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The Disclosure Question: A Matrix for Decision-Making 

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The Disclosure Question: A Matrix for Decision-Making 

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By Barbara Roberts

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HOW TO ENSURE ACCESSIBILITY FOR EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS

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HOW TO ENSURE ACCESSIBILITY FOR EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS

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Center for Teaching and Learning | Learning House Inc.

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Creating videos for online education can be an excellent way to reach and engage your students while building instructor presence. However, because videos are fundamentally audiovisual in nature, including them in your course can create accessibility challenges for some of your students, which could then lead to legal problems at your institution. Addressing accessibility after a course has already launched can require a great deal of time and expense, so in this article, we'll address what the law says about educational videos and how you can be proactive in ensuring your course is accessible to all students.

Laws and Standards

The primary law that pertains to educational materials is section 504 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act. Although first written to help support persons with disabilities who wanted to find engaging and rewarding work, it's also been applied to higher education, both online and face-to-face. At its core, section 504 prevents discrimination based on disability (defining it as a civil protection), and also addresses the requirements for "reasonable accommodation," which is described as modifications or adjustments that eliminate or minimize disability-related barriers.

Although section 504 may have a stronger impact on residential institutions of higher education (insofar as they may be required to renovate buildings or purchase equipment), it does also apply to online education, since it outlines a requirement to consider what a "reasonable accommodation" is for a student with a disability. The main drive of the law is ensuring equivalent access to educational content for all students. Case law has demonstrated that the courts care little about the cost or time involved in providing these accommodations. In other words, individuals and institutions can't assume they can defend themselves from alleged violations of section 504 by claiming that the cost or time required is too steep.

The U.S. Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) are vague regarding the accessibility requirements for electronically delivered instructional materials. The law doesn't specify what organizations must do, but rather focuses more broadly on equivalent access. This is largely due to the fact that these laws were written prior to the vast expansion of the Internet.

In the absence of specific language articulating what may be required for, say, a video or a website to be accessible, the courts have instead relied on Web Content Accessibility Standards (WCAG), a set of definitive guidelines written by a private group of experts known as the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines have formed the standards that organizations must adhere to for their content to be considered accessible.

Without going into too much detail (and there is quite a bit of nuance), the W3C rates their guidelines as falling under one of three categories: A, AA, or AAA. "A" is the bare minimum of conformance to WCAG guidelines, and "AAA" is the maximum conformance (World Wide Web Consortium, n.d.). Institutions of higher education are generally held to the "AA" standard, based on case law.

With that in mind, below are the "AA" WCAG standards relevant to audiovisual multimedia (World Wide Web Consortium, 2018):

Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1.2: Time-Based Media (AA Standard)

Captions must be included.

An audio description track must be available.

Let's dive into what these requirements actually mean.

Captions

The first standard is the more straightforward of the two. For each video that you produce for your course, you must include captions. Captions refer to onscreen text that's timed with the video and that articulates what's being said as well as any sounds that occur. Caption files are essentially specially formatted text files that include timecodes associated with particular lines of text. When added to videos uploaded to most video players, they display the various pieces of text onscreen during the established timecodes. Think of them as timed transcriptions.

Note that there's a difference between subtitles and captions. Subtitles assume that viewers can hear and just want the spoken text visible. Subtitles are typically used to translate foreign languages. Captions, on the other hand, assume that viewers are deaf or hard of hearing, and include all auditory information from the video, such as background noises, identification of different speakers, and even coughs and throat-clearing.

How to Create Captions

There are several options for generating captions.

Hire a Captioning Service

The first and perhaps easiest method is to hire professional transcriptionists to generate captions for your video. This service typically costs between $1 and $2 per minute of media, and provided your video isn't long and the content isn't complex, transcripts usually takes between 24 and 48 hours to produce. Most services claim to have 99% accuracy, but it's always useful to glance through them to make sure they're accurate enough for your tastes. Some examples of online businesses that provide captioning services include Rev, Cielo24, and 3PlayMedia.

Convert Your Script Into Captions

If you've written a script, you can turn that script into captions using YouTube. ( Click here to download a guide on how to do this.) YouTube has advanced audio analysis algorithms that can auto-generate captions, but these are only, on average, about 70% accurate and don't include punctuation. However, YouTube also allows users to leverage those same algorithms to upload a transcript to an existing video so YouTube can generate the captions. All it requires is a (free) Google account and a text-based transcript of what's said in the video.

Create a Transcript

If you didn't use a script and aren't able to hire a captioning service, you can generate your own caption file. Generally speaking, this is a difficult and time-consuming approach because you have to understand the appropriate amount of text to display onscreen at any given time and also generate several time stamps to ensure the captions display correctly.

For this reason, the best approach for instructors who want to create their own captions is to instead focus on creating a transcription: a text-based record of all dialogue and sounds. It's essentially like reverse-engineering your script. Just be sure to include any sounds that occur as well, ideally within brackets (for example, "This week we'll be talking about [clears throat] performance art"). Then you can follow the instructions on using YouTube to create a caption file.

Unless you're an incredibly fast typist, you'll probably want to find a way to slow down the video as you transcribe it because average talking speeds generally exceed average typing speeds. While several video players do this, VLC is a free, open-source video player that allows users to control the speed at which the video plays, and can play a wide variety of video file types.

Audio Descriptions

The trickier WCAG standard requires that audio descriptions be included in all educational videos. An audio description is an audio track added to a video that includes narration that addresses visual information not implicit from the original narration or soundtrack (Babb, Besong, Brooks, Dreibelbis, & Pyatt, n.d.). Audio descriptions allow people with visual disabilities to fully understand both the audio and visual content in a video.

For example, if a chemistry instructor performs a video demonstration of how certain chemicals interact, students with vision impairments will likely miss visual details such as how gently he mixes the chemicals, the reaction that occurs, the colors of the solutions, and so on. An audio description would provide the information that this student needs to fully understand the content of the video.

The video embedded below is an example of a video with an audio track with and without audio descriptions. Note that although this is technically a video, there's no visual content.

Sometimes, pauses between dialogue in a video aren't sufficient to allow a narrator to fully describe the visual content of the scene. In this case, extended audio descriptions may be necessary. These require editing the video to include additional pauses to allow for the insertion of the audio description.

Here's an example of a video that offers extended audio descriptions. Click on "Descriptive Video" to see the video with an extended audio description track.

You may have encountered audio descriptions yourself in entertainment media. The Netflix show Daredevil, for example, features a blind crimefighter, and many visually impaired fans were upset that the show was not fully accessible to them when it was released, insofar as it lacked an audio track that described the relevant visual details. After a petition from Change.org, Netflix agreed to provide an audio description for the show (as well as for many other shows), which they describe on their blog as a "a narration track that describes what is happening on-screen, including physical actions, facial expressions, costumes, settings and scene changes" (Kenneally, 2015). The narration generally leverages gaps in dialogue to narrate relevant onscreen visual information.

Given their non-theatrical nature, however, audio descriptions for educational videos are generally more straightforward. Even so, the work involved in creating narration for demonstration videos is considerable ex post facto, requiring instructors or their institutions to create an entirely separate audio track timed with the original video. And while third-party caption services generally cost on average between $1 and $2 per minute of video, audio description services can cost between 5 and 10 times as much!

How to Create an Audio Description Track

There are two main paths to creating audio description tracks: hire a service or generate them yourself.

Hire an Audio Description Service

As with captions, hiring a professional to produce an audio description is the easiest approach, though obviously a potentially expensive one. Although not all transcription services also provide audio description services, there are plenty of online businesses that provide this paid service, such as CaptionEasy, 3PlayMedia, and Video Caption Corporation. You might be able to mitigate some cost by hiring services that use text-to-speech voices (think Stephen Hawking's computer voice) because they don't have to hire professional voice actors.

Create Your Own Audio Description

Creating your own audio description is no small feat. Not only do you have to create a separate script for your video that describes all relevant visual content, but you also need to try to time the delivery properly so it fits within gaps in existing narration. If no such gaps exist (or if they're insufficient), you'll need to edit the video to create an alternative version that allows for the full extended audio description.

In addition, creating audio descriptions requires relatively sophisticated knowledge of video editing and audio production processes. For example, you have to know how to record separate narration, insert it into a copy of the video, reduce the volume of the background audio (if applicable), and export. You'll also need to create a separate set of captions for this alternative video option.

Strategies to Proactively Address Accessibility

Clearly, abiding by AA WCAG standards presents challenges to instructors. Although captions can be produced fairly easily, creating audio descriptions can be costly and time-consuming. Are there are approaches that can reduce or eliminate the need for an audio description? After all, if your institution is unwilling or unable to pay for captioning or audio descriptions, you, as the instructor, are responsible for ensuring that all students in your course have equal access to the educational content of your course.

With this in mind, it serves instructors to consider WCAG AA standards before they begin filming videos. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, after all. Below are strategies to consider when designing videos for your online courses that will help ensure their accessibility.

Write Scripts

There are two main challenges in writing scripts for educational videos. The first is that instructors who lack of performance experience may come off stiff when reading prepared lines. Extemporaneousness-or at least the perception of it-can add an air of authenticity and expertise to a video.

The second challenge is that reading from a script may not always be possible, depending on the type of video. Consider the example from earlier of a chemistry professor recording herself mixing chemicals. Presumably, this instructor would need to stand a reasonable distance away from the camera and would likely not be in a position to read lines easily (unless, for some reason, she had access to a teleprompter).

The benefits of creating scripts, however, arguably outweigh the challenges. Developing scripts ensures that you won't miss any essential content, and as discussed earlier, they also allow for the easy generation of captions.

Script or Narrate Every Relevant Piece of Visual Information

When writing your script or performing extemporaneously, you must always be aware of the language you use and any relevant visual content that serves the learning goals. Saying things like, "Notice the color change?" or even "Click here" can conceal valuable educational information from students with visual disabilities. Not addressing or fully describing charts and graphs also present problems when it comes to conformance with WCAG AA standards.

Admittedly, this recommendation is overly broad, but intentionally so, in part due to the wide variety of possible approaches to educational videos, such as software demonstrations, tutorials, procedures, tours, dissections, interviews, panel discussions, problem solving, and many others. Although broad, this strategy is also the most important. It's crucial that instructors be mindful of any information that is solely visual in their videos and write their scripts so that the narration makes all visual information explicit. This may make a script feel excessively explanatory, but such an approach is necessary to ensure accessibility.

The overall goal of writing a descriptive script is to describe what students will be seeing. Here are some more specific tips for including the appropriate amount of detail (adapted from Described and Captioned Media Program, 2012):

Describe all the important visual elements that are most important to students' understanding and appreciation of the educational content.

Thoroughly describe any images, graphs, or charts if they're relevant to the educational content.

Articulate the shape, size, texture, or color of visual elements if they're applicable to the educational goals.

If multiple speakers are in the video, ensure that they introduce themselves so their voices are identifiable.

Ensure that your vocabulary is intelligible to a non-sighted person.

If you're doing a screen capture (for example, a software demonstration):

Describe clearly what you're clicking on and where it's located within the application or screen.

Be as specific as possible about locations (for example, saying "the upper left corner of the screen" is better than saying "on the left").

Describe any changes that occur as a result of your actions.

Narrate what you type.

One method that might help keep your scripts accessible is to write them in a simple text editor (such as WordPad or TextEdit) so you don't have the ability to insert imagery of any kind. If you intend to use a PowerPoint presentation (or any other imagery), design those later. Start with the words and ensure that you're being as descriptive as possible. Imagine that you're writing a radio play. If you write your script with explicit references to all visual information, you may avoid the need for an audio description entirely.

Read Your Script Aloud

One good way to spot-check your video for accessibility is to read your enhanced script out loud before filming. Ideally, you can do this with someone present and ask him or her to confirm that the intended visual content of your video is clear. Alternatively, you could watch your finished video without sound while reading the captions and then listen to the video without visuals to ensure that the educational content is clear using either method. The disadvantage of this approach, however, is that if you do spot problems, you'll have to re-record parts or all of your video.

Universal Design for Learning

It's likely some of you are reading this and asking, "Why is it worth going to all this effort in the off chance that a student with a disability will be in my course?" Well, the first answer is obvious. Case law suggests that you might be putting yourself and your institution at risk of litigation if you don't make efforts to make material accessible. This is partly because the ADA and section 504 are affirmative laws, requiring that institutions take proactive rather than reactive measures to make materials accessible.

Potential lawsuits aside, there's an old adage: a rising tide lifts all boats. When you design with accessibility in mind, it's not just the students with disabilities who benefit. For example, some students prefer to watch videos with captions on, to ensure they don't miss anything, or because they know they learn better when they can read text.

The Universal Design for Learning ( UDL) instructional design framework is based on the ethos that all students benefit from an accessibility-focused approach to course design. It expands "accessibility" to focus more broadly on learning preferences rather than merely disabilities.

UDL provides numerous course design guidelines that are based on the notion that effective course design is aimed at the margins-the extremes of learning preferences that may be dictated just as much by students' awareness of how they learn as by disabilities (CAST, n.d.). Although this is admittedly a platitude, UDL guidelines do have a more specific recommendation that pertains to the use of video: Provide alternative representations of instructional material.

Students benefit when they have a choice of how to consume educational content. So if you want to create a video, consider also writing an article or essay that has the same content. Similarly, if you already have a reading assignment, you could create a video as an alternative.

The key is to ensure that what you create is an equivalent alternative; the materials should have the same educational value. Consequently, it's imperative that your alternative representation be accessible as well. For example, if you provide an article as an equivalent alternative to a video, the article too must be accessible to students with disabilities (such as including alt text for all embedded images).

If you're thinking about using video as an equivalent alternative in your course, good targets are modules that contains particularly challenging concepts. If students struggle in a particular part of your course, consider developing videos as equivalent alternatives to existing readings, allowing them to choose the medium that better suits their learning preferences.

Conclusion

Here are some of the main takeaways from this article:

To be accessible, educational videos must contain captions as well as an audio description.

To prepare for captions, write scripts for your videos.

To create captions, either leverage YouTube or use a captioning service.

To preclude the need for audio description, ensure that your script (or your narration) is highly descriptive of any visual information.

Read your script aloud to ensure accessibility.

Designing for accessibility benefits more than just students with disabilities.

Consider including videos as equivalent alternatives to existing instructional materials.

It's important to underscore that not all educational videos require audio descriptions. For example, if you deliver a "talking head" video (a video that contains no other visual content than you speaking), an audio description is not necessary.

Regardless, treating accessibility as an afterthought isn't wise. Not only do you expose yourself and your institution to litigation, but the remedial steps may be costly and time-consuming. By planning ahead a bit before filming your video, you can save yourself a lot of headache and ensure that all of your students will be able to benefit from your efforts.

References

Babb, J., Besong, P., Brooks, M., Dreibelbis, T., & Pyatt, E. J. (n.d.). An introduction to audio description in higher education video content. Retrieved from http://accessibility.psu.edu/video/audiodescription/adwhitepaper/

CAST. (n.d.). Providing UDL resources for colleges and universities. Retrieved from http://www.cast.org/our-work/capacity-building/projects/open-education-resources-higher-education.html#.W-HwJHpKjUI

Described and Captioned Media Program. (2012, January). Description tip sheet. Retrieved from https://dcmp.org/learn/227

Kenneally, T. (2015, April 14). Netflix responds to 'Daredevil' backlash with special audio feature for blind fans. Retrieved from https://www.thewrap.com/netflix-responds-to-daredevil-backlash-with-special-audio-feature-for-blind-fans/

Myers, E. (2018, January 9). Subtitles vs. captions: What's the difference? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.rev.com/blog/subtitles-vs-captions

WGBH Educational Foundation. (2002). Teri and Jairus: Biome buddies [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/tdc02.sci.life.reg.deathvall/teri-and-jairus-biome-buddies/na/

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). (2018, June 5). Guideline 1.2: Time-based media. In A. Kirkpatrick, J. O. O'Connor, A. Campbell, & M. Cooper (Eds.), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#time-based-media

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). (n.d.). Understanding conformance. Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/conformance.html

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How to Ensure Accessibility for Educational Videos - Center for Teaching and Learning | Learning House Inc.

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Creating videos for online education can be an excellent way to reach and engage your students while building instructor presence. However, because videos are fundamentally audiovisual in nature, including them in your course can create accessibility challenges for some of your students, which could then lead to legal problems at your institution.

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How To!

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How to make your teaching more engaging.

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How to make your teaching more engaging.

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Consider a student in an introductory math class - let's call him Alex. Alex had some unpleasant experiences with math in high school. When he got to college, he tested into a math course below the level that would count toward his general-education requirements. He is thus feeling wary about the semester, and resents having to "waste" expensive college credit on a course that he is unlikely to enjoy and that won't get him any closer to his degree.

To have any hope of learning the material, Alex needs to actually involve himself in the course. He needs to direct his attention to the lecture and the problem sets. He must be willing to use his working memory to attempt solutions rather than daydream about his life outside the small windowless room full of equations. He needs to decide the information is important enough to commit to memory and then be motivated to grapple with it later, on his own time, to prepare for the exams.

Alex can do all of that - but he could use your help. As his instructor, you can stimulate his curiosity with an inspiring and energizing presentation style, with activities and assignments that maximize his sense of control over the material, and with expertise that helps him reach just a bit beyond his current abilities.

The psychologist Todd Kashdan writes, "If you want people to be interested, committed, and willing to devote effort to learning, mastering, and using these skills for the long haul, then you can't avoid the initial step of stimulating excitement." In short, if you really want a student like Alex to learn and succeed, something needs to happen first: You need to engage him.

Who Is This Guide for?

Welcome to The Chronicle' s guide on how to make your teaching more engaging. This guide is for anyone who wants to introduce energy or enthusiasm to their classrooms using methods that have been tried - and found true - through research and in classrooms.

Certainly some teachers are naturally compelling and intuitively spark a zest for learning in students. But most of us have to work at it. You can energize your classroom for Alex and every other student by using principles familiar to both emotion scientists and pedagogical experts - principles available to any faculty member willing to investigate and apply them.

Here's what you'll find below:

A brief argument for why academics should care about engagement in the first place, and answers for skeptics who believe that efforts to enliven the college classroom are frivolous and/or doing a disservice to the solemn work of higher education.

An explanation of four key principles of student engagement.

Concrete suggestions on how to actually put each of those principles into practice.

Anecdotal evidence from instructors in a variety of disciplines who have used the principles to teach in creative ways.

First: Why Care About Engaging Students at All?

Let's put an old misunderstanding to rest: "Engagement" is not a synonym for "entertainment."

To care deeply about whether students are actively involved in class and interested in the content does not mean you advocate coddling students or treating the college classroom as a free-for-all fun zone. In fact, anyone who conflates engagement and entertainment is not only mistaken but also quite in conflict with the psychology and neuroscience underlying how human beings learn, which demonstrates that learning requires the motivated application of attention and working memory.

"When educators fail to appreciate the importance of students' emotions, they fail to appreciate a critical force in students' learning," wrote the neuroscientists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio Damasio in the book Emotions, Learning, and the Brain. "One could argue, in fact, that they fail to appreciate the very reason that students learn at all."

Engagement is a necessary first step for learning - which is one reason why efforts to enliven your classroom can't be dismissed as empty entertainment. But beyond that, deep engagement in a course actually requires hard work. "Engagement means setting up challenges for students that are meaningful beyond getting a grade," argues the writer and speaker John Warner, "challenges which encourage risk without unduly punishing failure so they may experience the pleasure of resiliency and be enthused about trying again." It is less work for Alex if he remains unengaged - sitting passively in class not really absorbing the material and only half-heartedly attempting to study.

Engaging Alex using a variety of methods to attract his interest and excitement doesn't mean that you are taking on the work of learning for him, or somehow cheapening your material. Instead, it is an invitation - to take the initiative, to apply effort, to risk the daunting possibility of failure.

It is an open hand.

It is good teaching.

Here's how to do it.

The 4 Principles of Engagement

I have organized some related strategies and research evidence into four core principles that you can use to foster student engagement in your classroom.

Readers will no doubt expect one of the four to be "active learning." This term has been repeated so often in recent years that it has started to lose its meaning. It is pretty much canon now that an engaging classroom is one that incorporates active learning at least some of the time. For that reason, I've threaded active learning throughout each of the four principles rather than having it stand alone.

At its most basic level, active learning means getting your students involved in activities in class rather than just passively listening. Jennifer Gonzalez, editor of the teaching blog Cult of Pedagogy, summed up the concept quite nicely in the title of a blog post: "To Learn, Students Need to DO Something."

It isn't that lectures can't be dynamic and engaging in and of themselves. Some lecturing is always going to be required, especially in fields like the sciences and history. But to engage your students most effectively, you should, wherever possible, try to involve them in their own learning.

Any number of popular techniques will do the job, including:

For instance, Kimberly N. Russell, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, teaches "Evolution of Sex and Gender in Animals." Rather than lecturing on common misunderstandings about sex and gender in nonhuman species, she divides students into groups and asks them to imagine discovering a new alien species. They must sketch out male and female versions of the alien. After collecting the sketches and examining them together, she and her students discuss the assumptions they made about the evolution of sex in creating the sketches. They also talk about why science-fiction authors often assume that alien species will be mammalian in appearance - for example, giving the female versions breasts, even when they are otherwise fishlike or birdlike species. The students participate in both the activity and the resulting discussion enthusiastically, Russell says, demonstrating more energy and engagement than on other days.

The well-established effectiveness of active-learning strategies is why they are threaded throughout the four principles below.

Principle No. 1: Cognitive Resources Are Limited. Emotion Trumps.

What It Means

Decades of psychological science have shown that cognitive resources (like attention and working memory) are sharply limited - you have only so much to go around. If you pay selective attention to a complex game of ball passing, the odds are good that you will miss a man in a gorilla costume walking through the scene and thumping his chest. Your ability to maintain focused concentration has its own strict limits. Working memory can handle only the infamous seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information at a time.

All of these cognitive resources are required for effective learning in a classroom. Cognitive load theory argues that in trying to grasp new material, students face several related demands: intrinsic (understanding the task and how it is presented - e.g., reading and following lab instructions), germane (those involved in the process of learning - e.g., acquiring new knowledge and skills in completing a lab assignment), and extraneous (distractions - e.g., your lab partner cracking jokes while you are trying to focus). To help our students learn, we must direct their limited cognitive resources to the tasks at hand rather than to classroom distractions.

One of the best tools we have to achieve that is emotion. We know that emotions evolved in order to motivate behavior - to tag certain things as important either to approach (e.g., tasty food, attractive mates) or to avoid (e.g. venomous spiders, rotten food). Emotional stimuli draw our attention and are more likely to be remembered, much the way an angry face stands out from a crowd of neutral faces.

Liven your course content by connecting it to the emotional lives of your students and they are more likely to dedicate their cognitive resources to their classwork than to the phone buzzing in their pocket or to their anxieties about a calculus exam that afternoon. Present the material in the context of an arousing controversy. Use a quick demonstration or a brief video clip to hook their emotions. With more cognitive resources on deck, their understanding and future recall should benefit.

How to Do It

Chunk your class up into smaller time periods. Each one could be 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the overall class time). Assign each chunk of time a subtopic and introduce it with an "emotional hook." The educational psychologist Kentina Smith describes emotional hooks as "brief lesson content teasers, relevant activities, stories, songs, provocative questions, headlines, current events, images, demonstrations, videos, or case studies designed to stimulate interest, curiosity, and active interaction with information that can be connected to course concepts." Those hooks should not replace the day's lesson, she says, but rather serve as a trailer of sorts for it, to spark student interest and curiosity.

Choose activities and assignments that are clearly relevant to your students. That doesn't mean you have to be an expert on their personal lives or on contemporary pop culture. You can also make class activities relevant to contemporary social movements, to future careers in your major, or to some transcendent purpose. James Hauri teaches an introductory chemistry class for nonmajors at my home institution, Assumption College, and aims to make the entire course relevant to students' daily lives. All of the labs center around chemicals and materials that students interact with regularly. For instance, they evaluate bottled water versus tap water, test both for pH, conductivity, and taste, and then debate why so many people choose bottled over tap. His nonmajors do the same sorts of labs and practice the same skills learned in a traditional chemistry lab, but their curiosity about the material is aroused because of its direct relevance to their lives. Relevance attracts interest and motivates engagement.

Invite students to solve a mystery of your field. Present a persistent puzzle in your discipline. Mysteries, as the writer Ian Leslie put it, "inspire long-term curiosity by keeping us focused on what we don't know. They keep us 'alive and active' even as we work in the darkness." Presenting unsolved mysteries also sends a message that students could have a hand in creating new knowledge in the world.

Interrupt the routine. Especially once you've hit the groove in your semester where everything is running smoothly and students now can anticipate everything that is going to happen in your classroom, shake things up. Keith Johnstone, an actor and teacher, writes of the power of interrupting routines in his book Impro. All storytelling (more on that in a bit) involves describing a routine and then interrupting it. Two families are at war and hate each other - but their children fall in love. A little girl visits her grandmother - who has been replaced by a wolf. It is the interruption of the routine that arrests our attention. If you find that certain successful strategies prove less effective as the semester progresses, try a dramatic shift in routine.

Make it funny. Course-relevant humor is a good way to liven up the classroom, because in order to understand the joke, you have to process material twice - once to understand the frame of the joke, and then again to understand the sudden reversal that triggers the humor. An entire body of research called the "instructional humor processing theory" supports the value of cracking quips in the classroom to improve student learning. So use your own humor if you are naturally funny. And if you're not, use someone else's humor, via memes and videos that are easily found on the web.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Candy, Candy, Candy

Every October, Heather L. Urry, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, focuses her "Experimental Psychology" course on a topic that is on everyone's mind as Halloween approaches: candy. When discussing research study designs, she has her students evaluate the evidence behind a friend's "Hierarchy of Candy Goodness Model," which organizes types of candy into tiers of deliciousness. Tier 1 has Reese's, Kit Kats, Twix, and Snickers, while way at the bottom on Tier 4 is candy corn and "anything with marzipan."

In a prototypical semester she might have students taste-test Reese's (Tier 1) versus Hershey's (Tier 3) and rate their feelings of enjoyment and gustatory pleasure. Students design a mini-study, collect the data in class, run the statistics, and make conclusions about whether or not their data support the Hierarchy of Candy Goodness. They can also debate theoretical constructs like: Do students' pre-existing biases about candy influence the results? Does knowing the hierarchy ahead of time affect the results?

She has two aims here - to teach students about this type of experimental design and to give them some hands-on practice with it. Her candy activity achieves both. Conveniently for our purposes, it also illustrates an effective use of an emotional hook - students begin immediately debating the merits of the Hierarchy ("How dare they put Almond Joys on Tier 3?") and are eager to find out whether or not their data support the model.

The free chocolate doesn't hurt, either.

Principle No. 2: Your Persona and Performance Matter, Like It or Not

What It Means

In a compelling 2016 profile in The Atlantic, Teller - the silent member of the magic act Penn & Teller - shared his insights on teaching, having taught high-school Latin for six years before turning to a life on the stage. He argued that, before anything else, the job of a teacher is to help students fall in love with the subject matter. "That doesn't have to be done by waving your arms and prancing around the classroom," he said in the interview. "There's all sorts of ways to go at it, but no matter what, you are a symbol of the subject in the students' minds."

Teller's ideas about teaching are consistent with scholarship on several fronts:

Research on "emotional contagion" suggests that emotions and moods are likely to spread among members of a social group. That phenomenon is at work in the college classroom, too. For instance, research indicates that your enthusiasm as an instructor is indeed contagious and helps predict variables like student motivation in the course.

An 8-year longitudinal, qualitative study of undergraduates and alumni at Hamilton College found that students quite often reported choosing their major based on taking introductory courses with particularly dynamic professors.

Research studies on various aspects of pedagogy - on teaching evaluations, on student learning outcomes, and on student "reactance" (defensive, negative reactions to a course that can spread from student to student) - all show that one of the best predictors of good course outcomes is an instructor's use of something called "immediacy cues" - primarily nonverbal social behaviors like eye contact, gestures, varied vocal tone, and movement. Students "read" such cues to decide if you as the instructor are enthusiastic, effective, and in the moment.

You may have a knee-jerk reaction against the idea that college teaching is, in some sense, a performance art. But as an instructor, you are using your words, props, and actions to try to get students involved in and excited about something you are involved in and excited about. The degree of effort and enthusiasm you invest in your presentation will be evident to your students and may, in part, determine how much effort and enthusiasm they will invest in your class.

How to Do It

Observe yourself in action, or get someone else to. People who do any form of public speaking are often advised to record themselves and then watch the video to spot areas for improvement. Try videotaping one of your classes. Do you sway back and forth in a distracting way? Say "um" too frequently? Talk to only one side of the classroom? If the idea of watching yourself teach is a bit too nauseating, you can always ask a colleague to sit in on your class and give you feedback. Many teaching centers or faculty-development programs offer this service. A colleague's evaluation of your videotape might reveal a few behavioral tics that tend to discourage student engagement, and you can work on avoiding them.

Focus on your immediacy cues. A videotape of your teaching might also reveal a lack of behavioral cues that would encourage engagement. It is probably best to work on one at a time so you don't appear distracted or awkward. Focus one week on making more eye contact, another on moving around the room, and another on being sure that you're not lapsing into a monotone. An easy immediacy cue to adopt is to use language that invites students to see the course as a communal effort ("today we are going to ..." versus "today I am going to have you ...").

Watch good communicators in action. In his widely viewed TED talk, "Teach Teachers How to Create Magic," the Columbia University professor Christopher Emdin recommends visiting places where people are already skilled at the art of public performance and audience interaction - like rap concerts and the black church - and taking notes on the techniques people use to enliven their performance and energize the audience.

Take risks, and freshen up your material. In my own teaching, I've seen certain activities that used to reliably induce enthusiasm fall flat over time. I've realized that it's probably because an activity loses its ability to hook student interest as I smooth out all of the rough corners and present it with more polish and less raw enthusiasm. As Kevin Gannon, a historian at Grand View University and director of its teaching center, writes in his Teaching Manifesto: "If I want my students to take risks and not be afraid to fail then I need to take risks and not be afraid to fail." Inject new material. Try new things. Experiment.

Jazz up before class. My go-to, for better or worse, is coffee. A friend of mine ramps up for large lectures with loud heavy-metal music. Some people need to be sure they have a full belly; others work better on an empty tank. Whatever puts you in an energized state, do it before you teach.

Get enough sleep. I am a bit of a sleep evangelist. I won't belabor the point, but to have good energy in any area of your life, I believe you need to be well rested.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Nonlecture-y Lecturer

As part of a recent research project on student learning, I observed some of my colleagues teaching in various disciplines. One such course was "Introduction to Art History," taught by Elissa Chase, a lecturer at my campus. On paper, her lesson plan would look like a straight lecture via PowerPoint for a solid hour, sending a shudder down the spine of diehard advocates for flipped classrooms and active learning.

But in practice, her "lecture" was instead a lively, enthusiastic, energetic tête-à-tête. She began each class with a music video related - often very tangentially - to the day's topic and played loudly over the classroom's speakers. She then invited students to guess its relevance. For instance, one day she played Taylor Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" because they were covering the Reformation. The result: Students started the class curious and thinking ahead to the topic of that day's lecture.

Chase proceeded to conduct the class like a vibrant conversation. She spoke quickly and energetically, in a way that made you sit up and pay close attention in order to keep up. She moved quickly around the lecture hall. She knew all of her students' names and would often query them or make sarcastic quips that set them laughing. They knew they could be roped into the lecture at any moment, and so seemed at attention and eager throughout the class. Time passed quickly, and at the end, I leaned over to one of my research assistants and murmured, "I've never been interested in art - but I really wish I could take this class!" And I meant it.

Teaching with gusto, whatever strategy you use, is key to student engagement.

Principle No. 3: We Are Intensely Social Creatures, Motivated by Community

What It Means

Human beings are not just a social species - we are an ultrasocial species. We crave community and form groups easily. Our ideas, emotions, and theories about how the world works spread as easily as cold viruses in midwinter. Michael Tomasello, a psychology professor at Duke University, believes we are so ultrasocial that even when we're alone in our own head, thinking our own thoughts, our sociality is still stamped all over the moment. "Thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room," he writes. "It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix."

A college course is a group of human beings working together for up to 15 weeks on a mutual enterprise. There, the sharing and influence is explicit, baked into the very structure of the endeavor. Establishing a sense of community in the classroom helps predict whether your students will participate in class discussions, have high or low levels of anxiety, and even have better grades.

It is particularly important to make sure that all of your students feel equally welcome and equally valued in the conversation. Students whose identities and backgrounds vary from those of the rest of the class (in terms of gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability status, social class, etc.) may feel less able to easily join the community, and so it is critical that you plan carefully how to help them feel included.

In How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, Joshua R. Eyler, a historian and director of the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence, provides an extensive review of the research supporting three fundamentals for a social classroom:

A sense of belonging.

A classroom-management philosophy that privileges community building.

An instructor who effectively models intellectual approaches.

How to Do It

Learn their names. You've probably heard that a million times, but it doesn't make it any less true. If it is at all feasible given your class size, learning your students' names is a powerful first step in establishing a warm social climate in the classroom. See some names on your roster that you aren't sure how to pronounce? Consult Google before the first day of class.

Make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute. A variety of techniques can be used to that end:

Mix classwide debates with small-group discussions, since introverted students might feel more comfortable speaking up in a small group of peers.

Don't call on someone too quickly after you've asked a question. Waiting a bit allows those who require more time to gather their thoughts (and courage) to participate.

Question stacking - a practice in which students indicate by some gesture or nod that they have something to contribute and get added to a list that you work through during discussion - can also allow for a greater number and variety of students to participate. While it can be controversial, progressive question stacking, in which the professor prioritizes marginalized voices that traditionally get silenced, can help you establish that diverse voices are valued in your classroom.

Work as a class on a shared project. Rather than asking students to work alone or in a small group, unite the entire class on a major project. In a beautiful example of this, a biology instructor recently replaced his final exam with a class project that developed a children's book on the topic of the course.

Diversify your curriculum and your teaching strategies. Mix up the voices that are included in your course content so that students hear from people with a variety of backgrounds and life histories. Vary your teaching strategies and assessments so that students with different skill sets and different strengths have an opportunity to shine. Rather than offer separate policies for students who need learning accommodations, practice universal design, so that all students have access to policies that benefit students with disabilities. As the prototypical example of universal design goes, having sloped curbs doesn't just help people using movement aids like wheelchairs, but also helps the elderly, parents pushing strollers, etc. The same is true of universal design in the classroom. As an example, you might provide captioning and transcripts for any films or videos you show in class. This practice will benefit not just hearing-impaired students but all students in understanding and taking notes on the material.

Build community in small ways. Instead of a traditional roll call, do a question roll where you take attendance that day by having everyone answer a fun question about their favorite movie or food. Or offer a two-stage exam, in which students complete the test on their own first and then have an opportunity to work together to earn more points. You don't have to wait for the first exam to begin building community, either. As James Lang, a professor of English at Assumption College who writes regularly on teaching for The Chronicle, reflects here, the first day of class is a great time to begin laying the foundation.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: Bonding Over Brains

Many colleges have attempted to ease the transition from high school with the introduction of learning communities for first-year students. The models vary but involve some mix of shared classes, dorms, and extracurricular activities.

As a professor, I was part of a freshman learning community with a colleague, Michele Lemons, who teaches biology at my college. The same group of new students took both my "Introductory Psychology" course and Michele's "Introduction to Biology" course. To demonstrate that true knowledge spans disciplines, we dovetailed our topics at several junctures - talking in both courses about neurons and brains, eating and motivation, the biology of vaccination and the psychology of why some people opt out of life-saving vaccines. Outside of class, we met with our students for occasions that were both social and intellectual - for instance, we all had breakfast together one morning before class while a nutrition expert answered student questions about healthy eating. Michele took the lead on a community-building project in which students worked together to craft a miniature science fair on basic aspects of neuroscience, which they presented to local middle-schoolers during Brain Awareness Week.

It was delightful to get to know these students on a deeper level than I usually do, and to joke with them in settings outside of class. I think it was also valuable for them to see their professors socializing. As these students continued in their studies over the years, and occasionally showed up in some of my more advanced courses, I would always smile when I saw their names on my roster. I like to think they felt the same.

Principle No. 4: Stories Are Our 'Most Natural Form of Thought'

What It Means

You might notice - as the psychologists Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson once did - that some words, with just a handful of syllables, seem to contain entire storylines. Words like "betrayal" and "crucifixion."

Schank and Abelson argued that stories are our "most natural form of thought." A narrative weaves together otherwise isolated bits of information into a meaningful whole, linking them in important ways but also chunking the information so that it takes up less space in working memory and connects to existing threads in long-term memory. The causal relations in stories and the use of reliable narrative structures are also thought to benefit understanding and remembering.

Clearly stories are a way to engage students. The stories you tell in your classroom can be about your own intellectual path, about discoveries in your field, about people who have lived through different historical eras, about patient case histories, or about previous students who went on to succeed. Whatever their type or shape, tell stories.

How To Do It

Share your own stories. Research confirms that, when it's done well, disclosing anecdotes from your own personal history can motivate and inspire your students. As David Gooblar, a lecturer in rhetoric at the University of Iowa and author of the blog Pedagogy Unbound, wrote, "When you talk about yourself to your students, you signal to them that you trust them and see them as worthy confidantes. That, in turn, encourages students to feel more at ease, to open up themselves and commit more fully to the class." Obviously, sharing too much and too often is inappropriate and likely to detract from your credibility, but qualitative research suggests that students appreciate, in particular, hearing stories of their instructors dealing with academic obstacles and overcoming them.

Share your field's stories. Perhaps you teach in a discipline like math, where the subject matter seems very divorced from the idea of personal stories. But every field has its stories of frustration and discovery, of accidental solutions and sudden new insights. So share the stories of how specific scholars or entire fields traveled a path to discovery. In fields like psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and health sciences, considering or attempting to solve case studies of people who have struggled with disease, brain injury, or mental illness can engage, reduce stigma, and spread awareness all at once. You could even elicit the help of advanced students or alumni to come back and tell stories about how their early training benefited them on internships or working in the field.

Create stories in the classroom. Immersion games like the famed Reacting to the Past in history have enviable track records of student engagement, with students volunteering to come in for extra class time. Even if you don't have time for an extensive immersion game, brief role-plays can also energize the class.

Focus on the whole journey. To really maximize the stories you use in class, don't just include a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, include a story that includes both a goal and an obstacle. In his book on science communication, the actor Alan Alda describes how, in giving a talk, he often asks for a volunteer to carry an empty glass across the stage and place it on a table. He then asks the volunteer to fill the same glass to the brim with water and carry it back across the stage. He tells members of the audience that their entire village will die if even a single drop of water is spilled. It's nonsensical - the audience doesn't even live in a village, never mind share one, and who will do the smiting? - yet people are on the edges of their seats watching that second glass. The point here: Students want to be a part of the story; give them a reason, even contrived, to be invested in the outcome.

Your students have relevant stories to tell. Inviting them to share those stories can do double-duty for engagement and inclusion. "Teachers can devise activities for students to share their diverse experiences," writes Dena Simmons, assistant director of education at the Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence. "These could include spoken-word performances, written pieces, podcasts, videos, other multimedia and art projects, or even simply one-on-one lunch conversations with classmates or educators." By inviting your students' stories, you demonstrate your interest in them and their potential for contribution to your class and to your field.

Tips From Someone Who Has Done It: A Story-Centered Course

James Lang, the English professor and Chronicle columnist on teaching, recently structured his entire upper-level British literature seminar around stories. The course covers four major historical time periods, and he began each with a set of true historical narratives that set the tone for the rest of the unit.

For instance, he introduced the unit on the Romantic Period (1789-1832) with two contrasting stories that sharply illustrated the socioeconomic divide that would inform all of the literature they read next. One story was of George IV's lavish ball that included such extravagances as exorbitant amounts of food and champagne and an artificial river complete with bridges and greenery and cavorting fish. The juxtaposing story concerned a 5-year-old boy who worked as a chimney climber. Chimney climbers were small boys sold to chimney sweeps by their parents to climb up inside chimneys to clean them of accumulated soot. In short, they were sold into a painful, dangerous life that often ended in death from cancerous tumors, suffocation, or being trapped in the chimney. One chimney boy was beaten to death by his master while witnesses failed to intervene.

The contrasting lavishness and penury, excess and grime, frivolity and tragedy provide a frame for all of the works that the students will encounter for the rest of the unit, and help set the historical stage. The emotions and moral imperative suggested by the stories are also likely to light a motivational fire under the students, create an itch to address the problem - even if just by reading and writing about it.

The 4 Principles in Practice

I received my Ph.D. in psychology in 2007, but I became a psychologist over a decade earlier, as a teenager in Cheryl LePain's Advanced Placement class in psychology. At the time all I knew was that her course was highly engaging and deeply motivating. But reflecting on the experience now, I see that she practiced all four of the principles outlined in this guide:

Emotions: She engaged our emotions with one part intimidation (horror stories about the difficulty of the AP test) and one part inspiration (how much psychologists had unlocked about the human mind, how much remained to unravel).

Performance: She was a charismatic and passionate lecturer, who put a lot of thought into her classroom performance, and who frequently employed humor.

Community: With only eight students, LePain had us pull our desks into a semi-circle around hers - all the better for developing a community atmosphere for considering high-minded subjects. She also had us meet after school for fun study sessions.

Stories: And she enthusiastically told stories about prison experiments and dream theories, and invited us to see the material through her own lens of sophisticated understanding.

Most of us aced the AP test. More important, we learned deeply. In college, I would have to get to at least the three-quarters mark of any upper-level psychology course to hit material that I hadn't already mastered at LePain's feet. Several of us formed deep friendships that would endure both the passage of decades and our scattering across the globe. A few of us, myself included, found a vocation.

Cheryl LePain's teaching may have been informed more by intuitive artistry than intentional design, but anyone can learn and apply some of the principles that informed her teaching - the same principles that informed this guide.

Helpful Resources

Plenty of polling websites are available to help you ask "clicker" style questions in class or set up discussions.

Use concept-mapping software to illustrate connections among ideas or pieces of information.

My favorite screen-capture software, for capturing internet videos or creating "flipped" lectures, is Shiny White Box.

Try attending a conference on Reacting to the Past to understand immersion game tools.

You can find all sorts of classroom materials - discussion activities, icebreakers, and the like - on the Cult of Pedagogy website.

The podcast Teaching in Higher Ed, led by the warm and wonderful Bonni Stachowiak, provides accessible, fun advice from some of the best thinkers in higher education.

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is an associate professor of psychology and associate director for grants and research in the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. She is the author of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotionand the forthcoming HIVEMIND: Thinking Alike in a Divided World. You can find her on Twitter @SaRoseCav.

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Consider a student in an introductory math class - let's call him Alex. Alex had some unpleasant experiences with math in high school. When he got to college, he tested into a math course below the level that would count toward his general-education requirements.

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Alternative Course Evaluation to that of Traditional 
 Testing and Examination 

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Alternative Course Evaluation to that of Traditional 
 Testing and Examination 

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Alternatives to Traditional Testing and Assessments

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This Resource Guide provides lists of accommodations, learning strategies, and assistive technology as well as suggestions for Universal Design for Instruction

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ALBERTA GUIDELINES FOR ACCOMMODATING STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES IN POSTS...

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Planning accessible events, meetings & conferences (click on the checklist)

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Here you will find everything you need to know about planning and hosting an accessible and inclusive event.

NEWSLETTER

Stay up-to-date on the latest accessibility-related information, resources, events, announcements and more.

Council of Ontario Universities
180 Dundas St West, Suite 1800, Toronto, ON M5G 1Z8
Contact COU * 416.979.2165

Copyright 2018 Council of Ontario Universities. All Rights Reserved.

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Accessible Event & Conference Planning - Accessible Campus

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Here you will find everything you need to know about planning and hosting an accessible and inclusive event. Stay up-to-date on the latest accessibility-related information, resources, events, announcements and more. Council of Ontario Universities 180 Dundas St West, Suite 1800, Toronto, ON M5G 1Z8 Contact COU * 416.979.2165 Copyright 2018 Council of Ontario Universities.

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List defining ways of doing/not doing access. "Access is a Human Right and the Right Thing to Do."

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List defining ways of doing/not doing access. "Access is a Human Right and the Right Thing to Do."

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Poster

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Key text: "Be an Ally. Learn. Eliminate ableism."

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Key text: "Be an Ally. Learn. Eliminate ableism."

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Poster

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Poster

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What is Universal Design of Instruction?

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What is Universal Design of Instruction?

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CAST

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Universal Instructional Design (UID) is a very similar to UDL in that it is a set of principles aimed at creating more inclusive and accessible learning environments. UID is based on seven principles.

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Some ideas for how faculty can accommodate timed pop quizzes IN CLASS.

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Some ideas for how faculty can accommodate timed pop quizzes IN CLASS.

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Contact Accessibility Services for other ideas

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Pop quizzes can be a valuable teaching/learning tool in postsecondary education, but they often put many otherwise qualified students with learning disabilities, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, traumatic brain injury -and sometimes psychiatric disorders- at an extreme disadvantage.

These students frequently qualify for the accommodation of extended time on examinations, tests and quizzes, typically one and one-half to double time. Here is the accommodation dilemma: Five-minute pop quizzes during class then necessitate a time extension of 2 1/2 to 5 minutes more for the student with the disability, and leave the professor and the rest of the students waiting. Even more problematical, the student with the disability is clearly identified as same, calling undue attention to the disability and also putting this same student under extraordinary stress. Having the student finish the pop quiz in the professor's office is not always possible because of class schedules.

Pop quizzes are simply not "accessible" and fair to all students. There are other ways to obtain the information needed from the students, such as:

(1) Did students read and comprehend the assignment?

(2) Is the student keeping up with daily reading assignments?

(3) How well are students internalizing the readings?

(4) Do I need to reiterate salient points and provide more examples? and

(5) Can the student apply the principles to practical application situations?

I taught classes that met once a week, in the evening, for three hours. When a class meets only 16 times during the semester, it is necessary to track student progress weekly. Here are some things I did in graduate-level, special education theory and methods classes for teacher training in the School ofEducation at the University of Colorado to accommodate students:

Put pop quiz-type questions on the course or department Web site or on a class e-mail list at a certain time, to be e-mailed back or turned in (hard copy) by the next class time;

Present these types of questions as a hand-out at the end of class to be turned in at the beginning of the next class;

Put all pop quiz-type questions on the syllabus reading list, following each assigned reading (this allows students' reading to be more directed); vary the response mode requirement each week to be posted on a special Web site,e-mailed to the professor, or handed in at the beginning of the next class.

Vary how this pop quiz-information is obtained from students so it does not becomeboring and mundane:

Do an all-class pop quiz on the overhead one day. Each class member is asked/ expected to add to the discussion (best for classes with less than 15 students) and then discuss the answers with the entire class. Such a technique has proven to be a good learning experience for everyone, in that students whose cognitive abilities are different are allowed the opportunity to observe how their peers think, problem solve and internalize course elements. This also allows the professor to observe how students absorb course material and display knowledge in different ways.

A short take-home pop quiz, due at the beginning of the next class is another option. The professor can put the question on a standard-sized sheet of paper and specify that the answer should not take up more than half the page. (All students typically ask how "long" the answer should be!)

Occasionally the professor could assign an in-class, small-group question and have students derive the answer with one student from each group reporting the collective answer. Depending on the size of the class and the amount of material to be covered, the professor might assign each small group a different question, asking that the answers be turned in at the end of class so the professor can put them on a Web site, in an e-mail memo or put them on the word processor as a hand-out for the next class meeting. For such an exercise, the professor can allow about 15 minutes (of a three-hour class period) for their discussion and answer. Then another 15 minutes can be allowed for reporting to the class and clarifying any misunderstandings.

The professor might ask students to devise a pop quiz-question that they think is relevant to the assigned readings and ask to have it answered (This surprises them!). And one thing that can be learned from this exercise is that some students with learning disabilities have a great deal of difficulty with this task. A professor needs to know the students fairly well before doing this so it doesn't catch certain students being required to demonstrate their weakness or disability in front of the class. It should be emphasized there are no "stupid questions!" A few times I have been caught not knowing the answer, but this allows a simple response of "I don't know," and stating that the answer will be presented at the beginning of the next class period.

About twice a semester, when students have demonstrated that they are keeping up with the class work and readings, or when a particularly long project is due, I have surprised them by stating that there will be no checking of their readings this particular class period, but any questions they have are invited and answered.

If there are less than 12 students in the class I schedule a 15-20 minute one-on-one discussion with each student during the semester, during the last 15 minutes of the three-hour class period (in addition to office hours and other appointments as requested).

While a couple minutes of this time is spent on personal rapport and support, I always have pop quiz-type questions to discuss with them such as, "Tell me your understanding of the differences between internalizing and externalizing disorders for students in your (grade level) classroom." This allows the others to leave early and allows the professor important personal support opportunities to all students, disabled and non-disabled, and no student is singled out for any reason.

I emphasize at the beginning of the semester that much of the content of each class is not only for their learning and required by the state department of education for teacher certification, but also for the purpose of internalizing information as they write their comprehensive exams prior to the awarding of their graduate degree. I also emphasize, to this end, that the questions that are posed to them (or they pose to the professor) are to assist them in reaching this goal in a situation that causes them the least amount of stress possible, and accommodates diverse backgrounds, abilities and experiences - but in the form of no timed pop quizzes!

I am NOT advocating that students with disabilities do not need extended time on quizzes. Rather, this is a way to eliminate the need for extended time by obtaining a quick perusal of students' progress in a venue other than a timed pop quiz-situation, and certainly meets some of the tenets of Universal Design.

Student feedback has been very positive in that both students with and without disabilities have expressed appreciation for taking the "terror" out of pop quizzes. Having the opportunity to learn at their own rate and within their own learning style, while being gently pushed to keep up with the readings, were also helpful comments. One very bright student with ADHD sent an e-mail at the conclusion of the course expressing that this class was the first one he had ever completed on time! One or two students (most are active teachers) each semester realize that "modeling" inclusive teaching and testing techniques are a covert part of the class, and have indicated that they are now much more sensitive to learning differences among their own K-12 students; they have put extra thought into finding creative ways to minimize these differences for students in their own classrooms.

Finally, the various procedures assist in alleviating the "extra time" dilemma of pop quizzes.

____________________________

This was published in The Section 504 Compliance Guide by Thompson Publishing Company, in 2006; it is revised from an e-mail to Disabled Student Services in Higher Education (DSSHE) Listserv in February, 2001; also posted on the Brown University Website at one time, and also on a UCONN website as well.

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Pop quizzes can be a valuable teaching/learning tool in postsecondary education, but they often put many otherwise qualified students with learning disabilities, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, traumatic brain injury -and sometimes psychiatric disorders- at an extreme disadvantage. These students frequently qualify for the accommodation of extended time on examinations, tests and quizzes, typically one and one-half to double time.

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Writing or refining a course syllabus can be a daunting task. This new resource from The Chronicle of Higher Education is here to help. 

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Writing or refining a course syllabus can be a daunting task. This new resource from The Chronicle of Higher Education is here to help. 

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This is really good!!!

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There’s never a bad time to re-examine and rethink your syllabus. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to craft an effective one.

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In a Twitter thread about ableism, a folklore professor offers concrete ways educators can create more inclusive student environments.

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In a Twitter thread about ableism, a folklore professor offers concrete ways educators can create more inclusive student environments.

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I've been thinking about teaching & ableism. Since many folklorists are professors, I'm putting some thoughts in a thread here for #FolkloreThursday and would love to hear others' ideas. A few little things I've implemented over the years:

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I've been thinking about teaching & ableism. Since many folklorists are professors, I'm putting some thoughts in a thread here for #FolkloreThursday and would love to hear others' ideas. A few little things I've implemented over the years:

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I've been thinking about teaching & ableism. Since many folklorists are professors, I'm putting some thoughts in a thread here for #FolkloreThursday and would love to hear others' ideas. A few little things I've implemented over the years:
— Sarah M. Gordon (@folkyousarah) September 13, 2018

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I've been thinking about teaching & ableism. Since many folklorists are professors, I'm putting some thoughts in a thread here for #FolkloreThursday and would love to hear others' ideas. A few little things I've implemented over the years:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
I've been thinking about teaching & ableism. Since many folklorists are professors, I'm putting some thoughts in a thread here for #FolkloreThursday and would love to hear others' ideas. A few little things I've implemented over the years:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
I've been thinking about teaching & ableism. Since many folklorists are professors, I'm putting some thoughts in a thread here for #FolkloreThursday and would love to hear others' ideas. A few little things I've implemented over the years:

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Welcome to fall!  Let's take a look at those disability access statements with "Check Your Syllabus 101:" 

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Welcome to fall!  Let's take a look at those disability access statements with "Check Your Syllabus 101:" 

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The start of the semester is just about upon us, which probably means you are rapidly ditching your best laid plans to lovingly craft your syllabus into a gleaming gem of radical pedagogical genius and coming to terms with the Winnicottian spirit of "good enough." Welcome back.

The good news is that there is one easy addition that can make every syllabus shine a little brighter, something every good enough syllabus needs (and every kick ass syllabus has) that, thanks to the handy examples below, will take mere minutes to add if it's missing from yours: An accessibility or disability inclusion statement.

Generally, accessibility statements inform students of university resources and policies for accommodating disabilities, accommodations that are required under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ADA is why many universities require them. But that is not why you should have one.

You should have one because a thoughtful accessibility statement is an opening to a pedagogical practice that offers a small but powerful push against the ways college and university systems exacerbate rather than rectify social inequalities by calling out the ableism of the academy and creating an experience that is more just and accessible for all students. Granted, if your school has a boilerplate accessibility statement (check the student disability services office or teaching support office to find out) it probably doesn't do that. It is probably legalistic, perhaps unwelcoming, and almost certainly not informed by principles of disability justice or universal design, both of which see access as an opportunity to address social and structural inequity and marginalization by centering disability while pushing at its presumed edges.

To help you make your accessibility statement the best it can be, I've crowdsourced some examples from our wonderful colleagues in the Disability Research Interest Group, the subsection of the Society for Medical Anthropology that brought us such treasures as these guidelines for accessible AAA presentations, and this survey about in/accessibility at the AAA meetings (if you haven't taken the survey, get to it...ALL of you!). I've separated the institutional boilerplates from those customized with critical disability politics in mind. The significance of the difference should be pretty damn apparent.

Finally, the most important thing about the accessibility statement may be what you do with it.

Just as decolonization at the level of the text is not itself decolonization (as Faye Harrison, Lila Abu Lughod, Jafari Allen, and other anthros of color continue to remind us), a great accessibility statement does not sufficiently address ableism in one's pedagogy, classroom, or institution. Read the statement with students on the first day of class, remind them throughout the semester of your commitment to access, and most importantly, look for ways to practice access throughout the semester in your pedagogy and in your classroom (in any room, really). For more on how to do that, check out this fabulous tip sheet on feminist disability pedagogy (which also includes syllabus statement tips) or look for resources on Universal Design in Education. Though STEM focused, Washington University's DO-IT Center has great Universal Design resources (like the info graphic on page 14 of this publication).

Boilerplate Accessibility Statements (you can do better)
Case Western Reserve University:
In accordance with federal law, if you have a documented disability, you may be eligible to request accommodations from Disability Resources. In order to be considered for accommodations you must present a memo from disability resources. Please contact their office to register at 216.368.5230 or get more information on how to begin the process. Please keep in mind that accommodations are not retroactive.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill facilitates the implementation of reasonable accommodations, including resources and services, for students with disabilities, chronic medical conditions, a temporary disability or pregnancy complications resulting in difficulties with accessing learning opportunities.

All accommodations are coordinated through the Accessibility Resources and Service Office. See the ARS Website for contact information: accessibillity.unc.edu.

Relevant policy documents as they relation to registration and accommodations determinations and the student registration form are available on the ARS website under the About ARS tab.
College of William & Mary:
William & Mary accommodates students with disabilities in accordance with federal laws and university policy. Any student who feels they may need an accommodation based on the impact of a learning, psychiatric, physical, or chronic health diagnosis should contact Student Accessibility Services staff at 757-221-2512 or at [email protected] to determine if accommodations are warranted and to obtain an official letter of accommodation. For more information, please visit /www.wm.edu/sas.
Rice University:
Disability Support Services
If you have a documented disability or other condition that may affect academic performance you should: 1) make sure this documentation is on file with Disability Support Services (Allen Center, Room 111 /[email protected] / x5841) to determine the accommodations you need; and 2) talk with me to discuss your accommodation needs.

Critical Accessibility Statements (better than 'good enough'!)
Professor at a large public research university
Class Accessibility and Inclusion If you need a reasonable (or even unreasonable) accommodation, please let me know and I'll try make it happen. This goes triply for folks with non-visible disabilities or who pass or mask or compensate. No need to do that here.
Zoë Wool, Rice University
This course is intended for all Rice students, including those with mental, physical, or cognitive disabilities, illness, injuries, impairments, or any other condition that tends to negatively affect one's equal access to education. If, at any point in the term, you find yourself not able to fully access the space, content, and experience of this course, you are welcome (and not required) to contact me by email, phone, or during office hours to discuss your specific needs. I also encourage you to contact the Office of Disability Support Services (Allen Center, Room 111/ [email protected]/ x5841/ https://dss.rice.edu). If you have a diagnosis, ODSS can help you document your needs and create an accommodation plan. By making a plan through ODSS, you can insure appropriate accommodations without disclosing your condition or diagnosis to course instructors.
Professor at a mid-sized public research university
If you have a disability or a personal circumstance that will affect your learning in this course, please let me know as soon as possible so that we can discuss the best ways to meet your needs. (Any student who needs accommodation for disabilities should also contact Student Accessibility Services at [email protected] to obtain an official letter of accommodation for all their courses.)

[The author of this statement also says: "I emphasize my willingness to help with accommodations aloud on the first day of class. I also give a questionnaire in which I ask about accommodations, allergies, pronouns, planned travel, etc. so that I can be in touch with individual students about their needs in the class".]
Universal Design for Learning at McGill University's Office for Students with Disabilities
As the instructor of this course I endeavor to provide an inclusive learning environment. However, if you experience barriers to learning in this course, do not hesitate to discuss them with me and the Office for Students with Disabilities, 514-398-6009.
Lydia Brown (AKA Autistic Hoya)
Accommodations for Disabilities: If you have any kind of disability, whether apparent or non-apparent, learning, emotional, physical, or cognitive, and you need some accommodations or alternatives to lectures, assignments, or exams, please feel free to contact me to discuss reasonable accommodations for your access needs.

[Lydia Brown also notes: "Standard headers for this section generally say, 'Special Accommodations' or even avoid the word disability altogether in favor of euphemisms like learning differences or challenges.

Professors, you can make a strong statement for access and inclusion from the beginning of the course. You can, without saying or signing anything at all, make students like me feel immensely safer from the start."]
Michele Friedner, University of Chicago
I am committed to meeting the needs of all seminar participants. To arrange class-related accommodations, please see Student Disability Services: http://disabilities.uchicago.edu/accommodations. I am happy to meet with students to discuss ways of expanding access in the classroom that are not only mandated by law. Please feel free to make an appointment with me to discuss.
Mara Green, Barnard College
Disability accommodations: For disability and other learning-related needs and accommodations, please communicate with me during the first week of class, whether in person or through email. Of course if concerns arise later in the semester, let me know as well. Disability-based services are provided through Barnard's Office of Disability Services, located in 008 Milbank Hall ([email protected]) and through Columbia's Disability Services (https://health.columbia.edu/disability-services). I am committed to working with you, so do not hesitate to come talk with me.
Cassandra Hartblay, University of Toronto, Scarborough
Accommodations: Please assert requests for accommodations often and early. It is never too late to request accommodations - our bodies and circumstances are continuously changing. You will be asked to make use of formal accessibility services on campus; however, you will not be asked to disclose personal medical information. If there are ways in which the overall structure of the course and general classroom interactions could be adapted to facilitate full participation, please do not hesitate to raise your ideas with the instructor: comments and suggestions about the format of readings, lectures, and class discussions are welcome.
A note on basic needs:
Finally, Jessica Waggoner at the University of Houston turned me on to the basic needs statement, something that took on additional importance for their classes in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey (which hit Houston at the start of last year's fall semester). They learned about it from this post on basic needs in/security in higher education, which suggests this syllabus statement:

Basic Needs: Any student who faces challenges securing their food or housing and believes this may affect their performance in the course is urged to contact the Dean of Students for support. Furthermore, please notify the professor if you are comfortable in doing so. This will enable her to provide any resources that she may possess.

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Check Your Syllabus 101: Disability Access Statements

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The start of the semester is just about upon us, which probably means you are rapidly ditching your best laid plans to lovingly craft your syllabus into a gleaming gem of radical pedagogical genius and coming to terms with the Winnicottian spirit of "good enough." Welcome back.

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Universal Design for Learning in Postsecondary Settings: One Faculty Member’s Journey Toward Making Learning Accessible for all Students

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Universal Design for Learning in Postsecondary Settings: One Faculty Member’s Journey Toward Making Learning Accessible for all Students

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Universal Design for Learning in Postsecondary Settings_ One Facu

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Universal Design - shared note taking in class

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Universal Design - shared note taking in class

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See half way down on page 11 and page 12.

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What faculty can share when they introduce themselves to students in their classes.

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Home " All CFT Teaching Guides " First Day of Class
The first day of class is your opportunity to present your vision of the class to prospective students. It is helpful if you can introduce yourself as a scholar and educator and provide insight into how you will teach the class and what you will expect them to contribute to the learning process.

Consider that several of your students may be "shopping" for a schedule the first week of classes. They may be looking for a class that will fill a particular time slot, include a particular learning environment (i.e. lab-based or lecture style), or a class with a certain workload to balance the demands of their other courses and extra-curricular responsibilities. Thus, students will appreciate a clear roadmap of what you will require of them over the course of the semester. You may also want to model, as specifically as possible, the classroom environment you intend to foster during the class. For example, if they will spend a good deal of time doing group work over the course of the semester, you may want to break them into groups the first day.

Welcoming:
How to Create an Inviting Classroom

"Professors who established a special trust with their students often displayed the kind of openness in which they might, from time to time, talk about their intellectual journey, its ambitions, triumphs, frustrations, and failures, and encourage students to be similarly reflective and candid."

-From the chapter "How Do They Treat Their Students" in Ken Bain's What the Best Colleage Teachers Do (Harvard Press, 2004), available in the CFT Library

Introduce Yourself

The point of an introduction is to establish yourself as a unique individual sharing the classroom with other unique individuals. Other than providing your name and the name of the course you're teaching, here is some information you may consider sharing:

Personal biography: your place of birth, family history, educational history, hobbies, sport and recreational interests, how long you have been at the university, and what your plans are for the future.

Educational biography: how you came to specialize in your chosen field, a description of your specific area of expertise, your current projects, and your future plans.

Teaching biography: how long have you taught, how many subjects/classes have you taught, what level of class you normally teach, what you enjoy about being in the classroom, what do you learn from your students, and what you expect to teach in the future.

In making your decision about what information to share, consider how much you want them to know and how much you want to reveal about yourself.

Allow the Students to Introduce Themselves

This is your opportunity to focus on students as unique and diverse individuals. Consider how introductions can lead into a productive and welcoming classroom environment. Instead of just asking general questions concerning their name, major, and years at Vanderbilt, ask them questions that are pertinent to the subject and the atmosphere you want to build through the semester. Here are some examples:

In a geography or history class, you may want to ask students to introduce themselves and explain where they are from. You could mark these places on a map of the world as they talk.

In a math class, you may want to ask the students to introduce themselves and state one way mathematics enriches their lives every day.

You may also want to have the students break into pairs, exchange information, and introduce one another to the class.

This may also be a good time to give your students an exercise that enables teachers to assess the state of their students' previous or current learning. Examples of these Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) can be found on our Web site, but include the following.

The Background Knowledge Probe is a short, simple questionnaire given to students at the start of a course, or before the introduction of a new unit, lesson or topic. It is designed to uncover students' pre-conceptions about the area of study.

Discuss and Evaluate the Room Environment Together

As your students are introducing themselves and you are talking to them, ask your students to comment on the acoustics and remain conscious of how well you can hear and see each of them. Consider, with their input or alone, how you would change and optimize the seating arrangement. At the end of the introductions, ask them to move to optimize communication and make note of unexpected needs for a microphone, lighting changes, seating arrangements or other environmental controls.

Truth in Advertising:
Course Expectations and Requirements

"What happens between you and your students in your classroom or lecture hall depends largely on what you want to happen. How you treat each other and how you and your students feel about being in that place with each other is modeled and influenced by you."

-From the chapter "Classroom Contracts-Roles, Rules, and Expectations" in David W. Champagne's The Intelligent Professor's Guide to Teaching (Roc Edtech, 1995), available in the CFT Library

Course overview: Provide a map of where the class will start and end, and what you expect them to understand at the end of the semester. See the Course Design page for resources on creating and summarizing course goals.

Departmental Requirements/Expectations: If your department sets standards and requirements, you may want to establish that you are required to work within those parameters. Vanderbilt Teaching Assistants may want to refer to Questions TAs Might Ask Their Supervisors for assistance understanding this information. This may be the best time to discuss Vanderbilt University's Honor System.

Presentation of material: Tell your students how you will provide them with the materials they need to be successful in class. Do you use Web-based materials, like OAK, or rely on electronic course reserves through the Library? Will your students have to schedule evenings to watch films or attend performances? Will you lecture and expect them to take notes on your presentations?

Expectations for class time: How will the student feel confident and competent in your classroom? Is the class discussion-based? Do you follow your syllabus or do you improvise? Do they need to bring their books every day? Tell them what they can expect and how can they interact within those expectations to thrive in your classroom.

Expectations outside of class: Provide them with an idea of what they will need to prepare for the course outside of class. Is their preparation primarily reading and writing individually, or will they be working in groups? Will they need to turn in assignments electronically outside of class hours? Give them enough information so they will be able to plan their schedules accordingly.

Instructor responsibilities:

Establish what you will provide for your students to be successful in your class. This may include in-class material, study guides, meaningful and prompt feedback on assignments, facilitation of discussion, attention to students with special needs, and a positive and welcoming classroom environment.

Assert your boundaries: Let your students know how to contact you and when. For example communicate or provide your office hours, office phone number, availability for instant messaging, email, and when you do not respond (evenings, weekends, and traveling for example). If you are traveling during the semester, you may want to explain the dates that you will not be available.

You may also want to alert your students to the events, habits, or situations that detract from your ability to fulfill your responsibility. For example, if late assignments, lack of participation, or sleeping during your lectures distracts you from timely and persuasive teaching, explain why you cannot tolerate these events and how you handle them when they occur.

Student responsibilities: If attendance is required, participation is mandatory, or you want them to read the assignment before class, explain to your students that this is expected of them throughout the semester. Explain policies on absences, make-ups, emergencies, and accommodating special needs. You may also remind them that they are responsible for their success and communicating with you when they have need assistance or have other concerns. The Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and Disability Services Department (322-4705) provides information about accommodating disabilities of many types. The ODC suggests the follow statement be included on all syllabi: "If you need disability related accommodations for this course; if you have emergency medical information to share with me; or if you need special arrangements in case the building must be evacuated, please make an appointment to speak with me, as well as the Opportunity Development Center (2-4705) as soon as possible."

Assessment: How will you assign the course grade at the end of the semester? How many assignments will you grade? Do you have grading policies and/or rubrics or criteria for grading?

Cooperation/communication/resources: Finally, you may want to spend a few minutes discussing university, department, library, or other resources for students to use in through the course of the semester.

"By giving students an interesting and inviting introduction, I was able to reduce anxiety about the course and help students view the class as a collaborative learning process. Every field has its own exciting research or striking examples, and it is a good idea to present a few of these up front. The teaching challenge is to find special ideas within your own field. Your class will thank you."

-From "How to Start Teaching a Tough Course: Dry Organization Versus Excitement on the First Day of Class" by Kevin L. Bennett, in College Teaching, 52(3), 2004

Additional Resources:

Angelo, T. A., and Cross, K. P. Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. (2nd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993.

Erickson, B. L., and Strommer, D. W. Teaching College Freshmen. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.

"The First Day of Class: Advice and Ideas." Teaching Professor, 1989, 3(7), 1-2.

Johnson, G. R. Taking Teaching Seriously. College Station: Center for Teaching Excellence, Texas A & M University, 1988.

McKeachie, W. J. Teaching Tips. (8th ed.) Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1986.

Scholl-Buckwald, S. "The First Meeting of Class." In J. Katz (ed.), Teaching as Though Students Mattered. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 21. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.

Serey, T. "Meet Your Professor." Teaching Professor, 1989, 3(l), 2.

Weisz, E. "Energizing the Classroom." College Teaching, 1990, 38(2), 74-76.

Wolcowitz, J. "The First Day of Class." In M. M. Gullette (ed.), The Art and Craft of Teaching. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984.

Other Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Resources: Other Academic Web sites on First Day strategies and online publications:
Summary Checklist

Introduce yourself

Allow the Students to introduce themselves

Discuss and evaluate the room environment together

Course overview

Departmental requirements/expectations

Presentation of material

Expectations for class time

Expectations outside of class

Instructor responsibilities

Student responsibilities

Assessment

Cooperation/communication/resources

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The first day of class is your opportunity to present your vision of the class to prospective students. It is helpful if you can introduce yourself as a scholar and educator and provide insight into how you will teach the class and what you will expect them to contribute to the learning process.

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by Amie Thurber, Joe Bandy, and participants in the 2017-2018 Disability and Learning Learning Community at Vanderbilt U

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by Amie Thurber, Joe Bandy, and participants in the 2017-2018 Disability and Learning Learning Community at Vanderbilt University.

Cite this guide: Thurber, A., & Bandy, J. (2018). Creating Accessible Learning Environments. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/creating-accessible-learning-environments/.

There are estimated to be 50 million people with disabilities in the U.S. today. Disabilities may be temporary, relapsing or remitting, or long-term. Although there are hundreds of distinct kinds of disabilities, we may group them into the following categories: physical disabilities, mental disabilities, and sensory disabilities. Disabilities are complex; they may be a source of stigma or shame and may also be a cherished part of a person's identity and the basis for meaningful community. The focus of this guide is creating inclusive and accessible higher education classrooms-beyond accommodation-for a range of students with disabilities

This guide is organized around the following sections:

Issues of accessibility in higher education have been shaped by ongoing theoretical debates. The most prominent perspectives are often described as the 'medical model' and the 'social model' of disability. Put simply, the medical model tends to focus on addressing the diagnoses of deficiencies and accommodations for a disabled individual, while the social model embraces disability as a difference and focuses on correcting systematic exclusions in institutions based in ableism-discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities (for more, see Titchkosky, 2011). More recently, a third perspective, referred to as the 'cultural model,' has emerged. This model reframes disability as "a valuable form of human variation" (Hamraie, 2016, p. 260) The table below summarizes differences in the three perspectives:

Ultimately, these different perspectives on disability-as a problem, a difference, or valuable-inform the way questions of access are approached in higher education settings. Most colleges and universities function within a medical model of disability. Typically, to get an assistive technology or accommodation, disabled students must prove that they have a recently-diagnosed disability. These accommodations treat disability as a deviation from the norm. By contrast, if a university were to adopt a social or cultural perspective on disability, the goal would be to increase accessibility for all students, regardless of whether they have a formal diagnosis. The focus would be on accounting for human variation by design.

Person first or disability first language?

There are ongoing conversations and debates within Disability Studies and the Disability Rights Movement as to whether to use person first ("a person who is deaf") vs disability first language ("a Deaf person"). Both are responses to deficit-based views of disability. For some, person-first language is an important way to reclaim humanity. For others, the self-identification with disability culture is a meaningful counterpoint to stigmatizing disability. For a reflection on the debate related to person first/disability first language, see this blog post.

Further reading:

Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. University of Toronto Press.

Hamraie, A. (2016). Beyond Accommodation: Disability, Feminist Philosophy, and the Design of Everyday Academic Life. philoSOPHIA, 6(2), 259-271.

Linton, S. (1998). Disability studies/not disability studies. Disability & Society, 13(4), 525-539.

Miles, A. L., Nishida, A., & Forber-Pratt, A. J. (2017). An open letter to White disability studies and ableist institutions of higher education. Disability Studies Quarterly, 37(3).

Dunn, D. S., & Andrews, E. E. (2015). Person-first and identity-first language: Developing psychologists' cultural competence using disability language. American Psychologist, 70(3), 255.

The Disability Rights Movement

The Disability Rights Movement has shaped societal expectations regarding accessibility in higher education and the regulatory frameworks to which colleges and universities must comply.

Key historical moments in the Disability Rights Movement are highlighted below.

1940s-Disabled workers and veterans organize for recognition, access to the workplace

1950s-60s- First university programs for disabled students are established at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, University of California, Berkeley, and other campuses.

1968-The Architectural Barriers Act requires accessibility in federal buildings. It is not enforced.

1970s- The de-institutionalization movement calls for the integration of disabled people into public life and removal from institutional segregation.

1973- The first piece of federal legislation protecting people with disabilities was the Federal Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in federally funded programs, including colleges and universities. Seeks to enforce Architectural Barriers Act.

1975- The Education for All Handicapped Children Act-later renamed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)-guaranteed access to public K-12 education for children with disabilities.

Transitioning to college

Although the federal government
has enacted legislation promoting accessibility in both K-12 and higher educational settings, much of the access guaranteed in K-12 does not extend to college. Further, while in K-12 educational settings, the student may have had a teacher, parent, or guardian who advocated for services, whereas in college faculty and administrators expect that students will advocate for themselves. For a useful overview of the differences, see this website.

1975- The Education for All Handicapped Children Act-later renamed to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)-guaranteed access to public K-12 education for children with disabilities.

1978- Disability activists stage successful "504 sit-ins" to demand compliance with federal disability rights laws after the Federal Rehabilitation Act is not enforced.

1990- The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibiting discrimination on basis of disability in employment, public services, and public accommodation (including many areas of colleges and universities), with the goal of full participation of people with disabilities throughout society.

2008- In response to several Supreme Court cases that narrowly interpreted the ADA's definition of disability, Congress passed the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA). The purpose of the act is to ensure that the intended beneficiaries of ADA were being appropriately served by the law.

Disability rights and higher education

Today, three sets of laws regulate disability rights in higher education settings:

Title II of the ADA applies to public colleges that are operated by a state or local government.

Title III of the ADA applies to private colleges/universities/places of education.[2]

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act applies to places of education that receive federal funds.

These laws do not require colleges or universities to modify academic requirements considered essential to the curriculum, but they do set minimum expectations, including the following:

Note, what legally constitutes "meaningful access" may not be optimal access for a student. For example, a university may provide meaningful access to a blind student in a biology class by ensuring a readable version of the text is available. However, given the degree that biology relies on visual models, optimal access might include having tactile or 3-D versions of those models, something that may not readily be provided. Further, there is a high level of variability across institutions in the ways they meet these needs, as institutions are differently resourced and differentially prioritize accessibility. Some of the ways higher educational institutions may provide meaningful access include:

Provision of auxiliary aids or services (i.e. provision of a sign language interpreter or a screen reader).

Modification to nonessential academic requirements (i.e. allowing a student to complete an exam orally rather than in writing or have additional time to complete exams).

Reasonable adjustments to policies, procedures or practices (i.e., increasing number of allowable absences, exception to no-pet policy).

Ultimately, ensuring access is not simply an issue of legal compliance, but a reflection of an institution's commitment to creating educational settings in which all learners can participate, develop, and contribute.

For further reading, see:
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Though many disabilities are unreported, in 2018 there were more than 1000 Vanderbilt students who had registered over 100 different disabilities (out of ~12,000 students). Students with disabilities have several on-campus resources that may offer support.

VU Resources

Student Access Services: Provides disability services for qualified students. To determine eligibility, students apply for services through the Access Center. Specific documentation criteria and examples of common services can be found on the website.

Student Ability Alliance: A student-organized and student-led organization that discusses the importance of disability awareness.

Plant Operations: Responsible for facilities and grounds, Plant Operations is the office to which you may report accessibility concerns, such as:

inoperable automatic door openers

inoperable/missing audible crossings

debris/ice on sidewalks

Working with Students Enrolled through Next Steps

Vanderbilt University is home to Next Steps at Vanderbilt, a 4-year inclusive higher education program committed to providing students with intellectual disability inclusive, transformational postsecondary education in academics, social and career development, and independent living. Students enrolled through Next Steps complete course work with the assistance of academic tutors and customized "Independent Learning Agreement". To facilitate an authentic college and classroom environment for all, students enrolled through Next Steps are not accompanied by a peer mentor or staff member in the classroom. In addition to the information in this guide, instructors with students enrolled through Next Steps in their classes may benefit from some additional recommendations.

Hold High Expectations

Because college was not a viable option for students with intellectual disability until recent years, our students are eager learners with a high-degree of gratitude. Our students want to be a part of Vanderbilt University and a contributing member of a learning environment.

Our students are first and foremost full-time Vanderbilt students and just as other Vanderbilt students, we hold high expectations for our students in the classroom.

Students enrolled through Next Steps should be expected to participate in class discussions to the level that they are able, complete their assignments, come prepared and on time to class, and display appropriate college behaviors.

Look Forward to Reciprocal Benefits
Hosting a student enrolled through Next Steps is not only beneficial for the student, but equally valuable to his/her classmates. Traditional students are afforded the opportunity to work alongside students with diverse abilities and are exposed to different ways of thinking. Inclusive classrooms equip university students with more knowledge and experience working within a diverse and changing world.

Adopt Universal Design for Learning Approach

It is a myth that faculty have to provide extensive modifications because they have an inclusive classroom. However, much of what works well with students enrolled through Next Steps in the classroom, also will work well with traditionally enrolled Vanderbilt students. Refer to the section "Strategies for Creating Accessible Learning Environments" in this guide for details about UDL.

The main difference in an academic experience for students enrolled through Next Steps and their classmates comes down to the demonstration of knowledge. As a program, we work with our students, peer mentors, and faculty to develop a customized syllabus "Independent Learning Agreement". The student voice is essential in the development of these agreements.

We understand many courses offered at Vanderbilt are robust in nature with complex content being taught. Our students have support in grasping the main concepts of the course by partnering with academic tutors and following the customized "Independent Learning Agreement".

While our students do not receive traditional grades for their completion of a course, our program consistently evaluates and monitors students' progress to ensure students are meeting their program of study requirements for graduation.

Treat All Students Equal in the Classroom
Faculty should address any issues or challenges that arise just as they would for any other students enrolled in the classroom. It is important to note that our program is equipped to provide support to students and faculty to ensure a successful experience.

Disability History at Vanderbilt

Did you know...there are a number of significant people and initiatives connected to Vanderbilt University that have increased accessibility for people with disabilities?

Despite these accomplishments, Vanderbilt University-like many educational institutions-still has work to do to increase accessibility. For one student's reflection, see this 2017 editorial published in The Washington Post.
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Although Vanderbilt University encourages all students with disabilities who desire reasonable accommodations to seek services through Student Access Services, faculty have an essential role to play in making courses accessible and creating a climate of equity and inclusion. While individual needs are difficult to anticipate, there are many things professors can do to create inclusive and accessible environments for a wide diversity of learners. This guide reviews strategies in the following areas:

Most of the strategies highlighted in these sections reflect the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL is an educational framework that emphasizes the use of flexible goals, methods, materials, and assessments in order to provide effective instruction to a diversity of learners. Rather than approaching accessibility as an afterthought or only on a case-by-case basis, UDL principles help instructors to design courses that address the needs of diverse learners from the start so that all students may benefit. For example, a note-taker is a common accommodation given to students with disabilities, however, in note-heavy classes, this may be beneficial to many students. Some instructors rotate the role of note-taker throughout the class as a way of creating a shared set of notes that all students can access.

Note, the strategies suggested in this guide are not exhaustive. For more recommendations, see:

Communication with Students

Creating open lines of communication with your students is essential. There are a variety of ways instructors can build a foundation for open communication:

Consider adding an "Inclusive Learning Statement" to your syllabus. Tulane University's Accessible Syllabus website offers the following example: "Your success in this class is important to me. We will all need accommodations because we all learn differently. If there are aspects of this course that prevent you from learning or exclude you, please let me know as soon as possible. Together we'll develop strategies to meet both your needs and the requirements of the course. I encourage you to visit the Office of Disability Services to determine how you could improve your learning as well. If you need official accommodations, you have a right to have these met. There are also a range of resources on campus, including the Writing Center, Tutoring Center, and Academic Advising Center." Reiterate your desire to help all students succeed by communicating a version of this statement aloud in the first week of class.
Note, the Accessible Syllabus website has many other helpful recommendations to create an accessible syllabus, including information on formatting, text, images, rhetoric, and other course policies.

When you receive notification from your campus disability services office that a student has requested accommodations in your course, reach out to the student individually, in private, to discuss how accommodations may work best for them. A student's disclosure of a disability is always voluntary and some students may feel nervous to disclose sensitive medical information to an instructor. Whether or not a student discloses details of their disability, you can discuss appropriate accommodations. In some cases, accommodations may be straight forward - such as providing an alternative testing location. Other situations may require ongoing brainstorming between the instructor and student. It can be helpful for an instructor to describe upcoming activities or assignments (particularly those not fully described in the syllabus) and ask the student what, if any, additional accommodations may be needed. As the course proceeds, it is helpful to check in with the student periodically. Not all needs can be anticipated in advance, and given the nature of some disabilities, needs may change over the course of a term. Ask the student, "How are the accommodations we have implemented working for you? Is there anything we should consider changing?"

When you make announcements in class, for example regarding changes in due dates or room locations, make sure to always send them in an email or online announcement as well.

Consider your course policies in the interest of creating an inclusive classroom environment. For example, do you have a no laptop policy in your classroom? If so, how might that negatively impact students with disabilities?

Physical learning spaces

Ensuring physical accessibility includes consideration of the building location, the classroom location (within a building), as well as the layout of the classroom, and classroom technologies (i.e. lighting, tables, seating, projection, white boards). When considering the physical accessibility of your class, keep in mind:

Changes in weather or campus activities can disproportionately impact students with mobility impairments. For example, sidewalks may be impassable due to snow or ice, piles of yard debris during landscaping, or equipment in place for a campus event. These may delay students or may present such a barrier that a student may need to participate remotely. As a best practice, if you notice an area that is inaccessible on campus (which also includes inoperable lifts, elevators, or audible crossings at crosswalks), let the plant operations department know immediately.

To the greatest extent possible, set up your classroom so that students with wheelchairs or service dogs have room to navigate into and around the class. For example, if the classroom is set up with workstations, consider leaving an open spot-without a chair-at multiple tables.

Engage your students in thinking about accessibility in your classroom. Some rooms may not have any moveable furniture, but present options in terms of lighting, sound, or size of text on presentation materials. Other rooms may be highly adaptable.

Moving classes at the last minute and changing classroom layouts can cause difficulty for a range of students, including those with mobility, sight, or hearing impairments, as well as people with anxiety. For example, students using guide dogs may spend up to a month before classes begin training their guide dog to navigate them to class, and to a particular seat within the class. Whenever possible, alert students in advance as to changes of location or room set up.

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Course materials

Ensuring accessibility of course materials includes consideration of 1) the course management system (i.e. Brightspace, Blackboard, etc.); 2) assigned reading materials, handouts, and presentations; and 3) audio or video used in class. Creating accessible materials takes time. It can necessitate learning new technologies and being creative when considering alternative ways to share information, and/or allow students to participate in class.

1. Course Management Systems

Many course management systems have built in accessibility features. For example, Brightspace (Desire2Learn) has screen reader accessibility features, keyboard-online navigation features, screen magnifiers, and design features to assist both students and instructors. To learn how to make your content more accessible to individuals who use screen readers or screen magnifiers, as well as individuals with colorblindness, click the "Check Accessibility" button in the bottom toolbar. This will provide you with warnings and ways to improve accessibility.

For those using other course management systems, please check with their helpdesk or campus consultants. Ultimately, it is an instructor's responsibility to get to know the accessibility features and limitations of their institution's course management system, and to take advantage of the tools that will allow their students to fully participate.

2. Course reading, handouts and presentation materials

It is important to make your syllabus and course materials available to students as soon as possible, so students who may need more time can begin accessing materials. The most common strategy for increasing accessibility of course texts (which include any assigned readings, presentations, and handouts) is providing versions that are readable, especially by screen readers. Most computers come equipped with a screen reader technology, which essentially converts printed text into auditory words to which the user can listen. For this technology to work, reading materials must be saved in a text file, such as a Word Document or Rich Text Format (RTF). Converting materials from PDF or PPT to readable text increases accessibility to a wide variety of learners, including people with learning disabilities, literacy difficulties, visual impairments, or people who multitask. You may find some readable text versions of your course materials are already available. In other cases, you may need to prepare them.

Importantly, text-reading-technology does have limitations. If there are graphics that are critical to the course materials (i.e. tables, graphs, or other images), you will need to find another way to share these with students who have sight impairments, for example by explaining figures in prose form, transferring the graphic onto a tactile surface, or creating a 3-D model of the figure.

Further reading: This 2018 special issue of Learned Publishing focuses on accessibility in publishing.

3. Audio & Video

Instructors increasingly utilize audio and video materials in class. Captions and descriptions are required by law (Section 508) to support students with disabilities, though as described below may benefit a wide range of learners. There are two types of technologies to increase accessibility to audio and video.

Converting audio (or audio portions of video) to text (e.g., closed captioning) can be done through computer-assisted-programs. Captioning video increases accessibility to a wide variety of learners, including people with learning disabilities, literacy difficulties, hearing impairments, or second language learners.

Creating audio descriptions of visual images is typically needs to be done by a person in real-time, or through use of a pre-recorded narrative. Audio descriptions of video increases accessibility to a wide variety of learners, including people with learning disabilities, literacy difficulties, and visual impairments.
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Classroom Climate

Students learn best when they feel respected, included, and that instructors are invested in their development. Students with disabilities can experience stigma, marginalization, and negative stereotypes from their peers and instructors. In Barbara Davis's Tools for Teaching, she explains that it is important for instructors to "become aware of any biases and stereotypes [they] may have absorbed...Your attitudes and values not only influence the attitudes and values of your students, but they can affect the way you teach, particularly your assumptions about students...which can lead to unequal learning outcomes for those in your classes" (2010, p. 58).

Strategies for creating an inclusive and welcoming classroom climate include:

Pay attention to your engagement with students. In courses where teacher/student ratio allows, endeavor to learn and use students' names. Use classroom engagement strategies that allow students to contribute in a variety of ways, for example, through online discussion boards, in-class discussions, and individual assignments.

Pay attention to and enable group interactions in the classroom. Use peer-to-peer engagement strategies that facilitate relationship-building, trust, and the creation of a learning community within the class.

Respond to microaggressions in the classroom. People with disabilities experience a multitude of everyday comments and behaviors that, while not intended to be hurtful, nonetheless can be stigmatizing, marginalizing, and/ or dehumanizing. Microaggressions ultimately communicate implicit assumptions and prejudices that can injure the targeted group, alienating them from their peers and the learning community faculty attempt to create. For instance, here are some microaggressions and the implicit biases they communicate:

"I don't know how you do it - I'd hate to be like you"

Your disability is not comprehensible
and is always a deficiency.

"You look so normal"

Your disability is not normal, and
you hide it well.

"You are so inspiring."

Your disability defines you;
you are deficient; and you are here for my inspiration.

It is important for instructors to be attentive to microaggressions in the classroom, to normalize inclusive and appropriate language, and to consider effective strategies for turning difficult dialogues into teachable moments.
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Out of Class Activities

Not all learning happens in the classroom. Does your course integrate lab work, field work, practicum placements, internships, service learning, or presentations in community based or academic settings? If so, it will be important to think about accessibility within these spaces as well. The Ohio State University's Composing Access website offers helpful guidelines for creating accessible events.

Conclusion

As Dr. Aimi Hamraie writes, "Meaningful access requires collective labor" (2016, p.266). The Center for Teaching is committed to partnering with students and instructors to increase accessibility of learning experiences at Vanderbilt University. Contact us for more information or assistance.
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[1] Each year, the Center for Teaching offers a number of topic-based Learning Communities intended for members of Vanderbilt's teaching community interested in meeting over time to develop deeper understandings and richer practices around particular teaching and learning topics. In 2017-18, the CFT was proud to host a year-long learning community on disability that explored principles of inclusive teaching, universal design for learning, instructional accommodations, as well as legal and cultural issues relevant to students and faculty with disabilities. This guide reflects a summary of the topics explored over the five-part series. This guide is an update to the Teaching Students with Disabilities guide developed by Danielle Picard.

[2] Note, ADA Title III offers an exception for "religious organizations or entities controlled by religious organizations, including places of worship." However, given that the Rehabilitation Act does not provide a religious exception, in practice the vast majority of higher education entities are regulated by one of these three sets of laws.

[3] For more on the problematic ways in which disabled people are regarded as inspiration, see Stella Young, " I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much." TED talk

This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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by Amie Thurber, Joe Bandy, and participants in the 2017-2018 Disability and Learning Learning Community at Vanderbilt University.1 Print Version Cite this guide: Thurber, A., & Bandy, J. (2018). Creating Accessible Learning Environments. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [todaysdate] from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/creating-accessible-learning-environments/. There are estimated to be 50 million people with disabilities in the...

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Tips for how to interact with a wheelchair user.

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Follow these simple wheelchair etiquette guidelines with photos and help avoid any awkward situations when talking with a person in a wheelchair.

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Do-It

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Graphic Organizer

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 some ideas for employing Universal Design for Learning principles in lesson plan design

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 some ideas for employing Universal Design for Learning principles in lesson plan design

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Suggested practices for Syllabus Accessibility Statements

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Suggested practices for Syllabus Accessibility Statements

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Though seemingly transparent, the syllabus does much to set the tone for a course and is typically the first textual contact students have with their instructors. As such, syllabi function rhetorically and have consequences in terms of how students understand the classroom atmosphere, what they expect from the teacher's relationship to students, and how they predict the semester will go for them.

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Using a shoe store analogy, this short video by OCALI provides an overview of Universal Design for Learning.

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National Center on Universal Design for Learning

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Universal design for learning in postsecondary education: Reflections on principles and their application. 

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Universal design for learning in postsecondary education: Reflections on principles and their application. 

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Journal of Postsecondary Education and Disability, 19(2), 17.

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Analyzing a college course that adheres to the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework

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Analyzing a college course that adheres to the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework

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Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 12(3), 31–61.

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Analyzing a College Course that Adheres to the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Framework | Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

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Universal design for learning (UDL) offers an educational framework for a college instructor that can maximize the design and delivery of course instruction by emphasizing multiple representations of materials, varied means for student expression, content and knowledge, and multiple ways to motivate and engage student learning.

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A video about Universal Design at McGill University

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A video about Universal Design at McGill University

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How to's for increasing faculty student interaction

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Passages is an attempt to present a decidedly non-prescriptive interpretation of post-secondary success, what it means, and how students can begin thinking and asking questions about it.

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Who is it for?

This film is intended for students - incoming first-year students, students in transition, students poised to graduate, students in between, students in residence, students thinking about career options, students who struggle, students who thrive, students with disabilities, students full of confidence, students full of doubt.

And it's for the folks who support and guide students through all of it - educators, parents, caregivers, administrators, counsellors, friends.

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This film is intended for students - incoming first-year students, students in transition, students poised to graduate, students in between, students in residence, students thinking about career options, students who struggle, students who thrive, students with disabilities, students full of confidence, students full of doubt.

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Some examples of how professors can help the learners in their classes by anticipating their needs. Designing courses and instruction time with these needs in mind will benefit all.

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Emphasize variability not disability!

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National Center on Universal Design for Learning

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Tips for how to talk to students who are registered with Accessibility Services

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Tips for how to talk to students who are registered with Accessibility Services

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What to say? How to ask? What not to ask? Etc.

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Here are additional tips for talking with Professors_1

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First year is universally challenging to students. Understanding what your student may be experiencing can help you be an effective support person. While no two students will experience first year in exactly the same way, there are predictable ups and downs:

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First year is universally challenging to students. Understanding what your student may be experiencing can help you be an effective support person. While no two students will experience first year in exactly the same way, there are predictable ups and downs:

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How to make visual presentations/PowerPoint presentations accessible

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How to make visual presentations/PowerPoint presentations accessible

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Make sure you remember to create captions for your videos or turn on captions if they are available. Click on this link to see how easy it is to do so:

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How To Edit Automatic Captions in YouTube

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A syllabus designed based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has the potential to provide additional access and participation in a postsecondary course. This type of syllabus provides a variety of options for how information will be presented for the course, how students will be assessed, and ways to participate in the course as well as explicit expectations and available supports.

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Searching for Words: A Woman's Fight to Learn

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Searching for Words: A Woman's Fight to Learn

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Accessibility Advisor at SAIT (friend of Andrea's)

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Searching for Words: A Woman's Fight to Learn

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Colleen Smereka spent the first 22 years of her life pretending. In her words, she spent her life hiding - until she was diagnosed with a learning disability. After getting the help she needed, Colleen is now an advocate for those dealing with this invisible disability.

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Webpage. The downloadable syllabus checklist resource and an example of an accessible syllabus.

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Additional Writing Time; Writing in Isolation; and Use of Computers.

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Accommodation vs. Accessibility: A Pro-active Approach by Barbara Roberts

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Accommodation vs. Accessibility: A Pro-active Approach by Barbara Roberts

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Accommodation vs. Accessibility: A Pro-active Approach by Barbara Roberts

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Universal Design for Learning Symposium, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, 2014.

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Make your Moodle page accessible.

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The National Centre on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE) has developed one-page cheatsheets on creating accessible resources and content.

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Create your own Breakout Game!

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Invisible Disabilities and Postsecondary Education (Audio Described)

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Invisible Disabilities and Postsecondary Education (Audio Described)

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Invisible Disabilities and Postsecondary Education (Audio Described)

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Student self-determination combined with effective accommodations for disabilities with learning disabilities, attention deficits, autism spectrum disorders, and other issues that are not readily apparent can result in successful outcomes. Also available without audio description at http://youtu.be/skNAVgPb1Lo

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MRU, 2016

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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex developmental brain disorder caused by a combination of genetic and environmental influences. ASD is characterized, in varying degrees, by communication difficulties, social and behavioural challenges, and repetitive behaviours and is considered to be a lifespan disorder., A Accessibility Services provides accommodations and support for students in the spectrum.

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Is your course accessible? Are you wondering where to start? Learn these 6 Core Skills! 

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Is your course accessible? Are you wondering where to start? Learn these 6 Core Skills! 

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These six skills will generally improve the experience of adaptive technology users, people with non-apparent disabilities AND the general population--in essence, improving both accessibility and usability

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Brothers David and Jeff, former Mount Royal University students, share their perspectives on what it's like to be university students who have an Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asperger Syndrome).

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A Different View on the World - Perspectives of Two Brothers Who Have Been Diagnosed With Aspergers

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As university students who have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Asperger Syndrome), brothers David and Jeff, former Mount Royal University students, share their perspectives. Through their chosen "intermediaries", they speak to the need for tolerance, respect, understanding, and patience. They describe a spectrum of physical and educational differences.

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Failing at Normal: An ADHD Success Story

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Failing at Normal: An ADHD Success Story

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Have ADHD? Know someone with ADHD? Want to learn more?

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Failing at Normal: An ADHD Success Story | Jessica McCabe | TEDxBratislava

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Teaching University Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Teaching University Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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A Guide to Developing Academic Capacity and Proficiency

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'Academic staff, students who have an Autism Spectrum Disorder, and their parents, need a comprehensive guide to successfully graduating from college or University. The explanations and recommendations in this book are based on extensive experience of supporting and explaining the thinking and needs of students who have an ASD, while understanding the perspectives of both staff and students. Academic success and graduation will now be much easier to achieve.'
- Tony Attwood, PhD, Clinical Psychologist, Minds & Hearts Clinic, Australia, and author of The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome

'In the increasingly busy world of the academic, this book is invaluable. It is a comprehensive yet practical, step-by-step guide to easily developing teaching knowledge and successful strategies for working with university students with ASD. Vibrant case studies, clear tools & quick tips for teachers abound.'
- Petria McGoldrick, Disability Liaison Officer, University of Wollongong, Australia

'Anyone interested in autism will treasure this book. McMahon-Coleman and Draisma have created a much-needed resource, which covers everything one needs to know about university students on the spectrum. A must-have for students on the spectrum, their families, as well as education professionals at all levels.'
- Iva Strnadová, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales, Australia

'McMahon-Coleman and Draisma have provided the higher education sector with a much-needed resource in a well-structured, easy-to-read guide to the provision of educational services to students with ASD. Grounded in their vast personal and professional experience, the deep insights within this book provide high-value reading for all those focussed on the teaching and learning of students with ASD.'
- Dr Nola Norris, Morling College, Australia

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Teaching University Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

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'Academic staff, students who have an Autism Spectrum Disorder, and their parents, need a comprehensive guide to successfully graduating from college or University. The explanations and recommendations in this book are based on extensive experience of supporting and explaining the thinking and needs of students who have an ASD, while understanding the perspectives of both staff and students.

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Inspiration Porn and the Objectification of Disability: 

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Inspiration Porn and the Objectification of Disability: 

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Inspiration Porn and the Objectification of Disability: Stella Young at TEDxSydney 2014 (CAPTIONED)

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Students can experience any number of challenges and issues throughout the year. A month-by-month list of possible stressors is shown below to help parents, family and guardians become aware of when issues may typically arise, and what resources are available to support students.

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Applications of Universal Design in Education

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Applications of Universal Design in Education

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Stella Young

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I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much | Stella Young

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EF is an umbrella term for the complex cognitive processes that serve ongoing, goal-directed behaviors.” (Meltzer, 2007)

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Annie Elainey

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What does it mean to "overcome disability"? [CC]

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How do we continue to shape the brain in older students?

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Michael Merzenich: Growing evidence of brain plasticity

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Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich looks at one of the secrets of the brain's incredible power: its ability to actively re-wire itself. He's researching ways to harness the brain's plasticity to enhance our skills and recover lost function.

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Find out more about the importance of working memory for learning and living!

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Peter Doolittle: How your "working memory" makes sense of the world

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"Life comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it." In this funny, enlightening talk, educational psychologist Peter Doolittle details the importance -- and limitations -- of your "working memory," that part of the brain that allows us to make sense of what's happening right now.

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A course for faculty on teaching students with disabilities...

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A course for faculty on teaching students with disabilities...

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A new online course at the University of New Brunswick focuses on educating teachers on accommodating students with different disabilities.

The three-hour course took two years to design by the university.

"The university has requirement by law, human rights legislation and legal precedence to provide academic accommodation for students," said Ken Craft, a student accessibility counsellor at UNBSJ.

"Often what is academic accommodation and what isn't academic accommodation is not well understood by many people at the campus," he said.

"This course gives people a good tutorial on the requirements for duty to accommodate."

The online course is based on real-life scenarios with students. For instance, students who have trouble writing a paper could do an audio recording or multi-media presentation instead.

'This course gives people a good tutorial on the requirements for duty to accommodate.' - Ken Craft, student accessibility centre

"I think it's going to be a great access to instructors of all stages of their career," said Jody Gorham, director of student accessibility services.

"Early instructors individuals who are starting off at the teaching profession, it'll be really helpful to them because they may not have had any experience with the notion of duty to accommodate," she said.

"For more experienced instructors it helps them think about some more unique and challenging circumstances that can arise when it comes to accommodating students with diverse needs in their classroom," she added.

Outline of the course

The course was designed by Bev Bramble, an instructional designer at UNB.

It is scenario-based, where instructors can read a given scenario and answer questions based on it. It is also content-driven where participants can watch videos and read documents on the matter.

The idea for the course was a result of the document posted by the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission in 2014 that provided guidelines for post-secondary institutions on their duties to accommodate.

"Basically it was an opportunity to shed more light on the issue with faculty and instructors," Gorham said.

"We tried to go around to various faculty and council meetings and get a few minutes on the agenda but we found it hard because of their busy schedules so it wasn't doing the job of clear and in-depth presentation."

She said that's when they decided to do a separate course for faculty instead.

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Online course helps teachers educate students with disabilities

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A new online course at the University of New Brunswick focuses on educating teachers on accommodating students with different disabilities. The three-hour course took two years to design by the university. "The university has requirement by law, human rights legislation and legal precedence to provide academic accommodation for students," said Ken Craft, a student accessibility counsellor at UNBSJ.

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Inclusion, belonging and the disability revolution

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Inclusion, belonging and the disability revolution

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Jennie Fenton at TEDxBellingen

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Inclusion, belonging and the disability revolution: Jennie Fenton at TEDxBellingen

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David Rose has been on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) for over 30 years. Rose is a developmental neuropsychologist and educator whose primary focus is on the development of new technologies for learning. In 1984, Rose co-founded CAST, a not-for-profit research and development organization whose mission is to improve education for all learners through innovative uses of modern multimedia technology and contemporary research in the cognitive neurosciences.

In this video taken at the AHEAD Conference in 2015, Dr. David Rose explains the concept of Universal Design for Learning and the Neuroscience underpinning it. He explores how disability is contextual by looking at the differences between the brain of himself and his wife Ruth who has the ability to sing and hear in perfect pitch. He shows with great humour how context defines whether this attribute is a skill or a barrier. Please note this video is 1 hour 12 mins long.
UDL & the Continuum of Supports>>

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David Rose has been on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) for over 30 years. Rose is a developmental neuropsychologist and educator whose primary focus is on the development of new technologies for learning.

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National Centre for Universal Design on Learning

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Postsecondary Education and UDL | National Center On Universal Design for Learning

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udlguidelines.cast.org! The current UDL Center site will be taken down onAugust 31, 2018. Please update your links accordingly. A brand new UDL Center will launch after August 31. Follow us on social media to find out more.

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National Center on Universal Design for Learning Director David Rose explains the structure of the UDL Guidelines.

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National Center on Universal Design for Learning

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Implementation of Universal Design for Learning 

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Implementation of Universal Design for Learning 

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A PhD thesis (context elementary school)

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"Day by Day" is a short documentary about the experiences of artists living with disabilities who attend school at Tufts University. 

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"Day by Day" is a short documentary about the experiences of artists living with disabilities who attend school at Tufts University. 

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The film was created by Ray Bernoff and Benjamin Hosking in collaboration with Tufts Film and Media Studies and Student Accessibility Services.

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Day by Day - a documentary by Benjamin Hosking and Ray Bernoff