work environment before. And we’re going to some really big ones, and to be able to say for themselves, “Oh, I can do this.” I know what to expect. And not only can I do this, I know what I prefer, and I know why I prefer it. So again, it helps that self advocacy, it helps to be your authentic self. And these are employers that all have neurodiverse programs and want my students. And I have to tell you that that is the most rewarding part of teaching career ready boot camp is when I have SAS come to talk or Southwest Airlines and I get to set the stage with students of “You are wanted. I know you’ve spent your lives feeling other. No, no, they’re here early for you. It is August, they have not posted these jobs yet. They are here to get a front-row seat to my RIT talent.” And you can just see them, they just sit up so much straighter. And in all of the post career ready boot camp survey, that’s what they say… it was just I never thought that people were going to want me… never thought… or it felt so good to have someone come here. And they do, I mean these employers give a 45-minute presentation of how we are thinking about you and your needs and here’s how it’s really great. Oh, and here’s somebody that did it. Like Southwest Airlines started their program last summer and had one of my RIT students and brought her back to career ready boot camp… and to hear her share her experience and what it was like and the students were able to ask like, “What’s your one piece of advice? What do you think you did the best in the interview? What do you think you did the worst?” And this is my best piece of advice that I really want everybody to hear going into this interview. They want to know how you solve a problem. Just like in life. I just want to know that you’re listening to me and that you’re going to try,. I want to know your initiative and your problem solving and so the student comes back. And she says, “I got this question and I didn’t know the answer, and I started to panic. What I did is I took a deep breath and I looked down at my notepad, because we always say, have reasons, have ways to distract yourself. I looked down, and I composed myself, and I looked back up, and I said, ‘I honestly don’t know. But I’ve solved other problems. Here’s how I would approach that.’” And she went into what she would do next. She’s like, “I think that’s what got me the job.” Because again, it’s how do I solve some them? Am I going to give up? Am I going to whine? Am I going to complain? Or am I just going to get to work, because again, these are co-op positions. And then I talk about what a co-op is: “Think of it as a class. This is like the lab to your bio class. This is you getting out and putting those skills to work.”

Rebecca: This sounds like a really great program. We always wrap up our sessions by asking: “What’s next?”

Kendra: I love “what’s next?” I don’t know if you’re West Wing fans, but “what’s next?” is what’s asked by the President every time he’s ready to push the agenda forward. And so that is actually how I kind of live my life is “What’s next?” As I told you, we’ve expanded career ready bootcamp, we’re now doing alternative spring travel. And we’ll do winter term travel with our students to give these opportunities. What I’m most excited about, we’re always looking to increase the impact on our students, we’re always looking to increase the reach to the community, and how do we train the trainer. So that’s a big goal is to be able to take this career ready bootcamp to other universities and show them how they can make it their own and help their students. I’m also working with a lot of partnerships on campus, because that’s where creativity happens, because we were talking, it’s all cross disciplinary. And so we have a program called RIT certified that works with online options. And so this will reach not only within RIT, but wider. And so we’re going to have modules for managers. So if you’re taking an HR class, if you’re taking this managerial certificate, you’re going to get best practices and universal design, so that we can do the reach further. I’m also going to work with our business school to be able to have internship programs, leadership certificates, things like that. So that it’s not just helping the autistic student or the already employed, but we’re planting the seeds so that as each of these people go out into their various networks, it’s a wider spread awareness and knowledge. And so I think those are the main ways that we’re looking to take care of impact is cross collaboration and expanding the model.

John: You’re doing some wonderful work. And I hope we’ll see more campuses and more programs like this, because individuals who are autistic often have trouble finding those first jobs where they’re successful. And we’re wasting a lot of resources that can bring some real strengths to organizations and to businesses out there.

Kendra: That’s true. But as I said before, these are business solutions. This is an untapped talent pool that really the sky’s the limit here. In all spaces, we need to make a bigger table. We need to make room for everyone and make sure we all have a place. So that’s what we’re doing.

Rebecca: Well, I know that we’ll look forward to getting some updates maybe from you in the future about this program and the next things that you have planned.

Kendra: I would love that and maybe you can recommend some tea alternatives for me. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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253. Designing for Trauma

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, belonging, disability, emotion, higher education, inclusion, inclusive pedagogy, learning, self-care, trauma, trigger warnings, universal design
September 7, 2022

 Universal Design for Learning principles were developed to make our courses more accessible for all students. In this episode, Andrea Nikischer joins us to discuss how universal design principles can be expanded to address the trauma that can adversely impact student learning. Andrea is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for the Adult Education Program in the Social and Psychological Foundations of Education Department at SUNY Buffalo State.

Show Notes

  • Nikischer, A. B. (2021). Universal Design for Trauma.
  • Nikischer, A. (2018). Life after# MeToo: Understanding the impact of adolescent sexual assault on education and career. International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research, 17(10), 86-98.
  • Horsman, J. (2013). Too scared to learn: Women, violence, and education. Routledge.
  • Horsman, Jenny (2006). “Who will hear? Who will see? The Impact of Violence on Learning: A Historical Journey.” Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme. Ending Woman Abuse, Vol. 25 No. 1.
  • Horsman, Jenny (2005). Moving Beyond “Stupid”: Taking Account of the Impact of Violence on Women’s Learning The International Journal of Educational Development, Gender Equality in Adult Education, Vol. 26, Issue 2.
  • Nikischer, A. (2019). Vicarious trauma inside the academe: Understanding the impact of teaching, researching and writing violence. Higher Education, 77(5), 905-916.

Transcript

John: Universal Design for Learning principles were developed to make our courses more accessible for all students. In this episode, we examine how universal design principles can be expanded to address the trauma that can adversely impact student learning.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Andrea Nikischer. Andrea is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator for the Adult Education Program in the Social and Psychological Foundations of Education Department at SUNY Buffalo State. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea: Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

John: Right before this. We were talking a little bit about this, and you were a student here. So welcome back.

Andrea: Thank you. I loved my time at Oswego State, and I still have my mug and my sweatshirt in my office at Buffalo State. So it’s great to continue being part of the SUNY family.

Rebecca: It’s so great to have you here. Today’s teas are:… Andrea, are you drinking tea?

Andrea: I am. I actually love tea. And today….

Rebecca: Yay!

Andrea: …I’m drinking my regular afternoon tea, which is a double green matcha from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: Nice. And I noted like a really beautiful mug.

Andrea: I am an avid tea drinker since I was in my teens. So it’s wonderful to be able to talk about tea… one of my favorite subjects.

Rebecca: it looks like a mint colored mug with, is it butterflies?

Andrea: They are birds, birds of peace, I think is the theme of the mug.

Rebecca: Awesome.

John: And I am drinking a ginger tea.

Rebecca: And I have English breakfast today.

John: And next time you’re on campus, stop by the CELT office where we have over 100 teas available.

Andrea: Oh, I’d love to.

Rebecca: …always welcoming tea drinkers.

John: We invited you here to talk about the presentation that you gave at the SUNY Conference on Instruction and Technology. Rebecca was able to attend that… I wasn’t able to because I had to be in another session at the time. So this is a chance for me to catch up a little bit on that and so that we can share this more broadly. Your presentation was titled Universal Design for Trauma. Maybe we should start by talking about how prevalent trauma is.

Andrea: That is a really great and, I think, complicated question. I actually have been working with trauma since really right out of my undergraduate degree at Oswego. And I started work at a rape crisis center. And I worked in the sex offense squad of a police department as a victim’s advocate. And my interest, when I moved into education, was in studying the impact of trauma on educational outcomes and what I call the life pipeline or career and life trajectories. But when I wrote this paper, it was 2019 in the fall, before COVID, before we knew what was coming. And at the time, we were really looking at statistics, around 70% of adults in the US will have experienced trauma at some point in their life. Obviously, depending on what age group we’re talking about, the statistics will be different, but over the course of the life around 70%. Now, today, post COVID with the extreme increase in gun violence and mass shootings, with a televised violent attack on the US Capitol, with a war, climate disasters, and crisis, I think it’s really difficult to measure what the true number is, and that, indeed, the best response is to assume that close to 100% of the population has dealt with some form of trauma in their life, and certainly through the global pandemic and more recent crises. As I’m sure you know, here in Buffalo, we had a white supremacist mass shooting, towards the end of the semester. Our students live and work in that community. And so for us in returning to school in the fall, we will certainly be treating the situation as if every student has a history of trauma.

Rebecca: You and others have investigated the impact of trauma on academic outcomes. Can you talk a little bit about this research?

Andrea: Absolutely. There’s a fairly large body of quantitative research in Europe, as well as some studies here in the US, showing a clear, significant negative relationship between trauma and academic outcomes. Trauma is interrupting the academic process leading to lowered academic success or achievement, as well as lowered career status or career achievement. And really, some of the research can show that over the course of a lifetime, we’re seeing actually a significant reduction in earnings. So you’re seeing the sort of interruption points when trauma is experienced during youth and adolescence that is interrupting the educational outcomes. So if we’re seeing that trauma before age 16, some of the studies before age 18, or 21, we’re seeing that interruption during adolescence, during emerging adulthood, that really important period between 18 and whenever you become an adult, which, you know, can vary based on who you are, but usually we’re looking at 18 to 29 and beyond. That’s the most important sort of period for setting up your future career and earnings. So when we see trauma happening before or during that period, we’re seeing the most significant impact on educational outcomes, career outcomes, and again, lifetime earnings. I conduct qualitative research. And so I’m building on the work of Jenny Horsman from Canada and other researchers who’ve studied, through qualitative methods, the direct impact on education. She has really terrific work, “Too Scared to Learn,” and my research validates and extends her previous work showing that, specifically sexual violence, makes it extremely difficult to learn, work, complete assignments, engage in the educational experience during adolescence or emerging adult. And, so my participants were raped or sexually assaulted as a child or as a teenager. And we really went through how that process impacted their educational trajectory. And the results are just very significant in terms of how they describe the change in their relationship with schooling after the sexual assault. So you have students who are honor students, all As, dropping to Cs, Ds, Fs, and really nobody asking about trauma. What is going on here? Lots of questions, but nobody getting the key question of was there a trauma? …and specifically was there a sexual assault or sexual violence? The last piece of that point is that, for my participants, we are talking about a significant change to their engagement with schooling. And one of the most famous, or I should say, one of the most moving quotes from my research, which has been published in a few different areas. One of my participants said, “I go to school, and they want me to know about the first, second, third President, but I don’t care about the first, second and third President, I’m thinking about going home to slit my wrists, schooling just doesn’t have importance anymore.” And so I had participants who spoke about having commitment to schooling, wanting to go to Ivy League schools, wanting to have really significant career aspirations. And then after the sexual assault, just completely focusing on an eating disorder. Schooling was replaced by this unhealthy mechanism for dealing with trauma. So, right now, trauma is widespread. And we don’t know yet what the long-term impacts will be for the students of the COVID pandemic, for the students dealing with widespread school shootings and fear of mass shootings. But we have a clue from the previous research that there are serious risks to long-term educational outcomes and career achievement and earnings.

Rebecca: There’s been a lot of conversation during the pandemic about digital accessibility and universal design for learning to address students with disabilities and mental health has certainly come more into that conversation. And you’ve proposed a universal design for trauma. Can you talk a little bit about what that framework looks like? And how that relates to Universal Design for Learning?

Andrea: Oh, yes, I’d be happy to. Let me start by saying I’m building off the amazing work done with universal design, starting with construction accessibility questions and moving into learning. And in fact, many scholars had previously tied trauma and mental health directly to accessibility concerns. I’m certainly not the first to make that connection. But I think I was in a great position having the experience working in trauma as a rape crisis counselor, and then moving into education, teaching 100% online for the last 10 years, having that sort of perspective, both worlds. For me, universal design is all about making sure that all of our students can fairly and successfully participate in learning. And so we’ve done a lot of work thinking about accessibility in a variety of different settings, but not much had been done in terms of asking questions about trauma. For my work as a rape crisis counselor, and through my research with survivors of trauma often was discussed that students would struggle in particular scenarios in their education. So a universal design builds on this great previous work of Universal Design for Learning, and focuses specifically on addressing the needs of students with a trauma history. Like all forms of universal design, this benefits everyone. So even if you don’t have a trauma history, sometimes you may experience distress if content is presented in a way that is not thoughtful, and that content has the ability to cause distress among the students. So trauma triggers are something we talk a lot about in the trauma field, and certainly is a major issue of concern in educating students with a history of trauma. Trauma triggers are really very personal typically. So it might be a site, a smell, a song, something that brings you back to that trauma. But there are some content areas that are universally considered universal triggers or universally triggering: content on war, content on sexual assault, sexual violence, content on suicide. These content areas can even cause distress in students without a trauma history. So universal design is certainly focused on students with a trauma history, but has the ability to make the learning environment more successful for everyone, healthier for every student.

Rebecca: In your framework, you lay out five principles for universal design for trauma. Can you give us a little insight into those five principles?

Andrea: Yes, I can. So these are the five things that I focus on in my work. So there are certainly other things that I think can and should be brought into the conversation. But for me, the five things that I really focus on when building a course, address what I think are some of the most important concerns for students. So I should say, I teach courses on sexual assault and family violence and other areas that are potentially universally distressing. And so I started building this concept of universal design, probably 10 years ago, in what I call “teaching sensitive topics online.” I did a lot of presentations and writing and professional development about teaching sensitive topics. But universal design goes beyond that to say that every class has the potential for triggering past trauma. So it’s not just those courses teaching sensitive topics, but all courses. And one of the reasons I moved into a more universal focus was because a lot of my students in my courses who were not being taught anything potentially distressing, were disclosing violence to me in personal journals, and other assignments, in large part because they knew my professional history and research area, but also because trauma can be triggered outside of those universals. But let me talk a little bit about those pieces that I’ve included in a universal design for trauma. And the first one is strategic content planning. So the first question educators must ask themselves: is this trauma content central to the learning objectives of the course or program? So when we are teaching a course, truly any course, the first thing we want to do is scan that course to see if there is any potentially distressing content included. And again, we’re looking for those universal trauma triggers: war, violence, violent imagery, sexual assault, police violence, etc. So the first step is really to say, is there anything in this course that could trigger trauma? And the next step is to say, if it’s here, does it need to be here? I’m very concerned about the what I call gratuitous inclusion of trauma content. I am a dedicated proponent of academic freedom. I never want to tell any faculty member what they should teach or what they can teach, but I do encourage faculty to take a close look at all materials they use that have the potential to be distressing and/or trigger past trauma and to ask themselves, is this content necessary in this course? Is it directly linked to the student learning outcomes? Is it the best possible resource to use in this course? I teach courses on family violence. The entire course is potentially triggering, I cannot remove that material, nor should I. It is directly linked to the student learning outcomes. So it’s going to stay in the course. But I’ve had other courses where I’ve wanted to include something. One example would be my diversity course, where I’ve had materials included and I’ve had to go back and reconsider if it is the right way to approach the material we’re covering in the course. Even if the materials linked to the student learning outcomes, it’s asking, Do I need to include this potentially distressing, potentially triggering, content in the course, that’s step one. And then if we do need to include it, we move on to another step, or how to deal with that. But I’m very concerned about just including a story about incest in a certain community, because we like the story, and then not really thinking about how the trauma of that story may impact the learning in the course, because we don’t want our students learning to be stifled because they have been triggered or are experiencing distress. So it’s really about the thoughtful process of selecting materials that are directly linked to our student learning outcomes, and not including any gratuitous.

Rebecca: So for folks that aren’t typically teaching topics that would be universally triggering, this first step is the key one for them to focus on?

Andrea: Well, yes, I mean, it’s the beginning. I think they’re all key in their own way [LAUGHTER]. But this one is most closely linked to our step on content and trigger warnings, which is an important part of the process. But I do think this is one that opens a lot of faculty’s minds to what is going on in their own course. A lot of faculty members, if they are not explicitly teaching a course on a sensitive topic may not be doing the thoughtful review of content to sort of find where there may be the potential for trauma or stress. So this is definitely a universal step that applies to all faculty members teaching all courses, both those with trauma content, and those that do not focus on a trauma topic.

John: A while ago, I ran into a situation where I had a reading in my introductory microeconomics class that looked at the marginal cost and marginal benefits of trying to improve safety on airlines by adding additional exit doors and such things. What I didn’t realize was that I had a student in the class whose father had just been shut down in the Gulf War, just a week or so before that. And ever since then, I’ve been much more careful in selecting material that might have that sort of an impact, because it was something I had not considered and it had not been an issue before, until it was.

Andrea: That is such a great point. And even I, who have been working in this issue of teaching sensitive topics for so long and thinking about trauma, have found that in the courses that don’t focus on a sensitive topic, I’m more likely to not be as thoughtful about the potential impact of materials. Thank you for sharing that example. Very relevant.

Rebecca: So I think the second principle in your framework is trigger and content warnings.

Andrea: Yes, and step two, the second principle is really connected, obviously to the first step or principle in that, if we have identified content that has the potential to trigger past trauma or cause distress, then we need to include the trigger and/or content warning. I actually did a project on trigger warnings, a research project around 2018. And you may remember 2015-16, there was a lot of heated debate about trigger warnings: Are we coddling students? Are we dumbing down the curriculum? Are we violating academic freedom? And where I landed on that in this research project was that this in no way requires a faculty member not to teach something. It simply is a matter of accessibility for their students. By telling your students in advance that something potentially triggering or distressing is coming, you give them the opportunity to prepare for that learning. When a trigger comes out of the blue, when you’re not expecting it, that is one of the most high risk times for having a negative reaction or a negative trauma response. So it doesn’t require faculty to change what they’re teaching or to eliminate rigor in any way. It simply allows students to know in advance that the content may be challenging to them in some way. So it was great that I was able to do that research project before this. And in fact, several scholars who were on the… it really was a debate… many of the papers were written as a debate. Many of the scholars on the side of the pro-trigger warning debate linked it directly to accessibility. And so I was able to sort of build from their wonderful work and from the arguments they made in that 2015-16-17 trigger warning debate. So what is a trigger warning? What is a content warning? it does not need to be complicated. I train the medical students at the University at Buffalo in family violence identification and reporting. And my number one takeaway is do not overcomplicate, it does not need to be complicated. All you need to do is say, we are going to be talking about, reading about, watching a film on, whatever the activity is, a topic that could be distressing to some students, please know that this content is coming. And then I always refer them back to the resources on campus and in the community. It can be one sentence, a simple heads up to let students know this may be distressing content. And if you’re on YouTube, or Twitter or Tik Tok, you’ll see actually a lot of these videos and imagery is now labeled with those really quick trigger and content warnings. Just a sentence is fine. Again, you’re just letting the student know: it’s coming, I don’t want to catch you off guard.

John: The next point in your framework for universal design for trauma is what to do about those situations where there may be some content that will be triggering for people. And what do you suggest in those cases?

Andrea: So my next step, or principle, whatever we want to call it, is alternative readings and assignments. So I always encourage faculty who are teaching particularly courses that are focused on sensitive material, but even those that include some unit or smaller section, with potentially distressing or triggering material to set up, where possible, alternative readings and assignments. So I’ll give you some examples of what I do. In my course on family violence, the whole course is potentially triggering. I cannot remove every reading and assignment. But I am very thoughtful about how I approach the work in that course. For example, we read a autobiography, which describes the experience of a sexual assault during college and the long-term impact on that woman’s life, including drug addiction, recovery, and moving on through the phases of her life. I like this book, because it shows the long-term impact in a narrative way. As a qualitative researcher, i love those narrative data. But there is one chapter in the text, which is an extremely graphic description of the stranger rape. And so I label this reading ahead of time, I tell students before the course begins, before they have bought their books, on the reading calendar, and in several locations. You do not need to read this chapter. This chapter is distressing, it is potentially triggering, and you don’t need to read it to get the value of the text. It is a chapter you can eliminate without any repercussion to your learning about this topic. So, in that case, we’re still reading the book, but we’re taking out the most distressing part of the text and I always make it optional. And a key point of any alternative reading or alternative assignment is that it has to be universal. You cannot ask a student to come to you to seek an accommodation. We do not want to force a trauma survivor to come to us to disclose their trauma, to seek an alternative reading or assignment. Please don’t do that. It needs to be built in… that universal design, right? That is the whole concept of universal design, is it is built in for everyone. So that optional chapter is optional for everyone, it does not matter what their trauma history is. And in that same course for the final assessment, which is really the big culminating assessment for the course, I allow the student to choose from five different options: a research paper, a book review, a lesson plan, a community service experience, or creating a domestic violence workplace protocol. I do this because it gives students choice and agency over how they will engage in a very time consuming way with content that is potentially triggering. So if one of my students is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, they may be very comfortable creating a domestic violence workplace protocol, that material may not be triggering to them in the same way that forcing them to write a paper about childhood sexual abuse would be. Perhaps they want to write a paper on elder abuse… also fine. We’re allowing them to decide, for them, what is the best, healthiest way for me to engage with this content? And how will I be most successful. And I can tell you as a faculty member that grades many, many graduate papers, having a variety of different projects come in every semester is a benefit for me too. It makes that grading process much more interesting. And students love it. And it is very closely linked to Universal Design for Learning which values choice for students. And in adult education, we value that self-directed learning and giving students the agency to really tie their work to what’s important to them in their career or personal life.

Rebecca: You mentioned earlier about providing access to campus and community resources as one of your key steps. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Andrea: Absolutely, and that is step or principle four. I am extremely focused on this. And I really tell faculty everywhere I go, I tell faculty, I do this and ask them to do this. And I show them my Blackboard course site. And in all of those Brightspace meetings, I’m asking where can I put my campus and community resources. I build campus resources and community resources. It has to be both. Some students will never see assistance on campus. Many students who’ve experienced trauma do not want to relive that trauma where they go to school, where they work, and they would rather seek services off campus. You have to provide both campus and community resources so the student can select what is best for their needs. But I build in those campus and community resources on my syllabus, of course, but also right on my Blackboard course page, soon to be Brightspace. I put them in the left-hand navigation bar at the top, they are front and center in every single course that I teach. And in the post COVID world, not post-COVID, but world after COVID came, students really need these resources. We’re finding at Buffalo State, as I’m sure you are at Oswego, that the student needs for crisis intervention and mental health counseling and support are extensive. So it’s been very well received by my students. And I just build it in, make it a priority. Every time you log on, you can see that there is help for you should you need it. This is also important for me because I have worked in the field as a crisis counselor doing crisis intervention, doing street outreach and advocacy. But I am not a counselor at Buffalo State. And I cannot counsel my students at Buffalo State, it would be unethical for me to try to take on that role. So I want to make sure my students can go to someone that can provide those services to them. And so before they try to come to me to seek those services, which I cannot ethically provide, I’ve made sure they know where they can go. And if they come to me, I listen and refer, listen and refer. That is my role as a faculty member. F aculty cannot and should not be providing counseling,

Rebecca: Such good reminders. I think often when faculty are thinking about trauma, they’re thinking this is not a thing I can take on. I’m not qualified. I don’t have this expertise. But the reminders that the job here is to refer and to provide those resources is a really helpful one.

Andrea: Yes, absolutely. It can be scary to think about opening the can of worms and that’s the phrasing the survivors in my research study used particularly related regarding their K through 12 teachers thinking maybe they didn’t want to ask me questions about if I was a survivor because they didn’t want to open that can of worms. They didn’t know how to deal with it. But a faculty member’s role is to listen and refer. We are not counselors, and even though I am qualified, it would be unethical for me to attempt to do that in that role.

Rebecca: I remember from your presentation that you also talked about having students reflect on a self- care plan to make sure that they have actions that they can take in case they did become distressed. Can you talk a little bit about that? And does that relate to this step?

Andrea: Yes, it does, thank you.

Rebecca: I took good notes. [LAUGHTER]

Andrea: Thank you so much. Yes, a self care plan is critical. All of my students do a lot of work with personal journals. As an online instructor, I find that journaling is a great way for me to have a one-on-one conversation with my students in a safe and private space. And so the first journal entry in every course every semester is setting your goals and objectives for the course. What do you hope to learn? How will you know you’ve learned it? What do you need from me to be successful in this course? And then I include the question: please create a self-care plan for the semester. How will you take care of yourself if you encounter distressing content, or distressing situations in this course, and in that personal journal, the students can begin to build that self-care plan. I can comment on that plan, remind them of those campus and community resources and be sure that they have thought in advance about what they will do if they experience distress or trauma.

Rebecca: Is that something that you recommend for courses that might not be those sensitive topics?

Andrea: Yes, many semesters, I have more disclosures in courses with no focus on trauma content, but perhaps we are talking about K-12 schooling and a student is brought back to an incident of bullying. And they’ve been triggered by content that was not directly related to bullying, or a potentially triggering topic, but they were brought back in time, and in so doing, they experienced dis stress. I do it in every course. I recommend everyone do it in every course universally, because it is an easy step. And again, our students, particularly right now, are experiencing so much in the world that a self-care plan is, I think, extremely valuable for everyone in every course.

John: And the last principle you list is instructor protections. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Andrea: Absolutely. This is one of my passion projects is thinking about and talking about the impact of teaching, researching, and writing trauma on a faculty member. So I’ve written about my own experience with vicarious and secondary trauma in an article “Vicarious Trauma Inside the Academe” published in the journal Higher Education. It’s an autoethnography that really goes through a process of discovering I was experiencing secondary traumatic stress, and learning how to deal with that in my various roles, certainly starting with my work as a rape crisis counselor, but then experiencing it again when I was interviewing and transcribing those long and painful qualitative interviews from survivors of sexual assault, and dealing with them. My role on campus as an expert and being asked to watch a film and comment on what to do. I often found myself in a situation where it was assumed that I would be fine just because of the role I have on campus or as a researcher, as a writer, whatever it may be, but a faculty member is not immune to the distress from the content they are teaching and from student disclosure, even in courses where I am not teaching trauma content, students disclose to me, they find me on campus, they come up to me at poster sessions, they seek me out because they know what I’ve done and what I do with my research. And so that has had an impact on me and I have tried to speak about it and advocate for faculty members taking care of themselves. In my scholarship, I really put it at a higher level. I think our campuses need to take care of their faculty members a little bit better than perhaps they have in the past. The world is changing. We are dealing with students with high levels of stress, distress. We are dealing with mass shootings in our community, with political instability, with a range of illnesses and viruses and global pandemics. It is not an easy time to be a faculty member. And it is not helpful to pretend that we are immune to feelings because we are not. And so I always talk to faculty about taking care of themselves. What is your self-care plan? Because for me, when I experienced that secondary traumatic stress, I couldn’t write. These journal articles took a lot longer than I wanted them to, because I just couldn’t go back to the material to repeat it again. It is difficult to do the work well, if you are not healthy, if you are dealing with stress, distress, or potentially vicarious or secondary trauma. And so, for me, that’s a big piece. This is, I would say, an exploding area of research. So, there is just myriad scholarship right now coming out around faculty members, instructors and teachers and their own experiences with trauma, secondary trauma and secondary traumatic stress. So there are many wonderful articles available for those faculty members who’d like to read more, and I am always available. If anyone ever wants to have a chat about teaching sensitive topics or about universal design for trauma or just dealing with trauma in our students and in the world, they are welcome to email me and I am always available to my friends in SUNY and beyond.

Rebecca: What are some things that you would recommend faculty think about for a self-care plan? I know this is something that’s on the minds of a lot of faculty having gone through a couple of years of teaching during a pandemic and really dealing with a lot of student disclosures.

Andrea: Absolutely a very pressing issue. I actually spoke at a professional development conference at Fredonia this winter break, which was 100% focused on self care: How do we take care of ourselves? How do we deal with this very chaotic world, very distressing world, stress and distress and trauma, when it doesn’t end, it really compounds. So if the COVID pandemic was over, we’d all be dealing with the potential distressed trauma and after effects of that, but we would be ideally moving forward and healing. It’s not over. It’s changing and growing and shifting, and we have no idea of what is coming next. That is really a dangerous situation when it comes to trauma. Because when the trauma is ongoing, we just don’t have the time to heal. So self care becomes that much more important. Things I think about: One, preparing yourself, doing a trigger warning for yourself for those weeks, months, days that you will be specifically dealing with trauma content in your course. Two, making sure you understand what your roles and responsibilities are. Many faculty members are not aware that they are a mandatory reporter on campus for sexual assault and for domestic violence. Many faculty members do not know about the campus care team or emergency response team. It is really important for faculty to educate themselves on what their roles are, their responsibilities are, and who is available to assist them. Faculty are not alone. And if they feel like they are alone, the threat of distress and trauma is much greater. But I know that when I get a disclosure, I first have to report it through the online system if it is a recent disclosure. I rarely get disclosures that are current. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had one where a student is currently experiencing sexual assault or domestic violence, though certainly, many faculty do receive these. I think it’s just a matter of teaching graduate students online. It’s a different setting, but I am prepared for those. And the first step for any disclosure, no matter when the incident was, is to report through your campus reporting system. And then I contact the care team and I often go directly to the dean of students to ask for help. What do I need to do here? Can you remind me about my legal obligation? I’ve given the student resources, what else can I offer the student? if I am at all concerned about suicidal ideation, I immediately involve the crisis response or care team to assist with that, knowing that I have a team of people behind me, that I can email the Dean of Students, and she will get right back to me is extremely helpful, because a really big threat is feeling like you are alone. So preparing for content in advance, understanding your roles, responsibilities, and who is on campus to help you, and then doing those things, which to you, are self care. Buffalo State has offered meditation courses just about one every two weeks. I have taken all of them. That’s something that is really helpful and useful to me. For other people, it may be exercise or reading a certain book or going to a friend’s home, whatever it is, that’s the personal piece. So you have the campus understanding and then the personal piece as well.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing such really important content, especially as we head into the fall and faculty are nervous and anxious about what this next semester of pandemic might look like.

Andrea: Thank you for having me. And just the last thing I’ll say is that faculty should know that they are not alone, and that their distress, stress, or feelings of trauma are justified by the world that we are living in, and that no one needs to pretend they are above the humanity of the time that we’re living in. And so I hope your campus and all of the campuses across SUNY and beyond begin to really prioritize the mental and emotional health, not only of students, but of faculty and staff asd well.

John: I think that’s an issue that all of our campuses need to focus on. And it’s been a tough time out there for everyone. So thank you.

Andrea: Thank you.

John: And we always end with the question, and which is very much related, of “What’s next?”

Andrea: Well, what’s next? I’ll answer it in several ways. One, I think that we need to continue the conversation and really advocating for addressing trauma in our higher education classes. Research, every setting in higher education must become aware that trauma is here, it is in our society, it is impacting our students, it is impacting our faculty, and we cannot pretend it is not an issue of concern. So for me, I’ll be continuing to write about and advocate for trauma concerns being addressed in higher education. I am working on the online oversight committee at my campus, and I’m working with one of the instructional designers. We’ve talked a lot about creating more training opportunities for faculty members related to learning about trauma and addressing trauma in their courses and among their students. So I’m excited to continue that work as well. But ultimately, the world has changed, higher education has changed. We are never going back to the world that we had before. And so we have to adapt to those changes that have really come very quickly in the past few years. And so step one is sort of admitting that higher education isn’t going to be what it used to be, and that we are ready and willing and able to do what needs to be done to help our students be successful. Because I expect in the fall, we are going to have students with a myriad of very significant challenges. And we are going to have faculty who need to be prepared to help those students address those challenges.

John: And it is a positive sign that students are so much more willing to disclose their mental health concerns than I think they ever had been in the past that may make secondary trauma a little bit more challenging to address, but it does allow us to get support to students when it’s needed.

Andrea: Absolutely, absolutely. And again, really making sure faculty understand they don’t have to solve the students’ problems. That’s not your role. You are a teacher, your role is to listen refer and, where needed, to connect directly to those campus resources like your care team and your sexual assault response office.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

Andrea: Thank you so much for having me. I love the opportunity to be back virtually on the Oswego campus and it was wonderful speaking with you both.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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221. Disability and Higher Education

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, diversity, higher education, learning
January 5, 2022

Faculty, staff, and students with disabilities constantly have to negotiate when and if to disclose their disability status and whether or not to request accommodations. In this episode, Kat Macfarlane joins us to discuss the ADA and the experiences people with disabilities have in academia, including the burdens associated with accommodation requests.

Kat is a law professor at Southern University Law Center. She is a disability rights advocate, chairs the American Association of Law School Section on Disability Law, and co-founded an affinity group for disabled law professors and allies. Her work is published in the Fordham Law Review, the Alabama Law Review and Yale Law Journal Forum and many other journals.

Shownotes

  • Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
  • Twitter thread that prompted this podcast
  • Katherine A. Macfarlane, Disability Without Documentation, 90 Fordham L. Rev. 59 (2021). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol90/iss1/2
  • Ms. JD Blog Series
  • Dorfman, D. (2019). Fear of the disability con: perceptions of fraud and special rights discourse. Law & Society Review, 53(4), 1051-1091.
  • Studies on laptops and notetaking:
    • Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological science, 25(6), 1159-1168.
    • Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019). How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 31(3), 753-780.
    • Aguilar-Roca, N. M., Williams, A. E., & O’Dowd, D. K. (2012). The impact of laptop-free zones on student performance and attitudes in large lectures. Computers & Education, 59(4), 1300-1308.
    • Artz, Benjamin and Johnson, Marianne and Robson, Denise and Taengnoi, Sarinda, Note-Taking in the Digital Age: Evidence from Classroom Random Control Trials (September 13, 2017).
    • Bui, D. C., Myerson, J., & Hale, S. (2013). Note-taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 299.
    • Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132.
    • Hembrooke, H., & Gay, G. (2003). The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments. Journal of computing in higher education, 15(1), 46-64.
    • Lang, James M. “The Distracted Classroom.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 13, 2017.
    • Patterson, R. W., & Patterson, R. M. (2017). Computers and productivity: Evidence from laptop use in the college classroom. Economics of Education Review, 57, 66-79.
    • Ravizza, S. M., Uitvlugt, M. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2017). Logged in and zoned out: How laptop internet use relates to classroom learning. Psychological science, 28(2), 171-180.
    • Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31.
  • Accessing Higher Ground Conference
  • Mya on TikTok

Transcript

John: Faculty, staff, and students with disabilities constantly have to negotiate when and if to disclose their disability status and whether or not to request accommodations. In this episode we get a primer on the ADA and discuss the experiences people with disabilities have in academia, including the burdens associated with accommodation requests.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Kat McFarlane, a law professor at Southern University Law Center. She is a disability rights advocate, chairs the American Association of Law School Section on Disability Law, and co-founded an affinity group for disabled law professors and allies. Her work is published in the Fordham Law Review, the Alabama Law Review and Yale Law Journal Forum and many other journals. Welcome, Kat.

Kat: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: Today’s teas are… Kat, are you drinking tea?

Kat: You know, I have an English grandmother, who… may she rest in peace… would be embarrassed to learn that her granddaughter is drinking Perrier today. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Don’t worry, we’ve got you. We’ve got you. I have a tea that… I can’t remember what’s in my cup.

John: But there is a tea bag this time, right?

Rebecca: Yeah, there’s actual tea. I made a pot of tea. But I made it a while ago, and now I can’t remember what it is. It’s a black tea of some sort. I’m gonna have to go with that today, John. I really have no idea. [LAUGHTER]

John: And I have Twinings Christmas tea.

Rebecca: Oh, I had some of that earlier. So we invited you here today to discuss what it means to be disabled in higher education as both a student and as a faculty or staff member. You’ve written extensively about this subject in journal articles like “Disability Without Documentation,” and in your blog series for Ms. JD, and on Twitter. And in these spaces, you’ve identified yourself as a person with disabilities. Would you like to share a little more about that before we get started?

Kat: Yeah, absolutely. So I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was 13 months old. So I’ve had RA, an autoimmune disease, my entire life, and I’ve been on very strong immunosuppressants my entire life. So, RA’s a joint disease… that alone makes me disabled but combined with the immunosuppressants I’m disabled in a variety of ways. Most of my disabilities play out as mobility impairments. However, unless you know what you’re looking for, or it happens to be a quite terrible day for me, in which I’m flaring, you’d likely wouldn’t know that I’m disabled. And I spent most of my life until my early 30s, being quite ashamed of what I was going through physically, really resisting the label of a person with disabilities. And no one really knew to the point where when I finally started talking and writing about it, friends from high school were shocked to learn what that’s an essential part of who I am.

John: To set the groundwork for the discussion, c ould you provide a bit of an overview of the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Kat: Sure, the ADA, as it’s referred to in legal circles, was passed in 1990. It’s a piece of civil rights legislation, and it was a result of decades of activism by allies, but mostly by people with disabilities themselves. And so it was intended to make all aspects of American life open to people with disabilities. So that includes employment, things like airplanes, public buildings, and what we’re going to talk about today, places of higher education. So one important thing that the ADA does, it views disability through what we call the social model. So we don’t think of people with disabilities as broken or in need of fixing, they exist outside of any kind of medical model or diagnosis, rather, the ADA and the social model looks at spaces and barriers. And the goal is to remove them so that everyone, including people with disabilities, can find space to exist equally alongside their non disabled peers. The ADA has a pretty specific definition of disability. And I say specific, it’s what we use legally, but it’s meant to incorporate all kinds of disability. So the working definition that we use is a disability under the ADA is a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits a major life activity. So my RA is a disability under the ADA. If you’re high risk for COVID because of asthma, you are disabled under the ADA, which of course has become very, very relevant over the last year and a half.

Rebecca: In academia, the primary way we often talk about disability, kind of unfortunately, is through the lens of accommodations. Can you talk a little bit about accommodations, and maybe also how that doesn’t always follow the social model. [LAUGHTER]

Kat: Accommodations, the way to think about them, are adjustments that make the learning environment so no one’s getting an advantage through an accommodation. And oftentimes, people have to ask for accommodations for things that really should be in place already. So an accommodation might mean installing an extra wheelchair ramp, there should already be a wheelchair ramp into any place of public education, maybe providing material in Braille, allowing students to have absences automatically excused to the extent that they need medical treatment related to their disability. And in the context of testing, giving either extra time on a test or something that I always encourage my students to ask for when they deal with panic attacks, for example, to have breaks that are untimed. So when you’re in front of the tests, the clock keeps on running, but to the extent there’s something you’re dealing with physically, maybe the clock for your break is unlimited. Things like accessible bathrooms are not accommodations. Schools, public buildings (private schools as well), have to have accessible bathrooms in there, you shouldn’t have to wait for a person with disabilities to arrive on campus. Same thing with service dogs, no one that has a service dog should have to get permission by way of an accommodation, they’re very limited questions that you can ask someone with a service dog. In general, we want to encourage and facilitate people to be able to bring their service dog to any place that they need to get to. So again, I would think of accommodations as fairly straightforward adjustments that facilitate equality. And I say fairly straightforward, because most of them are incredibly cheap. The rare accommodation is expensive, and we think of them in terms of equality. But there’s also limits on them. So you only get a reasonable accommodation. If an accommodation would change the nature of the learning environment, if it would undo a pedagogical purpose for a particular exam, for example, those accommodations don’t have to be granted. The ADA doesn’t say any accommodation whatsoever. It says only those accommodations that are reasonable. And cost does come into play in determining whether an accommodation is or is not reasonable.

John: Many institutions require documentation for disabilities, and that can serve as a barrier. And you wrote about that in your blog earlier. Could you talk a little bit about some of the barriers that are introduced by the requirements for documentation?

Kat: Sure, documentation typically requires a person with a disability to get a doctor to sign off on the fact that they’re disabled. You’re not supposed to have to do this, if you have an obvious disability, a legal rule. However, employers, places of higher education are very reluctant to call any kind of disability obvious. And I say that at the top, because there’s all of this suspicion that surrounds the assertions of people with disabilities make, both about the fact that they are disabled, and the kind of accommodations that they require. So typically, if you’re a student who needs any kind of accommodation, maybe that includes using a laptop in class, I know we’ll talk about that in a few moments, you are likely going to have to go to a doctor’s appointment, get a doctor to examine you to confirm that you’re disabled. And the doctor often has to write, themselves, what sort of accommodations you need, which adds on this additional layer of complexity because, in my case my rheumatologist, obviously never went to law school, doctors I continue to see do not work as law professors. So there’s this very strange requirement that we asked medical doctors to make recommendations about spaces they’ve never been in. The best case scenario: that takes one appointment, the doctor believes you, they sign off. But, what are we doing to people when we require them to get medical documentation of disability? They have to take time off whatever they’re doing… job, usually… school… doctors don’t work on weekends or after hours, they work the same time that classes are held. You have to go to a doctor’s appointment, travel to get there and back. You might not have money for that kind of transportation as a student. Parking at medical facilities is very expensive, gas or transport, If you have to add that on. If you’re in a new city, and you have to see a new doctor, even if your diagnosis was confirmed like me at birth, I’ve often had to provide additional documentation that the chronic and degenerative illness I have, in fact, I still have. I make jokes like, “Oh, is there a cure for RA that I didn’t hear about?” In any event, if you’re in a new city and you’re seeing a new doctor, you’re probably not going to get that form during a first time appointment, right? And I understand that a doctor might want to see you again. But we’re sending students down this very complex, very expensive, very time consuming path. Are their absences excused? Who knows? Another point to make here is that when documentation of disability turns on a health care professional’s assessment of your disability, we are now sending people into a system, medicine, that we know to be racist, and we know to be sexist, and that we know to disbelieve, in particular, women of color’s assertions of their pain. That absolutely crosses over into what doctors think certain demographics are saying and whether they’re to be believed when they make representations about their disability. There’s no uniform documentation form that every single university or grad school or law school uses. So, you might have filled out a one-page form at your undergrad institution and it was relatively straightforward and then have to start all over again once you get to grad school and pay out all this money, just to get, what we’ve just mentioned, was a tool of equality.

Rebecca: So you’re starting to describe, Kat, doesn’t really sound like the social model.

Kat: [LAUGHTER] No, it’s so dependent on medicine. And not everyone with a disability has to have as many interactions with healthcare providers as I do, for example, right? You may use a mobility aid, you may use a wheelchair and have to see a doctor every year or even less frequently. On top of that, the intricacies of your everyday life and what you need help with, what’s difficult, or what’s easy, even the understanding that you absolutely should be in the workplace is something that a doctor often will not understand. And just as we know that there’s an incredible amount of sexism and racism in medicine, ableism [LAUGHTER] is a terrible problem to the point where people in wheelchairs often can’t get into doctors’ offices, because medical spaces aren’t accessible to them. So Rebecca, thank you for mentioning that. It’s a point that’s at the heart of my “Disability Without Documentation” paper. And so not only are we tracking back to an idea that disability only exists if a doctor says it’s there, but we’re also treating a person with disability as someone who has something wrong with them. And you have to go to a doctor because only they will possibly know how you might be able to exist at school or exist in the workplace.

Rebecca: So what other models can we advocate for that would reduce this burden and help institutions move more towards inclusion for students, but also for faculty and staff.

Kat: So, I think every school should audit its accommodation process, look at how many pages accommodations forms are, if they’re more than two, you’re already asking a lot of people with disabilities. If there is a documentation requirement, it should be minimal. Anyone that already has documentation that includes a diagnosis should not be required to get anything new. If someone is discovering that they have a disability, and they’re now in a very intense academic program that requires accommodation that they might have not needed before, if they have to go to a doctor, I think they should be able to go to the Student Health Center and it should be free of charge, and it should be an appointment that students can get after hours. We often speak of our disability services offices as a part of the university that advocates on behalf of students. I’m sure there are places like that. Typically they’re not though, right? They’re offices that accept forms and decide some part of whether students are entitled or not entitled to accommodations, but they don’t then take on any other kind of advocacy role. So as institutes of higher ed, we should think about: Well, who is supporting students? Do they have access to mentors? Are we able to put students and even faculty in touch with other people who have gone through the accommodations process and can give them advice about how to navigate it? And then in turn, is there a feedback loop back to the institution about how to make the process better? I would also assume we all need training about implicit bias, right? But, we often don’t talk about disability in that discussion. There’s this overarching suspicion about people with disabilities. And a friend of mine Doran Dorfman has written an article called “Fear of the Disability Con,” and he describes how the epidemic is Americans’ fear that people with disabilities are faking. That’s statistically what we can measure. People with disabilities don’t fake. There’s so much discrimination that you face as soon as you identify yourself as a person with disabilities that why would you? So, we need to step aside from that model and assume that people are telling the truth. When you assume that people are telling the truth, you have less bureaucracy involved, [LAUGHTER] in your accommodations process, less people need to like double check or fill out paperwork, or even receive or review paperwork to begin with. And then finally, I would say, whenever we’re talking about accommodations, or people with disabilities, we have to speak as though people with disabilities are in the room because they are, right? I’ve sat through so many faculty meetings, where accommodations come up, and students are vilified. At my last institution, someone from the disability services offices came and gave a presentation and the only images of people with disability used were children with disabilities on playgrounds. I countered that with a presentation of my own, but I felt like I didn’t exist in that conversation. It was an invitation to talk about people and to other them. So the way we discuss students with disabilities has to be very different than what we’re doing right now.

John: One of the ways in which disability issues may come up in the classroom is that there are a lot of faculty who will not allow the use of any technology produced in the last couple of centuries in their classroom. How can that serve as a barrier to students with certain types of disabilities?

Kat: Yeah, I have this conversation with law professors, I guess I have this fight. Like every August I’ll tweet something and say: Just a reminder, laptop bans are ablest. And then people debate their merit. When I talk about this, the first thing I say is people are for some reason enamored with these studies about how students learn better if they’re not on a laptop, to which I say: What about all the students with disabilities? What’s the data on their experience when they don’t fit into [LAUGHTER] whatever data set you’ve come up with? “Oh, yeah, I didn’t think about that?” “Well, they’re just a few of them”. Okay, so this is not a perfect study to begin with. Anyway, second, I don’t think professors always understand how complex getting an accommodation is. So let’s walk through a timeline. You’re a freshman, let’s say. You get your syllabus, maybe a week… best practices…[LAUGHTER] right before classes start… maybe the night before, and all of a sudden you see a laptop ban. No way will you ever have enough time to get an accommodation in place that allows you to use a laptop on the first day that you need it, for various reasons. Accommodations require this multi-step evaluation process. And I know of no school that as soon as a student asked for a particular accommodation, they’re, in the interim, granted that. This is something that I’ve advocated for my institution. In the legal context, we would call that a TRO or like a preliminary injunction where you grant relief for a shortened period of time, pending a more fuller evaluation. We don’t do that. We make disabled students sit there and suffer without the accommodations that they likely are going to get. So if you have a laptop and you have a student with a disability who gets that accommodation, what they’re going to have to go through is all that medical documentation loop that I talked about: have meetings with the Office of Disability Services, fill out the forms, wait for the accommodation to be granted. So all that time has been wasted and that student has been sitting in your classroom when they needed a laptop and have had to go without it. So I’ve heard a couple professors come up with their own, like ad hoc solution to this and I haven’t heard one that I’m really on board with yet. So some people say, “Well, if you have a legitimate disability, then I’ll let you use it…” to which I say: “Number one, how are you going to measure that?” That’s interesting, that word legitimate is strange. Number two, no student should have to disclose their disability to you to get what they are entitled to under the law. And again, this is where implicit bias comes into play. We have confidentiality provisions under the ADA, because Congress, we as a country, decided we needed certain aspects of disability to be kept confidential because of the fear of discrimination. So on a one-to-one basis, professors should not just be deciding that students can be forced to disclose their disability. So I think that doesn’t work. Now, let’s say six weeks into the semester, the student finally gets permission to use the laptop, let’s say it’s a seminar class of 12 students, one student’s using a laptop, all of a sudden, you have forced that student to disclose to their classmates and to the professor, that they have a disability. And so what I say to my colleagues is, now that you’ve heard that, I’m guessing you wouldn’t want a student to go through all of that process and jump through all those hoops. And you understand that that’s hurtful and discriminatory itself. Yes, yes, yes. So can we just do away with the bans? And they’re still reluctant, but I managed to convince a few people that at least where we are now it’s impossible to do it fairly.

John: And we should also add that some of the most popular studies that found that result did not fully control for self selection. And when there were controlled experiments, what’s often been found is that it is true that the students who are most likely to choose to use laptops are more likely to be distracted. But that seems to be an issue of the sample selection, rather than the type of modality that they’re using for note taking, and so forth. And in at least some studies, there is no significant difference when the choice of using a laptop or not, is an experimental condition that’s controlled in the experiment. So even that argument breaks down a bit.

KT: Yeah.

John: But the issue about disability is, I think, much more compelling, in any case.

Kat: I’m going to quote you, John. [LAUGHTER]

John: We can include a citation in the show notes too, of at least one or two studies that found that

Rebecca: So, people with disabilities are often subject to comments about how they’re so lucky to have an accessible parking placard so that they can park closer or have extra time on a test. And these comments are often meant to imply that an individual is unfairly getting special treatment. How do you respond? Or how would you coach others to respond to these aggressions?

Kat: It’s hard because it does really hurt. And I’ve gone through different moments of my life where it’s made me cry. I’ve had several people, including one person when I was in a law school parking lot, yell at me about using a disabled parking spot, and I had someone who I thought was a friend, tell me exactly that, that I was lucky. Now that I’m older, I think people are scared enough of me to not say things like that. What I would tell people to say in response, if they are at that place is to ask more questions to say things like, “Oh, really? Why is that? Do you think you need one too? Would you like me to talk to you about why I have one?” But again, it’s difficult, because I don’t think anyone should ever have to explain themselves. So the best answer I’ve ever heard is from a friend of mine named Jesus who drives a Porsche and used a disabled parking placard one six-month period when he was on crutches. People really don’t like to see people with disabilities driving nice cars or really, in general, having nice things. Like the assumption is, we’re supposed to be impoverished and grateful for public transportation, I suppose. But he’s done very well for himself. So one day, he was parked in a disabled spot, and he’s in a Porsche. And before you see him get out, you wouldn’t be able to see his crutches. And so some woman comes up to him and said, “This is a disabled parking spot. How dare you park here? This isn’t for you.” And so then he became very slow and dramatic, and took his crutches from his passenger seat and very slowly and dramatically placed them on the ground. And when he was finally standing upright, he looked at her and said, “Thank you concerned citizen.” [LAUGHTER] and they went on their merry way. He’s a character. And I have some friends with disabilities that when they get stared at, they’ll wave at people, or they’ll get closer to the person staring and say things like, “Oh, do I know you?” [LAUGHTER] …just to kind of like put it on them for being awkward. I also think it’s perfectly okay to get emotionally exhausted by these kinds of statements and to look for spaces, and for a lot of us with disabilities that is online, I have found community on social media that I never even knew existed. I think you should feel absolutely justified in expressing how hurtful those comments are. I think the more important thing in those situations is for allies to immediately speak up, and to call it out… to say, “You only need a disabled parking placard if you are having difficulty with something about getting into the building. Nothing about that is easy, and it’s also none of our business.” So if that can be nipped in the bud by someone else, rather than putting the emotional labor on the person dealing with the reason for the parking placard, that would be ideal. Most people say things to me when I’m on my own. I now am more comfortable standing up for myself. But there’s weird things that happen to you, as a woman with disabilities. There’s some physical safety issues that I have to be concerned with. If I know I’m working late at night, and there aren’t that many other people in the building, I might move my car out of the disabled parking spot into another spot so that people don’t know that the only person in the building is a person with disabilities, which is bad that I have to do that… so I take some extra precautions, I would encourage everyone if they ever feel comfortable getting to the place, to hold their head up high, and to know that their life is too difficult already as a person with disabilities. And if they want to ignore someone, to be my guest, [LAUGHTER] and know that they have the right to do that as well.

Rebecca: I love the emphasis on having allies speak up and speak out. And maybe if you’re an ally, be an ally and have that in your pocket ready to pull out. Practice it.

John: Might this, along with many other reasons, lead people to not take advantage of services designed to accommodate disabilities.

Kat: Yes, so something that I hear from students is, in academic settings, where accommodated students take their tests in a known space. Just to not have to go in that one space, and let everyone know that you are testing with accommodations, students will not ask for accommodations. So the shame and the discrimination that attaches to just getting accommodations is something that stops people who very much need them from asking for them. I’ve had students who are veterans with PTSD and the need for incredibly limited accommodations to just take a break for a moment. Populations like that are afraid of disability… people who went to war are afraid of the stigma of accommodations, so much so that they won’t ask for them. In my own life. I still struggle with it within myself to the point where I make this decision in my head about whether I actually need to park in a disabled spot or not on a daily basis and whether I want to deal with the person that may yell at me. The truth is, I get a form of chemo for my RA, so I can objectively say I get that parking placard. I still don’t use it on days when I think the parking lot is crowded and someone else may need it more than me. I mean, the twisted way it’s affected my own assessment of what I need and what I deserve is really difficult. So I’ve been talking a lot from the perspective of someone with invisible disabilities. Of course, many people don’t have the luxury that I have to kind of decide on and off whether I want to share what I’m going through with respect to disabilities. However, they may still want to have confidentiality that attaches to the nature of their accommodations. For example, to the extent that they need an accommodation that places them closer to an accessible restroom. None of that should be announced to everyone and so fear of those very confidential and personal pieces of information being shared also stops people from asking for accommodations. The student feedback that I get, the reluctance is the stigma from other students and the conversations that the student bodies often have in law school, at least a conversation is, “Oh, whoever’s getting extra time on tests is ruining the curve.” And so people become petrified about being perceived as someone who’s getting an unfair advantage, to the extent they do well.

Rebecca: I hear a lot of conversation about this idea of like not being disabled enough to request accommodations, like you’re talking about, Kat, and I think that’s maybe become even more visible during the pandemic, partly because disability and chronic illness isn’t static, but also there are more folks who are experiencing mental health challenges, and maybe could really benefit from accommodations, but they don’t see themselves or don’t identify as disabled. And it would never occur to them to ask for an accommodation. How do we help these students?

Kat: So I tell my students that the system is not set up to give you too many accommodations, there will be some procedural barrier, or someone that gives you less than what you asked for. So don’t undersell yourself, don’t like negotiate against yourself to begin with, is what I tell my future lawyers. I also tell them that you don’t have to use every accommodation you get. So I think I probably asked for accommodations in law school that made my test-taking situation worse, but I had a certain number of breaks I could take away from the test to stretch and if I didn’t need them, I didn’t need them. And I was always very cautious of like, “Well, am I really taking this to stretch? Or am I taking it because I want to go and like think up this great idea, you know, in the hallway?” But the point being here, if you ask for 30 minutes of extra time, and you only end up needing five minutes or you finished early, that’s a great outcome, right? And if you have them in place, maybe there’s a semester where you don’t need them, maybe there’s a semester that you do need them, but better to have them in place early. I also really work with students, to do this work myself too, right? …to never qualify the word disability and to think in terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act, to talk about all of the heroic activists that fought on behalf of myself and other people with disabilities to make society more accessible and that you’re doing a favor for yourself. But you’re also opening the door and making the process easier and you’re normalizing it for people that come after you. So there’s a lot [LAUGHTER] to put on someone’s shoulders, but I think there’s no way anyone’s ever going to give you more accommodations than you asked for and the process is quite burdensome. So you’re going to lose time and money along the way. But why close yourself out? Why take away the opportunity at equality? You got there, you’re in school, you want to succeed, your here, you got up in the morning, you maybe were flaring, give yourself that extra step of equality that the law says you deserve.

Rebecca: During the Accessing Higher Ground conference this fall, I went to a discussion about an increase of accommodation requests in medical school, and that many of these med students have never needed to ask for accommodations before. And I think that’s something that faculty, staff, students, there’s a great population of individuals who maybe are feeling like they need to ask for accommodations, in part because of their risk, maybe with a pandemic and what have you. What advice do you have for folks who have never navigated this terrain before and now find themselves having to navigate it? It’s really intimidating.

Kat: It absolutely is. And during the first six months of the pandemic, I spent a lot of time… happily, but it was a lot of time… counseling friends from all over the country in different lines of work. And the first barrier was: “I don’t know if I deserve this.” And it absolutely was: :Yes, you do.” So if you can’t get a hold of me… if someone contacts me, I’ll either talk to them myself or find someone that they can get in touch with… but you need to have someone who is familiar with the process talk to you about getting accommodations. This is a very technical piece of advice, but often schools and whether you’re an employee or a student, the documentation form will inform the doctor to send the form directly back to the school. I say, “No, we don’t want anything going directly from my doctor’s office to my school or my employer and there’s nothing in the ADA that requires that kind of like fascist cutting out of the person with the disability.” So I say: “Be active in this process. Call the doctor’s assistant. Speak to the doctor directly. Use plain terms. Think about what you need, put it in your own words.” Again, you’re not doing anything nefarious here. You are the expert, you are the person that understands your body and your needs and your school existence or your working existence. And you try and talk to, especially medical professionals, get them to treat you like a peer and with respect and guide the discussion yourself because once it starts feeling a little bit out of control, and you don’t know what the doctor is written in the form, and a doctor might make a mistake, it’s harder to fix that. So from the outset, what I advise people is, let’s talk about what makes sense for you. Let’s get a hold of the person in the doctor’s office that actually fills out these forms. Are they okay with you being specific about what should go in them? No doctor’s office is like, “Oh, no, we’d like to write this from scratch.” No, [LAUGHTER] they like when you help them. But you need to talk to someone about that. With respect to the pandemic, what’s been really difficult… a lot of things move very quickly, at least, let’s say, in the first six months of the pandemic and then in fall of 2020, when we were all trying to figure out, are we going back in person or not. And schools did a real disservice, I think, to students and faculty and staff alike, by setting up these ad hoc systems that didn’t have any of the confidentiality protections that accommodations typically do. What I tell anyone who needs a COVID related accommodation is to call it a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Once you use that phrasing, you’re entitled to quite a few protections that you don’t always get if you just like send back an email form checking, “Oh, I want to work online.” So there have been different ways that schools have tried to not put people into the accommodation trap, because it’s more time intensive, and also it would likely mean that more people get to work or learn online. So to summarize: [LAUGHTER] talk to someone that’s been through it that knows, that can guide you through it, don’t hesitate to recognize that something like asthma is considered a disability because it makes you high risk for COVID. You’re entitled to the ADA protection, and then definitely ask for an ADA-based reasonable accommodation as opposed to any other phrasing that the school comes up with itself. That’s as close to legal advice, I think, as I’ll give.

John: Higher ed institutions have varied quite a bit in terms of addressing those issues. Some are very receptive and have given faculty the freedom to teach the modality that is most appropriate, and others have been much more rigid and have been much more likely to reject all such requests across the board, which has created a lot of challenges for faculty.

Kat: Absolutely.

John: More generally, though, higher ed institutions have, for several years now, been increasing their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, but in those they often leave out issues associated with disability. What are some of the top things that institutions of higher ed can do to be more inclusive for people with disabilities?

Kat: So when we talk about inclusivity, with respect to disability, I would say we’re starting from a different place than some other discussions. And what I mean is, many institutes of higher ed are not legally compliant with the ADA. So the first step, I would say, is an immediate physical audit of all of our physical spaces. There’s an amazing TikToker are called Mya. She’s a student at UMass Amherst, she uses a wheelchair, and she has been going around the entire campus, explaining what buildings she can’t get into, the lack of push buttons, there’ll be an accessible doorway, and then she’ll find herself at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Again, it shouldn’t take someone who uses a wheelchair and enrolls as a student to find those things out. It’s not that expensive to do this kind of physical audit, I think everyone really needs to do it. I work now at Southern which is an HBCU that is progressive in many amazing ways. Before this, I worked at the University of Idaho and found myself with a serious leg break and in a wheelchair for about four months, and discovered, by way of being in a wheelchair, that the building wasn’t accessible. I couldn’t use my office, I couldn’t get into the classrooms. I couldn’t reach the soap in the bathrooms. And that’s, in fact, partially why I became an expert in disability law, I didn’t set out to be it, I had to become that person. I had a couple of friends on the faculty who advocated for me personally, but it was humiliating, and nothing changed, even though I would bring it up every single semester. And they were fairly easy things like get a push button outside of these doors. Part of the reason I left was my fear that a student who used a wheelchair would get there and there’d be no way to make that space accessible to them. So an immediate physical audit. I would also do an immediate review of your institution’s accommodations paperwork. Can you bring it down to fewer pages? Can you cut out the documentation? Is there a way to accept prior documentation and make it straightforward? Some of the things we talked about… putting certain accommodations in place at the moment they’re asked for rather than when the full accommodations are approved. An example is something like note takers. When a student asks for note takers, very rarely is that request denied. So why not just from the first date always have a note taker in a class? Fine. if the accommodation actually gets rejected? Oh no, we’ve given the student notes for four weeks, what will we ever do? Our entire institution now is lacking in integrity. No, we’re fine, right? [LAUGHTER] It just doesn’t matter that much. And then, as I mentioned before, we need to have these conversations assuming people with disabilities are in the room. They have to be less patronizing, right? There’s a lot of like condescension involved in talking about people with disabilities. I think after all of that is done, then we can kind of talk about beyond legal compliance. What does it mean to be welcoming and inclusive? As a person with disabilities who in academic spaces still struggles to like, move, I’m not yet ready to talk about being welcomed. In fact, what I say to people is like, you can be mean to me, as long as I can reach the soap in the bathroom, I’m at peace with that. [LAUGHTER] So we need to have those conversations first, then you can throw me a pizza party.

Rebecca: I think also, in addition to probably those physical spaces, we should be doing some virtual audits as well. And making sure those spaces are accessible for a wide range of other disabilities who would benefit from making sure those materials are also reachable.

Kat: And anytime you can put the onus on someone who isn’t a person with disabilities to double check that things are working, that’s such a relief. And so sometimes that means double checking, if you have note takers, did the notes look good? Are they a mess? When I was a student, I received notes. I asked that my note taker have the same GPA range as me? [LAUGHTER] Yeah, no, I did say, “You know, there’s some stuff that’s missing. Is anyone reviewing them?” “Oh, no, we don’t have time for that.” Okay, so are we going through the motions or are we doing something that’s meaningful? A lot about that was getting feedback from students. I have seen student activism at law schools. When student groups for people with disabilities and allies are formed, they can do so much more than I can do as a faculty member. So to the extent you don’t have a disabled students group on campus, and you want to be an ally, I would think about how to get one started, because just the presence of that group is so meaningful. And in my days of activism, at least when I was like marching in the streets, are long gone. But when I meet these young people, ah, they’re so exciting. And they think of things that I won’t think of because I haven’t been in school for a while. Now. I’m on the other side. So I find listening to student activists very helpful and eye opening.

John: Do you have any other advice that you’d like to pass on to our listeners?
:

Kat: I would say anyone that goes into a position of leadership should be educated, or at least know who to turn to with respect to disability access, and disability inclusion. And so that can mean high level things like making sure that you hire someone with disabilities, they are given all the tools to succeed. It can also mean okay, you’re someone, maybe a student, who plans a conference. Is the conference accessible? Do we have a checklist that makes it easy for people who maybe might need an ASL interpreter, for example? Is all of that there and available? Are we treating disability awareness as a key part of the skill set that you need to be a leader?

Rebecca: I love that advice and something that’s definitely not typical as part of training or just general awareness that we share within our community in higher education. So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Kat: I’ll tell you about my scholarship and then I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about with respect to my disabled community in general. So my next piece within the disability law sphere is looking to the way we force medical encounters on people with disabilities just to get access to benefits, for example, or to get access to accommodations in the workplace. And to the extent that we are a society that believes in medical choice, or we pretend to, or we have respect for bodily integrity, why does that change? Why are we so willing to force medical encounters and sometimes really intrusive medical examinations on people with disabilities? Aside from that, I, as a high-risk person, every day, I am still fighting for my life. I take three immunosuppressants, like a lot of people with autoimmune disease. And so I am tired [LAUGHTER] of asking people to pull their mask above their nose. This happens, for example, in the waiting room of the chemo infusion center. So, there are people sitting amongst cancer patients who have their masks not above their faces. So I think for people with disabilities, the pandemic has been petrifying. And occasionally we feel… occasionally… quite often… we feel abandoned. And when it comes to discussions in higher ed about, “Well, should people be back in person?” …and as soon as the conversation turns to “Well, I just prefer to be in person.” That’s great, but don’t forget our humanity. And again, don’t forget who else is in the room and part of that discussion. And earn a minimum, we should be trying to keep people alive. And then second, we can talk about whether you feel more comfortable delivering your contracts lecture [LAUGHTER] 10 feet away from someone or over Zoom. As I say that very critical statement, I work for a… we call our Deans Chancellors down here… and he starts every meeting with a reminder that our safety is his highest concern. And even though there’s no indoor mask mandate in Louisiana, we have a mandate at my law school. I work in an HBCU, and the African-American community has been hit disproportionately by COVID, and the recognition of what it takes to keep everyone safe is very much on my boss’s mind in a way that I truly appreciate. So it’s not an announced concern for people with disabilities, but it’s sort of like a universal design, right? …safety for all, that has tremendous implications for high-risk people like myself.

Rebecca: What a great perspective to be having when you’re in a leadership role.

Kat: Yeah, absolutely.

John: It’d be nice if that were more widely shared across all institutions.

Rebecca: Thank you so much for the wide variety of information that you’ve shared with us today and advice and some ideas about ways to continue to support our community.

John: Thank you.

Kat: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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