8 Accessibility, Your Course, and You

PWR Accessibility Statement

July 2021

The Program in Writing and Rhetoric is committed to accessibility across instructor, student, and administrator experiences. This commitment begins with recognizing that all of us have bodies and minds with various needs and preferences that matter to how we navigate the various physical and virtual environments in which we teach and learn together. Our social identities and identifications also shape how we move together and thus influence how and whether spaces are accessible. Thus, this statement works in concert with the Statement on Antiracist Writing Pedagogy and Program Praxis in asserting that classroom and pedagogical accessibility also means considering the ways that BIPOC people, LGBTQIAA+ people, disabled people, and multiply marginalized people are affirmed and supported in being fully present within a space.

Administrators, instructors and students who compose materials for PWR courses should, from the outset, maintain accessibility principles, including those forwarded by the Disability Resources for Students (DRS) office for making online course materials accessible. In addition to these guidelines, we also seek to explore the accessibility of physical classroom spaces as well as of the materials and interactions we use to support instruction and instructor/student learning.

Finally, accessibility is not just about transforming spaces and materials, it is about developing new ways to move and recognizing possibilities for enabling different kinds of presence. In “Universal Design: Places to Start,” Jay Dolmage offers a long checklist of possible ways to move. We commit to experiment and engage with these possibilities to support all members of the program.

Crafting your own accessibility language

PWR does not have a specific accessibility statement you must include, but you must have a disability/accessibility statement in your syllabus. Disability Resources for Students (DRS) offers this statement as a starting point, and you may use it directly or customize it for your syllabus tone and presentation. Recent writing studies research shows that students attend carefully to syllabi as a starting point for ascertaining an instructor’s readiness to support accommodations or access needs that they have for their learning.

Below is an access statement created by Mimi Khúc, who shared the language she drafted for her syllabi on social media:

for my colleagues finishing up their syllabi right now, might I offer up an example of access/accommodations language to help you move towards more accessibility? I have two paragraphs in different parts of my current syllabus:

“Everyone’s access needs matter, and we will try collectively to meet them as they arise. Access needs are needs that when met enable participation in the course to the fullest–therefore they are wide-ranging and can be met in wide-ranging, creative ways. I am committed to making participation as accessible as possible. Please let me know if anything comes up that makes participation feel hard. Perhaps you are unused to thinking about access needs–no worries, that’s what this course is supposed to help you develop. We are taught not to have needs, that needs mean we are “weak”; resist this impulse. That is the biggest lesson I want you to take away from this class.”

“Access, as Aimi Hamraie has taught me, is relational. This means that creating access and accessibility is something we do together, in relationship and community. It requires a shared commitment to each other’s wellbeing and participation in the community space, and requires communication and negotiation and flexibility. We learn each other’s needs and try to meet them as best we can, so that we can all participate as much as possible in this classroom space. Everyone has access needs, and these needs change over time. I will try to anticipate as much as possible but I cannot know everyone’s needs at all times. When you become aware of your access needs, please communicate them to me. I do not require any documentation or working with any university support services–I believe you, and will work with you to generate structures to meet your needs as much as possible. I repeat: I believe you.”

feel free to crib with attribution!

Consider crafting an Instructor Accommodations Statement

MiSun (Bishop) Garrison published “Journaling as a Tool for Self-Care and Identity Formation: My Epilepsy Notebook” in a special issue of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics on the topic of carework and writing during COVID-19. In the piece, she shares a powerful self-care resource that she developed: an instructor accommodations statement that she includes in her syllabus.

Instructor Accommodations Statement

As a person with occipital epilepsy, I have requested accommodations through my department, and appreciate your understanding. I will mostly sit during class to minimize potential injury. I may experience a “petit mal” seizure where I might seem inattentive, confuse words, or see visual disturbances. I am somewhat aware during these episodes, so I will raise my hand to ask for a “pause”. I also have an emergency medication that can help prevent a full-blown seizure; please be assured that I am not taking a recreational or illicit substance. The medicine however will make me a bit tired.

Although I’m taking preventative measures, I would appreciate your assistance in the event of a “grand mal” seizure. I ask you:

• • Have no fear. It can be a jarring event to witness, but my episodes are infrequent and pass quickly
  • Kindly move me away from any obstructions
  • Please do not film the seizure; no visual record nor sharing is necessary
  • Please do not restrain my movements nor put anything in my mouth (despite the widespread belief that this helps)
  • Please text my partner [name] at [number] to alert him of the situation. He is a firefighter and very nice.

Developing an instructor accommodation statement can be an important resource–and you can do it whether you put it directly on your syllabus or simply write one for yourself. MiSun’s statement emphasizes what she may need from her students and her classroom community if she has a seizure during class. There are many other ways that you might imagine repurposing this idea for yourself–perhaps you’ll write one to model for your students that all of us have needs and those needs affect the ways that we participate in community with others. Perhaps you’ll write one for yourself, to remind you of the things that you need and are going to build/prioritize for yourself so that you can be at your best in the classroom.

Too often we talk about accommodations as things that students need, or that we provide for others. But we also need to turn that lens toward ourselves, to think about what it is that we need and which we can perhaps self-accommodate (given the ways that we as teachers have lots of choices about how to design and shape how a classroom is set up and/or how to pace and scaffold activities and events during a class session).

An instructor accommodations statement can also be a space for you to think about when you might need different kinds of community and/or resources as you launch a new quarter. The beginning of the quarter is a good time to intentionally put as many of those things in place before things pick up speed and you’re well in the middle of the hecticness and busyness of a typical quarter.