Pandemic Consultations Create Space for Accessible Practices Through Technological Affordances and Reflection

Emma J. Harris
Emily L. Kayden

Introduction

As coordinators and consultants, we started working with Michigan State University’s (MSU) Writing Center (WC) in August of 2020—amid the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, our time with this WC has taken place entirely online. Through our positions within the WC, we have been working to make our consulting practices accessible, considering how this online shift impacts people with disabilities, with the help of Dr. Karen Moroski-Rigney and the Accessibility Committee (AC).*

Emily: As the Online Coordinator, I am responsible for reviewing our current policies and procedures and revising them to best suit our clients’ needs in the online environment. Working at the WC at MSU was my first exposure to WCs and their pedagogical practices. During my lifetime, I have had great exposure to the world of disability and accessibility through my paternal family** and my coursework. My technology background and unique perspective have granted me the opportunity to assess and reconsider our policies and how we can incorporate accessible practices in our WC and beyond. 

Emma: Prior to working as a writing consultant and Coordinator for the Strategies for Teaching Across Fields workshop at MSU’s WC, I had consulted both in-person and online at my undergrad university. Prior to MSU, I hadn’t personally experienced disability, discrimination based on disability, or critical conversations of access and disability. I’m grateful to have the guidance of the AC, disabled folx, and research by disabled scholars and scholars of disability to help me recognize the shared stakes we have in our work as we pursue transformative access (Mingus; Brewer, Selfe, & Yergeau).

Our unique positions as coordinators, consultants, and members of the AC position us to work to increase the accessibility of our WC and campus community through directly engaging as consultants and suggesting administrative changes that benefit disabled people. In this manner, we have worked to separate disability from the individual and move from the medical model of disability, which focuses on accommodation, to the social model, where we focus on making our WC’s overall practices accessible. Additionally, our perspectives have allowed us to compare and imagine how to apply what we’re learning beyond our campus. Within this context, the COVID-19 pandemic gave us the chance to focus on practices of online learning through our virtual classrooms and online consultations. Through these experiences, we believe it’s crucial that we continue working to increase the accessibility of online consultations post-pandemic, because online communication is only becoming more essential. In this reflection, we discuss our experiences working toward accessible online consultations during and post-pandemic by reflecting on our current consulting practices using a critical disability studies framework.

Affordances of Technology Used Amid the Pandemic

Our WC has approached virtual consulting through mediums that must be addressed as distinct. This separation has allowed us to view their potential and what they uniquely offer. By the flexibility that virtual consultations afford us, we’ve reached more students than we have in previous semesters. As a result, our clients with disabilities have been able to utilize our services through different means and mediums that ultimately lead to a more accessible WC. 

Unique to online consultation methods are the built-in accessibility tools of the platforms we use. For instance, Google has been rolling out new tools to increase their platforms’ accessibility. Our AC team has been creating shareable guides and workshops to make tools used in classes and writing consultations more accessible and easier to navigate. We have worked to create these guides in a format that’s accessible, consistent, and condensed into one location. Additionally, our WC has begun using Zoom’s live captioning feature and recording sessions (with permission) for folks to revisit.

Pandemic Pedagogy

Because of the pandemic, our changing emotional needs have come to the foreground of our interactions and have brought opportunity for us to reflect on the emotional labor and energy it takes to share our stories and writing, access consultations, and interact in them (Price; Van Dyke and Lovett; Miserandino). In an effort to make consultations more accessible, we emphasize deepening our connections to writers themselves, being lenient with people’s time and processing, and understanding our physical presence and our directiveness (Johnson) in consultations.

We’ve spent more time talking about how people are feeling, the contexts and striking elements of their writing, and relating personal experiences–connecting more to the person doing the writing. In tandem with this, we must understand that people know themselves and their needs best. Clients need to choose ways to interact that work for them at specific moments. For example, we understand that clients or consultants may opt to have their camera off in video consultations or want more directiveness instead of prompting questions. Each consultation is a chance for us to determine how to make them more accessible, engaging, and encouraging for everyone.

Conclusion

Increasing access doesn’t just happen in the platforms we use and ways we interact. It’s ongoing and requires listening to our and our clients’ requests, being flexible in our approach to every session, and reflecting and holding ourselves accountable for how our practices may or may not be accessible, including to people we haven’t interacted with as a result. 

This reflection is framed by existing research in the field from disability scholars*** and our mentor Dr. Karen Moroski-Rigney. These folx have helped situate us as people who could impact the way others experience learning, teaching, and consulting, informing and guiding our collective work to make educational spaces more accessible. In order to not simply ‘check the box’ of accessibility (Minich), we must continue understanding the effects of these pandemic-time shifts in thinking and practice as crucial to framing disability and accessibility in higher education. Through situating ourselves in existing research, practicing and researching more accessible pedagogy, incorporating technological affordances and perspectives of disabled people, and bringing our findings to WC consultant trainings, our goal is to increase accessibility in The Writing Center at MSU and encourage the sharing of knowledge, motivation, and practices to promote access beyond our institution.

*Committee Members:

  • Adrianna Aviles
  • Emma (EJ) Harris
  • Emily Kayden
  • Imari Tetu
  • Jacob Weiland

**Em’s Grandparents had fostered 89 children with disabilities who were often neglected in foster care organizations and overlooked by adopting parents. 

***Scholars such as Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Julie Minich, Allison Hitt, Mia Mingus, Eli Clare, Sami Schalk, Christina Cedillo, and our mentor Karen Moroski-Rigney.

Works Cited

Brewer, Elizabeth, Cynthia Selfe, and Melanie Yergeau. “Creating a Culture of Access in Composition Studies.” Composition Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2014, pp. 151-154.

Dolmage, Jay. Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education. University of Michigan Press, 2017.

Johnson, J. B. “Reevaluation of the Question as a Teaching Tool.” Dynamics of the Writing Conference: Social and Cognitive Interaction, edited by T. Flynn and M. King, National Council of Teachers of English, 1993, pp. 34–40.

Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice.” Leaving Evidence, 2017, https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/. Accessed 1 October 2020.

Minich, Julie. “Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now.” Lateral, vol. 5, no. 1, 2016, https://doi.org/10.25158/L5.1.9

Miserandino, C. “The Spoon Theory.” You Don’t Look Sick: The Stories Behind the Smiles, 2003, https://butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/. Accessed 9 March 2020.

Price, Margaret. “Defining Kairotic Space.” Multimodality in Motion, 2013, http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/18.1/coverweb/yergeau-et-al/pages/space/defining.html. Accessed 9 March 2020.

Van Dyke, Turnip, and Sara Lovett. “Invisible Disability and the Writing Center.” WRA 495: Writing Centers and Access, Michigan State University [Zoom], 2020. Visiting Lecture.

About the Authors

Author photoEmma Harris is a graduate student in Michigan State University’s Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy program, where she also works as the Graduate Coordinator for the Strategies for Teaching Across Fields Workshop and consultant at the Writing Center. She earned her BA in English: Professional and Public Writing from Auburn University. This upcoming year, she will be joining the First-Year Writing team and continuing to pursue her research interests, including accessibility and disability justice, prison pedagogy, community engagement, writing across the curriculum, and writing centers as sites for social justice.

 

Author photoEm Kayden is a graduate student in Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing at Michigan State University where she serves as the Online Coordinator at the Writing Center. She earned her BA in New Media Studies and Communication from Alma College. Currently, Emily studies the affordances of technologies and their intersections with access and disability. In the future, she intends to pursue a career in the fields of technical communication and accessibility.

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