Toward an Accessible Pedagogy: Dis/ability, Multimodality, and Universal Design in the Technical Communication Classroom
Shannon Walters, Temple University
The Room Itself Is Active: How Classroom Design Impacts Student Engagement
Melissa L. Rands Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Ann M. Gansemer-Topf Iowa State University
Shannon Walters, Temple University
- Redefining disability
- Ensuring inclusion of both visible and non-visible disabilities
- Social model of disability
- Moving away from seeing disability as monolithic
- Rather than stem solely from the individual, disability is propagated by limiting nature of structures, designs, and constructed environments
- Universal Design (UD)
- Include the widest possible range of students, both disable and non-disabled when creating curriculum and establishing pedagogy
- Recognizes “the importance of including everyone in the discussions that create space”
- Technical Communication Classrooms
- Multimodal approaches
- Visual, auditory, spatial, linguistic, and gestural
- Addresses impairment specific concerns rather than the more social approach of UD classrooms
- Multimodal approaches
- Acknowledge that some accommodations may be incompatible with others, modes cannot be simply substituted
The Room Itself Is Active: How Classroom Design Impacts Student Engagement
Melissa L. Rands Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Ann M. Gansemer-Topf Iowa State University
- Qualitative study on the effects of an Active Learning Classroom (ACL) on student engagement
- Active Learning --> “students doing things, and thinking about the things they are doing”
- small group discussion, peer questioning, cooperative learning, problem-based learning, simulations, journal writing, and case-study teaching
- Goals -->
- (a) “creating a sense of classroom community”, (b) “helping students work at their optimal level of challenge”, and (c) “teaching so that students learn holistically”
- ACL "erased the line" between teachers and students enhancing community and student engagement
- “Something about [the design] makes everybody, probably the students and professor, more comfortable and able to really engage with what's going on in the classroom,”
- Use of audiovisual tools to autonomously monitor education
- “[My course] is very complicated so it’d be nice to draw things out… it was nice to have the knowledge of knowing a place on campus that we can do something like that and really utilize [it]”
- Physical mobility -->
- Freedom of movement allowed for greater community connections, fuller classroom involvement, and simultaneous mind and body engagement