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Cultivating Accessible Educational Pathways and Spaces

CHANGING MINDSETS: SYSTEMS, PROGRAMS, AND POLICIES

Emily Ackerman, a postdoctoral researcher in the Lahav Lab at Harvard Medical School, began the workshop on educational pathways and spaces with a panel on changing mindsets in systems, policies, and programs in higher education. She began by asking the panelists about systemic barriers to full participation of people with disabilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

One barrier is the lack of representation, said Lisa Meeks, clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan and executive director of the Docs With Disabilities Initiative. We send messages, covertly and overtly, through society about what people can and cannot do, she said, and “when you don’t have counter-stories, you don’t have opportunities to see yourself going into those scientific roles,” especially for women, people with disabilities, people of color, and the LGBTQIA+¹ population. Stories and mentorship are needed for people to grasp onto and say they can go down this career path, Meeks said.

Attitudinal barriers manifest into direct barriers, said Yvette E. Pearson, vice president of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Texas at Dallas. As a program officer at the U.S. National Science Foundation

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¹ LGBTQIA+ refers to individuals who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, ally/asexual, and other sexual and gender identities.

(NSF) several years ago, she spoke to a group of leaders from state schools for the deaf and blind who were interested in a collaboration. They were interested in bringing together education and workforce partners to help their students advance into STEM education and career paths. But the workforce partner missed a half-day of discussion, and one of the first things they said when they showed up was: “Well, I just don’t think we have any jobs they can do.” Starting with that mindset sets up systemic barriers that keep people out, Pearson said.

Disability Resource Providers and the “Real World”

In Pearson’s own experience in academia—as well as in the literature—what keeps showing up is misconceptions about accommodations for students with disabilities, particularly students who have unseen disabilities. There is a widespread sentiment that somehow providing accommodations is unfair to students without disabilities or doing so somehow does not prepare students for “the real world,” she said, and this ignorance around disability leads to a lot of barriers.

A related barrier is the lack of standardized education for disability resource providers (DRPs) on campuses to understand STEM fields, Meeks said. “They may be able to understand accommodations in an English classroom, but that will not translate to a biology or chemistry or engineering lab,” she said. DRPs are critical because they work with both students and faculty, but they are underpaid, underappreciated, and underfunded, Meeks said, and they need to be supported more clearly and be offered more professional development opportunities. “The real world is almost always more flexible than any educational program,” Meeks added. On both her and Pearson’s podcasts, they try to elevate stories of people who are disabled in STEM fields to “dismantle the belief systems and attitudinal barriers.”

As a wheelchair user with very limited use of one side of her body, Pearson said being in the world every day is a problem-solving exercise, and it is critical that that perspective has the opportunity to be added to STEM conversations. Within the past year, she is proud that her university has been able to bring accessibility under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a result, both student and employee accessibility are managed in one place, and they can begin to move beyond being a caseload management organization to a true resource center for the broader campus community, she said.

Institutional Changes

Ackerman agreed that this fits with her experience of navigating educational spaces as a student. “Most disabled people wake up every day [and] find they live in a system that is not made for them. The educational institutions that we know and love were not designed to hold us, and so we go throughout our days fighting these barriers,” she said. Ackerman then asked the panel what changes are needed at the institutional level.

“We need to get rid of or dismantle the exchange system we have set up where you have to tell me you are disabled and you have to prove you are disabled, and then I might do something to modify the system,” Meeks said. Her own experience with a degenerative autoimmune disorder has shown her that people make assumptions about her disability and access needs, which are reflected in the conversations they have about her disability. Instead, educational spaces can acknowledge that many people coming to them may have a disability and start looking at universal design as a mechanism for building inclusive environments proactively, “instead of always being in this reaction mindset,” she added. Institutional messaging also needs to acknowledge there are disabled scientists and disabled engineers, she said.

Universal and accessible design offer “huge opportunities” in the context of curriculum and the way we educate students, Pearson said. She and her partner, Ann Gulley of Auburn University, led a team for an NSF-funded study to test and study a novel way of teaching and assessing mathematics that was developed when Gulley was at Auburn Montgomery to help a student who was blind and whose mobility limitations meant that he could not use traditional braille.² “Some might say a reasonable accommodation would be to waive the math requirements, but then what is your degree worth?” Pearson said.

The process of developing this learning approach,³ Process Driven Math (PDM), was very user-centered and user-driven, Pearson said, and was later adapted for sighted learners. The team saw all sorts of benefits for students with and without disabilities. As an engineering educator, she also cited a change in the field’s accreditation criteria in 2019 that “opened up a world of possibilities for us to think differently about how we educate more inclusively and more equitably” as well as educate future engineers to be more inclusive

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² For more information, see https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1726869&HistoricalAwards=false.

³ This process was developed by Gulley, Logan Prickett (the student-user), and Jordan Price.

in their own practice, being able to receive information from an audience who may have a range of disabilities, and integrate that into their work. Moments when solutions like these are “baked into the design” of the institutions are rare, Ackerman noted, but are really meaningful to the student.

Sharing Practices

One of the pivotal reasons for creating the Docs With Disabilities Initiative and other groups has been the siloing of people and solutions, Meeks said. People would devise a solution for one institution or one learner but would not make a universal design based on that experience, nor share it with the world. “We need to find a way to operationalize this as just the new normal,” she said. “Let’s embed this into the way we teach or assess so that that is already in place and we will build on this each time.” This would also remove an attitudinal barrier, Meeks added. When you are faced with the evidence that this is no big deal, that this has been done countless times across institutions—avoiding the fear of the unknown that drives so much of ableism. Making solutions part of the new normal also helps people with disabilities be valued and fully integrated in the institutions. “You can create access and still make people feel excluded,” she said.

Wider Changes

Meeks said she loves accurate media portrayals of disabled people that model integration and access. People sharing their lived experience and disclosing is powerful, but she would like to see more effort in storytelling for younger students. “To have an impact we need to start at elementary school,” she said. “I think we need to send messages to children as they develop, they can be anything they want to be regardless of disability status.… It is part of being human, and we need to not make it super inspirational or villainize it.”

Stories of lived experience of people with disabilities help parents see real possibility too, Pearson said. She also wants as many institutions as possible to move beyond a compliance viewpoint, where “checking a box” when complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act⁴ or state and local laws can still mean things are inaccessible and do not lead to feelings of belong-

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⁴ 42 USC 12101, available at https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title42/chapter126&edition=prelim.

ing. Having people with different types of disabilities engaged from the very beginning is key, “because we can bring so many different perspectives, we can help illuminate ... what the possibilities are,” Pearson said.

DISABILITY-FRIENDLY SPACES IN HIGHER EDUCATION AND UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING

Sam Catherine Johnston and Luis Pérez, both from the postsecondary and workforce development office at CAST,⁵ presented their forthcoming commissioned paper,⁶ on creating disability-friendly spaces in higher education and universal design for learning. CAST’s vision is educational spaces where “every learner can have engaging opportunities to access education training environments that are designed with their needs and preferences in mind,” Johnston said. Creating greater equity in education and training systems will create a broader range of people informing the STEM workforce, including delivery of STEM-related services and care, she added.

Social Construction of Disadvantage

While the paper covers how universal design for learning can create more inclusive practices, their bigger “North Star” is to “address the fact that for many, many decades we’ve … rewarded a narrow definition of intelligence and learning in our schools in a way that excludes people with disability as well as many other groups,” who do not fit into “one-size-fits-all” systems, Johnston said. From early education onward, the expectation is that all students in a very narrow age range will accomplish the same things in the same ways, she said, but that is not aligned with variability in human learning and contributes to the elimination of differences. Remediating or excluding these variabilities in the education system is sometimes not connected with functional issues, but instead, with stereotypes, she added.

Universal design for learning (UDL) functions in the opposite way, centering difference and human variability as an asset. “UDL is about starting in the margins,” Johnston said, understanding for whom systems are not effective and then moving toward the middle. “So what is essential for some, benefits many. We really see the margins as the source of innovation.”

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⁵ See https://www.cast.org/.

⁶ Pérez and Johnston, 2023, Creating Disability Friendly and Inclusive Accessible Spaces in Higher Education (https://nap.nationalacademies.org/resource/27245).

Pérez added that a narrow definition of intelligence also excludes collective intelligence: the way we learn in a social environment and the way we interact with technology to learn. He delved further into the idea of social construction of disadvantage in that for a long time left-handedness was constructed as negative in educational spaces, even punished with physical violence. But a change—the ballpoint pen—deconstructed the disadvantage of being left-handed when writing, Pérez said, and identified the flaw was in the tool, not in the person themself. The forthcoming Pérez and Johnston paper argues that if someone is not learning in a STEM course, look at the learning barriers; do not blame the student. “I think the other lesson there is that remediation so often doesn’t work,” Pérez said. “You’re asking someone not to do what’s natural, not to lean into their own intelligence, their own ways of being in the world.” There is hope for change in the left-handedness example, he said.

Universal Design for Learning Framework

First defined in the Higher Education Opportunity Act (2008),⁷ UDL is an evidence-based framework that draws from the learning sciences and instructional methods to design for the widest range of learners from the outset, Johnston said. With UDL, “we create flexible, customizable, and accessible learning environments and experiences,” she said, and it centers variability.

UDL comprises three major principles based in three types of learning networks, she explained. First are the affective networks in our brain, that is, why someone pays attention in the first place. “We need to provide multiple means of engagement so that we can ensure students who are motivated through different ways … have entry points into and through our environment,” she said. Second are the recognition networks, the “what” of learning. UDL supports multiple means of presenting information and ways of accessing and comprehending the learning. “We have more than one way of presenting content here [at the workshop],” she noted. Finally, there are strategic networks—the “how” of learning. UDL provides multiple means of action and expression of that learning. “This is so critical in STEM,” Johnston said. “We want to make sure in our strategic networks—the frontal part of our brain—that we allow for different ways to build skill development and to express what we understand so [that] we can continue to build skills and knowledge in labs and fieldwork.”

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⁷ P.L. 110–315, August 14, 2008, available at https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ315/PLAW-110publ315.pdf.

Accessibility is Foundational

Both ableism and disableism⁸ are forces that work to exclude learners, Pérez said. UDL needs to consider the design of the environment, but we also need to look at its assumptions, he said. “We have to change the mindset before we go into specific design practices, because otherwise what we are doing is kind of patching the cracks in the foundation of a building that is not standing on solid ground.” One of the key concepts is “accessibility is foundational,” or what is essential to some is helpful for all, Pérez said, using the curb-cut effect as an example of this in practice. Flexible learning practices also benefit people going back to school, people who need literacy support and working memory support, as well as multilingual learners.

A focus on UDL also does not mean that accommodations can be excluded from consideration. Instead, they can be partners in inclusion, Pérez said, adding that taking a UDL-first approach addresses the limitations of solely focusing on accommodations. Many of these limitations are applicable in STEM, where much of learning does not follow predictable classroom structure required for most accommodations. “They don’t work as well when a lot of the work is independent or research work and you need to avail yourself of lab spaces and research facilities,” Pérez explained. Accommodations also place the burden to change on the student, rather than on the curriculum, he added. A common example of UDL and accommodations working together is using both captions, which benefits a range of different people, and American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters, which may be more effective for those whose first language is ASL.

CAST’s Suggestions for Lab-Based Learning

Much has been written about UDL in the classroom, including by CAST itself, so for the paper, Johnston and Pérez wanted to focus on steps to bringing accessibility to labs and fieldwork, Pérez said. Their suggestions include the following:

• Incorporating universal design principles into the design of the lab space

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⁸ There are two spelling conventions “disableism” and “disablism” that are used by various scholars, with both referring to discrimination against or exclusion of people with disabilities. In this publication we defer to the author’s selected preference of the term “disableism.”

• Exploring accessible tools, for example, a probe that can speak out loud as the data are being collected
• Vetting digital materials for accessibility, both instructions for the tools and digital places where information is being collected and documented
• Ensuring information about accommodation for service animals is readily available, and providing protective equipment for the animals
• Creating accessible virtual tours of lab facilities (“so that people can become more comfortable [and] more familiar with that space,” Pérez said. “That really facilitates navigation.”)
• Including ways for students to report both positive and negative accessibility experiences as part of fieldwork evaluations and sharing that information with future students, and in situations where safety is a concern, pairing up individuals with similar fieldwork interests.

Artificial Intelligence and Accessibility in Educational Spaces

We can think about artificial intelligence (AI) in accessible education in different ways, Pérez said, either as replacement or augmentation. Johnston and Pérez chose to look at it as augmentation, as AI has already improved captions and may allow for a better head start on image descriptions, he said. “We really emphasize this as a way to augment and distribute potential, rather than a way to replace it,” but he added that it is important to think about how this technology develops and includes people with disabilities in design and implementation—to improve the output and to minimize negative implications.

KEY ADDITIONS FROM REFLECTIONS PANEL

A panel of experts shared with Johnston and Pérez additional questions or topics their paper could discuss. Jacquelyn Chini, professor of physics and undergraduate program associate director at the University of Central Florida, said it would be useful to discuss the balance between knowledge, time, and cost for faculty. While there are resources for faculty to apply UDL principles in the classroom, basically no training is required to teach at the postsecondary level. “Sometimes we don’t know the basic teaching principles let alone the accessible and inclusive principles,” she said, and

that drives the need for more products for accessibility. Cost has been a challenge, she has found in her research—more expensive curricular materials have accessibility built in, while funded research may not because of a lack of money in their budget to access the support. She was interested in hearing from the panelists about solutions to make sure faculty have high-quality, inclusive, and accessible materials to use.

Developing and demonstrating STEM techniques specific to your specialization is crucial, and transitions can be a focal point, said Bradley Duerstock, professor of engineering practice at Purdue University. “Self-determination is key to developing those tools,” he said, and allow you to be successful at the next educational step. “These transitions are very important and often judged in STEM by your expertise in doing a technique.”

UDL discussions must be extended to consider how disabilities can be an advantage to the world of science, especially in fieldwork, said Caroline Solomon, director of the School of Science, Technology, Accessibility, Mathematics, and Public Health, or STAMP, at Gallaudet University. “When talking about individuals, we are making contributions to STEM as Deaf people,” she said; for example, during scuba dives, “we can sign underwater; we don’t have a communication barrier underwater, that is a benefit to us.”

Shifting Accessibility to the Beginning

One of the ways to lessen the load on faculty searching for a high-quality, accessible curriculum is focusing on procurement up front, Pérez said. “It’s not a sexy topic, but it’s an essential one,” he said. Instead of applying accessibility at the end of the process, “we need to start early: when we consider the learning management system that we will use at our university or the library system or the lab tools we will purchase.” If it is addressed earlier, then faculty or lab instructors can focus on adjusting, not starting from the beginning, he said.

Chini agreed on the shift to procurement, as well as expectations for other early-stage processes. A better future would be one where it is not just the new NSF call looking for input from disabled collaborators, but every call asks how the research is going to be accessible, especially when it is curriculum design or tools design, she said. One of the UDL principles she had seen from working STEM faculty, especially at the introductory course level, is offering students multiple ways of showing their learning, but that can be challenging given time constraints and learning management systems.

As people who are often gatekeepers, our jobs are to understand that we do not always know, and there may be multiple ways to get to the high standards education can require, Johnston said. Relatedly, she worries that, in STEM, “we cherry-pick the people with disabilities we think can be most normal or the most remediated. And we lose those opportunities for distributed intelligences,” because of discomfort or unfamiliarity. You never see conversations in STEM about people who have intellectual disabilities, she added, even though they are affected by the decisions these fields make.

Approaches for Decision-Makers

Panel moderator Dave Caudel, associate director of the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation at Vanderbilt University, asked the panel to describe potential approaches and processes for decision-makers to implement UDL. Solomon suggested testing an environment first. At Gallaudet, they were not going to set up a whole new building for labs without testing it, so they went to a warehouse and developed a mock lab, she said. They tracked how people moved in that environment, and learned a lot about how a variety of people used the space and what would be appropriate and accessible.

Including the voices of people with disabilities throughout means making sure there are open lines of communication for feedback, Pérez said. “Nothing about us without us … too often in higher ed, we have heard this excuse of ‘nobody asked for that,’ but that puts the burden on the person doing the asking” and does not consider if there are mechanisms for people to ask.

Safety concerns and regulations are another way lab designs can become inaccessible, Chini said. She described an ongoing dispute about keeping mobile phones out of labs as well as an “egregious example” where a physics grad student could not get into the research space during their internship because they were a wheelchair user and were told they could not use an elevator access space because of safety rules. “These are the kind of real things that are barring folks from participating. We need to be creative about the solutions to make sure folks are safe but able to access.”

It is important to have safety policies and written rules in labs and research environments, Solomon said, especially in research vessels where you may not be able to hear alarms. “If we do have good, sound policies for ship captains or managers who have already practiced in that field or in lab spaces, it will really help a lot and to document for reference … what is and what isn’t safe in the field,” she said. One of the main design requirements

for an accessible lab space is to make them reconfigurable, Duerstock said. Some things must be fixed structures, but having very moveable lab benches and getting electricity from the ceiling helps in multiple ways, including improving interactions between students in labs.

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