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.

Designing assignments

What is an effective writing assignment?

Stephanie Kerschbaum / Created for 2022 131 Orientation

Thanks to Sumyat Thu (UW PhD 2020) and Amy Vidali (UW PhD 2006) for generously sharing materials that I have drawn from in creating this handout.

Writing assignments are an important pedagogical genre. They provide students with an exigence for composing in your course, and they work in concert with your overall course design, antiracist and accessible praxis, and instructor positionality to support students in working toward the course outcomes.

In your syllabus, you should include a description of your two major assignment sequences including short assignments. The description can be brief (a sentence or two for each SA and MP), but students should be able to get a sense of what they will be writing over the course of the quarter when they engage with your syllabus. (Note: for your first quarter, you will likely only have your first Assignment Sequence described; but when teaching this course for the second and/or third time in Winter and Spring, you should have all of your assignment sequences described in your syllabus.)

Essential elements of an assignment prompt

• Purpose/Learning Goals/Connection to Outcomes: What do you want students to know? What do you want students to be able to do? How will students demonstrate course outcomes through this assignment? Why this assignment? What are the stakes?
• Connection to Overall Course Design: In what ways does this assignment connect to or build on other work students are doing in your course? How is this assignment part of your overall course sequencing?
• Attention to Process / Parameters: What steps will students follow as they complete this assignment? What boundaries and/or space for creativity does the assignment offer for students? How will the assignment help you to learn from your students how they are engaging and demonstrating the course outcomes?
• Prior Knowledge and Skills: How will students mobilize prior knowledges? What skills do they need in order to do this assignment? Which of those skills will you emphasize through direct instruction, class activities, and/or writing practice? How will doing the assignment support students in growing/developing these skills or practices?
• Assessment: In what ways will successful completion of the assignment demonstrate the course learning goals? How will this assignment give students practice in understanding, translating, and engaging the course outcomes? Where and how will you give students feedback in the process of completing this assignment?

Some nuts and bolts

Navigating cultural differences while designing and introducing assignments

Anselma Prihandita, 2023-24 PWR Multilingual Coordinator

Students who take PWR courses come from all sorts of backgrounds. A significant number of PWR students are international students who might not be familiar with the American education system. This lack of familiarity can be a barrier when they encounter reading materials that are considered “canon” within that education system, or they may not understand the historical contexts and cultural references that might be necessary for them to satisfactorily complete the assignment—or even what is expected in the assignment. This document, therefore, offers some guidelines to help you consider cultural and contextual differences while designing your assignments, writing your assignment prompts, and introducing the assignments.

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Do not take anything for granted

Some concepts might seem obvious to you and need no further explanation, but at the same time be completely new to people who did not grow up in the United States, or they may pose interesting (and/or confusing) differences when interpreted from another context. Because of this, it is always worth questioning how exactly you are hoping your students to interpret a concept, topic, or word.

This might mean taking a pause to consider whether every single student in your class will have the same interpretation and full understanding of those concepts, topics, and words. Some students who come from outside the US, for example, might not be aware of the weightiness of “race” within US discourses, or may not be as familiar with racial categories often used in the US. In turn, they may be more or differently sensitive to other markers of (racial) differences than what are commonly in operation in the US (e.g., religion and language instead of skin color). They might not know who or what Jim Crow is, or that James Baldwin wrote his essay “If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (which is commonly taught in many PWR courses) in the 1970s and not the last decade. Terms like “identity” and “popular culture” might be slippery to them because the salient markers of identity to them might be different than what you have in mind, and what’s popular in their countries might be entirely different from what’s popular here.

The goal of identifying these concepts is not to avoid using them, but rather, to recognize where you might need to be prepared to provide some context for your students. This is generally useful across all of your students, and should not be aimed solely at particular groups. You might consider having the class collaboratively look up and offer definitions for concepts, perhaps working in pairs or small groups to look things up on Wikipedia or to share and build understandings among one another and with the class as a whole.

Consider the extra labor it might take to digest course texts

Students who come from another country or culture often have to perform extra labor to understand the texts (broadly defined) that you assign. They might have to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to understand a historical or cultural reference; they might struggle with some figures of speech; they might not get the jokes or satires offered in your text because they’re not already familiar with the context in which they are embedded (or they have a very different sense of humor). Texts that you think of as fun or easy to digest might be challenging or even inaccessible to them (not everyone follows the Marvel movies, has a Netflix subscription, or can access or easily navigate all the social media platforms you’re familiar with). Some might take twice as long to read an article because they have to look up a lot of words, or prefer to translate the text entirely into their own language first, or have to reread the same sentence three times because they keep doubting their comprehension.

Unfortunately, the intellectual labor mentioned above often goes unnoticed by instructors, as often our way of assessing whether someone has done the readings or not is only through reading response posts or classroom discussions (which are another kind of labor). How you deal with this is up to you and your pedagogical design/approach, but at the very least, we encourage you to please take into account the possibility of this extra labor and check in with your students often, especially those who might be too shy to tell you they need extra time and help to complete the readings.

Consider the specific protocols needed to read and understand the genre you assign

Like differences in language and cultural/historical contexts, differences in genre also shouldn’t be taken for granted. Each genre needs its own reading strategies to be understood, and it is always worth taking some time to explicitly teach these strategies, in case some students in your class aren’t already familiar with the genre. Some students might have never read (English) poetry, for example, and thus have no idea how to parse the line breaks. Some students might not already know strategies to skim or scan the 50-page academic reading you assign, or how to understand the academic jargons used there.

Here is one resource you might consider adapting or using in your courses–it is a slide show I’ve used in my own courses to model this process and support students in connecting with the work that goes into reading.

Consider including an explicit examination of the cultural and historical context of your topic, if relevant, as part of your assignment scaffolding

Because of the often-invisible labor described above, consider making discussions around cultural and historical context an explicit and regular part of your course conversations. Before you formally assign a reading, for example, you can hold a classroom discussion about some concepts that appear in the readings, keeping in mind and/or asking students to help the class understand how these concepts might (or might not) transfer across languages and cultures. You might also preface course readings with quickly digestible videos or companion texts that provide extra context; give guidance for reading or writing in a certain genre; or invite your students for an office hour session with you to further discuss some of this background and embedded cultural knowledge. For example, you may assign a short video on James Baldwin along with his essay “If Black English Isn’t A Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?”.

It may also be valuable to teach such navigation of cultural/historical/linguistic differences in other directions as well: Assign texts that do not originate from the US. Use examples from popular culture/media that aren’t American. Invite your international students to bring their own texts—in whatever language—to be discussed in their assignments, if they want to do so.

Use plain language in your assignment prompts

I believe that prompts should be as transparent and accessible as possible. The audience of your prompts are your students, many of whom are first-year students, some of whom have not even been using academic English daily until now. Limit the number of academic jargon or specialized terms only to the key concepts you want your students to use in their writings—ideally, these should be limited and targeted (which will also help your scaffolding, outcomes-targeting, and assessment).

When you do use academic jargon, we recommend the following:

• Make sure you have discussed their definitions in class (see the previous points) and/or include notes on where students can find those definitions
• Use sentence constructions that are as denotative and straightforward as possible, to avoid misunderstandings.

I want to be clear that using plain language is excellent pedagogical practice; it does not mean “dumbing down” your language; it means making it as specific and easy to follow as possible. Your students will not be able to produce clear writings if they’re not clear on what is being asked of them. You might find it useful to engage with this article on using cognitively accessible language, or this website on Accessible Academia which details some strategies and approaches to plain language in academia.

Take a moment in class to discuss your prompts

As much as you can please also take the time to discuss the prompts in class and give your students the chance to ask questions, whether during the discussion, after the class, or outside the class via emails or Zoom (as some students might be too shy to admit they need help understanding the prompts). This can be an important opportunity to check for cultural/historical contexts, language-related confusions, and genre-related expectations (see the points above). It is also a good opportunity for you to recap the concepts or skills you want them to practice in the assignment.

In addition to holding a discussion or verbal explanation of the prompts, you can try a range of strategies for checking whether your students have understood the prompts fully or not. Consider asking students to pair up to identify questions they might have about the prompt; to discuss the prompt together and come up with ideas for their writings (it can be especially beneficial if they can pair up with another student with the same linguistic or cultural background), or to have students come up with an outline first before drafting, so that you can intervene early if there are misunderstandings or difficulties.

Use the writer’s memo to give students an opportunity to make visible the full range of labor that they are performing

It’s hard to stress how important it is to understand the full range of work students are doing, as described in the points above in relation to course texts and understanding assignment prompts. Students are also often performing a wide range of different kinds of labor around the actual writing of the assignments. You can explicitly invite students to talk about this kind of labor in their writer’s memo, both so that you can appreciate what they’re doing (and help them) and to give them a space for metacognition around this.

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The above are only some suggestions to help you think through cultural differences in your classrooms and how to support your students in navigating those differences. In your teaching, you may find other problems that have not been addressed here, or find that some of the things mentioned above do not apply to your students. There is no one-size-fits-all pedagogy for this; every student will have their own strengths, weaknesses, and experiences, and every instructor will have different expertise that can help them address emergent problems in a way that fits their teaching philosophy, personality, and positionality. We encourage you to check in frequently with your students, especially individually, to see if there is any way you can better support them.