Interdisciplinary Talks about Disability and Accessibility 11 am-5:15 pm on Zoom, Tuesday April 8

The 2^nd day of this year’s Symposium explores a myriad of interdisciplinary topics that demonstrate how the experiences of People with Disabilities are woven into day-to-day lives, professional pathways, and Education. The diverse conversations are guaranteed to spark a heightened understanding of the many layers of accessibility, and perhaps will call for a “re-imagining” of how space is created.  

Beginning with a panel on the ADA and the Law, the afternoon sessions will explore how Students with Disabilities are supported on higher education campuses and how they are situated in the classroom. Later, panels will consider the complexities of being an educator with a disability and support systems to build more inclusive classrooms. We invite you to join us at the end for a collective Q&A/Discussion led by Yale Prof. Deborah Streahle. 

ASL and CART services will be provided.

Schedule

The ADA and the Law 11-12 PM

11 AM: Mass Accommodations 

Presented by Shirley Lin

In the early years of COVID-19, decision-makers improvised under traditional disability law—even if unevenly—generating mass accommodations that represented tens of millions of people problem-solving, experiencing structural access and safety, and intensively collaborating on organizational design over a concerted period. Under an experiential analysis, these were disability-informed phenomena that spanned diverse disabilities and accommodations frameworks. Mass accommodations also signaled hidden doctrines we might leverage outside the courts that bolster the role of organizational theory and other models in legal persuasion. The Article evaluates mass accommodations through each of the following intersectional lenses: Universal Design theory, the Theory of Racialized Organizations, and aggregate legal approaches—at the meso-level—demonstrating how we might decenter current doctrine and methods as political constraints upon jurisprudence. By so doing, we decline to concede away normative gains for disability and civil rights law, nor their potential to reconfigure our political economy in the future. 

11:15 AM: Panel Discussion

Presented by Shirley Lin, Laura Bairett, and Jorge Ledesma. Moderated by Beck Boorstein

12-1:30 PM Supporting Students with Disabilities on Campus 

12-12:45 PM: A Day in the Life of an Accessibility Specialist presented by Yale Student Accessibility Services 

Have you ever wondered how accommodations are decided? Determining reasonable and appropriate accommodations can seem both straightforward and confusing, depending on the circumstance and the level of involvement in the interactive process. Join SAS as they flip roles and allow students to be the Accessibility Specialist. This session will go through the whole accommodation review process, including documentation review, intake meetings, and presenting the request to the Accommodation Committee. Session attendees will be able to review a mock request and watch as two students become an Accessibility Specialist in the Student Accessibility Services office.

12:45-1:30 pm: Providing support for students with disabilities on campus, presented by Yale Student Accessibility Services 

Accessibility requirements generally are consistent across different environments. However, the process of supporting accessibility and disability accommodations across campuses can vary depending on the type of institution. While some accessibility offices work as a central unit for accessibility, others may have different models with different requirements for their campus partners. SAS will bring together leadership from various institutions to lead a panel on how schools navigate supporting students with disabilities in their specific institutional environment.

The Many Layers of Disability and Education 1:30-5:15 PM

1:30 pm: Experiments in Access Pedagogy 

Presented by Niv Karthikeyan, Kira Tang, Fateya Omer, and  Audrey Nannor 

“The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility.” -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress. 
 
“Meaningful access… is relational accountability. It materializes from a commitment to enact, iterate, and re-iterate our answer to the questions of who belongs, where, and how.” -Aimi Hamraie, “Beyond Accommodation” 
 
Most of the spaces students occupy in the university were not designed with their comfort or physical and mental well-being in mind. This is particularly true for students with disabilities and chronic illnesses, students of color, students with marginalized genders, and students from working-class backgrounds. Last semester, Audrey, Fateya, and Kira (as students) and Niv (as a teacher) worked together to reimagine what a classroom based on values of comfort, generosity, holistic access, and feminist care could feel like. This presentation will share specific strategies in access pedagogy that they co-developed in their classroom. They hope it will serve other teachers with classrooms of their own. 

2 pm: Try and Fit In: Rethinking the Classroom Desk as a Site for Possibility 

Presented by Sarah Berry Pierce 

From 2014 to 2018, if you walked into one of my high school classrooms in small-town Mississippi, you would see everything you would expect to see in a Catholic schoolroom: a crucifix above the door, a whiteboard with an assortment of fading expo markers, stacks of textbooks and bibles, and rows of matching desks. However, one chair was placed at a different desk that twinkled in the front of the room. For me, the desk that fit my body comfortably became a beacon of hope despite its glaring difference. In this project, I ask how theorizing the school desk as a potential site for hope might begin to reorient educational practices of supporting the body in classrooms. I ask what might looking at the school desk reveal about the intersections between fatness, disability, childhood, and the way knowledge is built both in the body and mind. This presentation hopes to take up fat embodiment to ask how thinking beyond the body and into the chair may reorient approaches to accessibility within educational spaces. Looking to sites of learning from K-12 to graduate program classrooms, I work with methodologies of fat studies and disability studies to ask how students might settle themselves into learning not what their body should do but how they might participate in moving towards body liberation.  

2:15 pm: Lifting the Fog in Recognizing Twice-Exceptional Abilities among BIPOC Learners 

Presented by Charissa Owens 

In educational settings, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) learners face a dual challenge of being disproportionately represented in special education while also being underrepresented in Accelerated or Gifted programs. This dichotomy in identification can hinder their academic progress and limit their access to enriched learning opportunities. The presentation, "Lifting the Fog in Recognizing Twice-Exceptional Abilities among BIPOC Learners," addresses the critical need for equitable recognition and support of twice-exceptional (2e) BIPOC students—those who are both gifted and have disabilities. By reevaluating existing frameworks and biases in educational systems, educators can better identify and nurture the unique talents of 2e BIPOC learners. Proper identification and support are essential for these students to overcome barriers, ultimately enabling them to achieve their full scholastic potential. This presentation aims to spotlight effective strategies and interventions that can create a more inclusive and supportive educational environment for BIPOC learners within K-12 and college settings. 

2:30 pm:  Understanding Entitlement vs. Eligibility after High School: Multilingual Students in College 

Presented by Audrey A. Trainor and Logan Roberts

As students leave high school and prepare for adulthood, they leave the entitlement culture of school accessibility shaped by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004). Post school, these young adults enter the eligibility culture at work, school, and daily life shaped by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA; 2008). For public school students in high school, transition planning should prepare them for this shift (Trainor et al., 2019). The shift requires them to be familiar with disability rights and be prepared to self-advocate. Using interviews from successful students with disabilities who were also multilingual, we asked them to share both their paths to college and their experiences as college students (Trainor et al., 2024). Findings from this study generated implications for the students themselves and for institutions of higher education. We will present practical strategies that improve students’ knowledge of their disability rights under ADA and self-advocacy strategies identified by the students. In addition, because participants were also multilingual and had experienced immigration, either themselves or within their families, we will present how multilingual young adults draw upon this identity as strength and address related barriers. Finally, we employ our findings to identify institutional changes that map to policy for disability rights in higher education. 

2:45 pm: Building for the Body: Mobility Research and Pedagogy in the RISD Department of Industrial Design 

Presented by Max Pratt 

This presentation will cover the research of Max Pratt, Hyundai Regeneration Studio Faculty and Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and their work in the field of mobility and design for disability.  
 
They will specifically cover their background in design for professional bicycle racing, and how that has led to work in the additive manufacturing of assistive devices and prosthetics, new materials and approaches to design for disability, as well as their teaching practice within the RISD department of Industrial Design, where their students design and prototype novel mobility and accessibility solutions at the undergraduate and graduate level. 

3:15 pm: Instructors with Disabilities: Policies, Practices, Potentials

Moderated by Deborah Streahle and featuring panelists: 

• Julie McGurk, Director, Teaching Development and Initiatives at the Poorvu Center at Yale 
• Jamaal Thomas, Associate Director, Deputy ADA and Section 504 Coordinator, and Deputy Title IX Coordinator 
• Monkol Lek, Assistant Professor of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine 
• Aparna Nair, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough, at the Department for Health and Society/Center for Global Disability Studies 
• Katie Wang, Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale School of Public Health 

4:15 pm Discussion and Q&A 

Moderated by Deborah Streahle.