The second class of Faculty Accessibility Fellows marks part of an ongoing faculty-led effort to promote an inclusive campus culture that supports all learners.
“The Faculty Accessibility Fellows program is just one other way where Oswego is a real leader when it comes to faculty development,” said Fiona Coll, an English and creative writing faculty member who coordinates this year’s program.
This year’s class of Faculty Accessibility Fellows includes:
- Steve Abraham, School of Business
- Kathleen Blake, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Donna Greene, School of Communication, Media and the Arts
- Elizabeth Wilcox, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- Carol Willard, School of Education
Traditionally, those with disabilities might not have been able to get to spaces or access texts they need, but this is where the college and the fellows look to change the culture, said Coll, whose research interests includes the digital humanities’ efforts to make texts as widely available as possible.
“The SUNY system as a whole has a goal of becoming the most inclusive system of higher education in the entire country,” Coll said. “That’s a very big goal, but one part of that goal is to think about what it means to make our learning spaces available and accessible to groups of students who might historically have been excluded from those spaces.”
Rebecca Mushtare from the college’s Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching realized the importance of getting faculty involved in the conversations about information and electronic information accessibility. The program was part of a set of initiatives the college launched in late 2018 to enhance the institution’s digital accessibility and inclusion.
“The Faculty Accessibility Fellows program selects a small group of faculty every year and offers training in digital accessibility,” Coll explained.
After being part of the first cohort of seven faculty fellows, Coll’s transition to coordinating the program means she now leads outreach, training, discussion, brainstorming and related tasks.
“It means that I get to keep learning about these things, but I also get to see how there’s a real momentum building on this campus and beyond,” she said. “It really does feel like an opportunity that allows me to keep learning about an area and a field that is vast and complicated and difficult. It’s a very exciting and very wonderful opportunity.”
She complimented Mushtare for her tireless efforts toward accessibility in education, as well as Chief Technology Officer Sean Moriarty, whom Coll describes as “a visionary in terms of imagining what our campus could be,” for being two tremendous resources for the campus.
Coll noted the group poses questions to seek solutions, such as: “What does it mean to make a syllabus that can be read by someone who uses assistive technology? What does it mean to design an assignment that might be accessible to someone with cognitive differences? What does classroom discussion look like if that discussion were in fact to be totally inclusive to be mindful of the different ways that students appear and embody themselves in a classroom.”
The ultimate goal is for faculty to take what they learn back to their departments to support from a ground level a teaching culture that is as inclusive as possible to the variety of learners Oswego serves.
“We are in a world where we need all hands on deck,” Coll said. “Everyone should have access to the learning support that they need to become the most enriched, vital, open, productive version of themselves that they can be, and our role in higher education is to support, to guide, to offer opportunities for learning to whomever might want them. And I see that as a little bit of what I’m helping to do by participating in this program.”