Introduction

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our fifth edition of The Wac Reader, a digest of curated articles and sources focused on writing and reading across the curriculum.

This year’s theme is Accessible Pedagogy. Accessible pedagogy is a praxis of making the classroom space inclusive to all. It attempts to break down barriers that prevent our students from fully engaging in learning. Because of this, it has primarily been framed within disability studies; however, it also has strong ties to themes we have covered in previous digests, namely queer pedagogy and anti-racist pedagogy. Working towards an accessible learning environment requires interrogating how our institution excludes marginalized students because of their dis/ability, race, class, gender, sexuality, or other oppressed positionalities. An accessible pedagogy framework invites us to be sensitive to embodied experience in the classroom space, both for our own bodies as educators and for the bodies of our students. How do our bodies enter the learning environment, and how can we build care in resistance to the institution marginalizing or flattening through normativity different bodies? We find this topic to be of particular importance given that providing access to students and teachers alike is under threat in our current political moment, and how mysterious this topic is to many educators.

In our first section of the digest, we will highlight a few of the major themes in accessible pedagogy scholarship. For each theme, we summarize the major concepts and reference further reading. The five themes we highlight are:

• Universal Design for Learning
• Pedagogy of Care
• Embodied (Queer and Anti-Racist) Pedagogy
• Linguistic Justice
• Accessible Assignment Design

We have included two interviews this year covering different aspects of this topic. In our first interview with Kathleen Lyons, an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Fairleigh Dickinson University, we talk to her about teachers being access makers. Lyons suggests that making accessible pedagogy is a process that can be as simple as learning to make captions for videos, or can be as big as making all assignments in a course accessible to all. In our second interview with Talia Schaffer, a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, we discuss how to create a community of care within the classroom. She suggests that care is so important at CUNY specifically because the education system often has not cared for our students.

In our final section, we move away from the theory of accessible pedagogy to offer 10 strategies for implementing accessible pedagogy in the classroom and in assignment design. In these strategies, we remain committed to Lyon’s suggestion that accessible pedagogy is a process of making, and so we offer both small and more holistic strategies.

We’re excited for you to read our fifth edition of The Wac Reader and look forward to sharing more of our love for writing and reading pedagogy with you.

Your Friends,

Valerie Fryer-Davis and Natasha Tiniacos

WAC Hostos Fellows

Themes of Accessible Pedagogy

Universal Design for Learning: Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is the go-to theory for accessible pedagogy, since it attempts to address the systemic nature of ableism, racism, homophobia, etc. by recrafting the learning space to be inclusive to all. Danielle Nielson highlights in “Universal Design in First-Year Composition–Why Do We Need It, How Can We Do It?” (2013) that UDL moves away from individual methods for addressing dis/ability so as not to single students out and only focus on visible disabilities. It adheres to the philosophy that accessible pedagogy is good for everyone because it not only addresses dis/ability, but also different learning styles. For example, video lectures (with captions) that supplement in-class lectures address hearing disabilities, but are also useful for students who struggle with note-taking. Or, multimodal assignments that offer alternative options for students with disabilities related to writing might also help students who learn best through kinesthetic or experiential learning. The major problem with UDL is that it is time-intensive, requiring a lot of course redesign and careful thought from the educator. This is why Kathleen Lyons (2023) suggests that we might rely on a “technē of access,” which draws our attention to the process of crafting and making accessibility. This is a long process that will have setbacks and failures, but will also remain always committed to resisting the normative erasure of different bodies in the classroom by making accessible materials and spaces.

Pedagogy of Care: In the epilogue to her book, Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (2021), Talia Schaffer urges us to “Think of care as a practice–a difficult, often unpleasant, almost always underpaid, sometimes ineffective practice” (194). In a book on Victorian Fiction, Schaffer brings us back to teaching in this epilogue to remind us that care attends to the needs of all within an education community, but it is often rife with failure and is more often than not unpleasant work. But we are interdependent on each other in the classroom, and so we must attend to each other’s needs, as Laura Gonzales and Janine Butler (2020) aptly argue in their article on socially just accessible pedagogy. Because we exist as bodies in a shared space, creating a community of care in the classroom involves not only attending to the needs of one’s students, but also to oneself. Susan W. Woolley (2021) provides an insightful example of this in her queer rhetoric classroom, writing about when her disabilities made it impossible to be present in the classroom. Talking through this moment of vulnerability provided an important lesson for students in having care for all embodied experiences in the classroom, teacher and student alike. A pedagogy of care creates space for this vulnerability to be expressed, and for needs to be listened to and addressed.

Embodied (Queer and Anti-Racist) Pedagogy: A central tenant to accessible pedagogy is paying close attention to embodied experience in learning. As David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, and Linda Ware (2014) reveal, much of this thinking is inherited from queer pedagogy because both embrace the body as a site of knowledge that cannot be separated from the mind. In the context of writing, Robert McRuer (2004) asks us to attend to how composition is often taught as a normative practice through the prioritization of orderly and efficient prose that prepares students for heteronormative and able-bodied demands. Instead, we might embrace the failures of composition and the body, the disorder of writing, which McRuer calls “de-composition.” Embodied pedagogy also evokes anti-racist pedagogy, another site of bodily difference. Building from authors such as bell hooks, who famously embraced the raced body in Teaching to Transgress: Education as a Practice of Freedom (1994), Christina V. Cedillo (2018) writes about her life in academia as a disabled woman of color. She argues that communication based on one's race or disability is often seen as a deficiency, an offense to “correct” ways of communicating rather than merely alternative forms of expression. Cedillo suggests that life writing could be a way for students to embrace their embodied differences. Getting students to tell their stories, and their relationship to writing, reading, and learning, could help them to embrace their different embodied communication styles. We might also ask students to engage with their emotional response to readings and assignments, or to directly write about accessibility: “how did your body and emotions respond to this thing we did in class?” “Who was excluded or included in this moment?” Finally, Cedillo asks us to be sensitive to how different bodies are prioritized for fellowships and other academic positions to support institutional diversity initiatives and then expected to produce normative writing. Different forms of communication based in embodied difference should be embraced.

Linguistic Justice: When thinking through different forms of expression, we would be remiss to not include multilingual writing, a particular interest at our home institution, Hostos Community College, a Hispanic Serving Institution in the Bronx. Laura Gonzales and Janine Butler (2020) suggest that we might increase access to multilingual learners through online multimodality. This is because in multilingual spaces, communication often happens through visuals, gestures, or online tools when direct spoken translations are not available or not known. In general, multimodal work is more accessible because it allows for people with different learning styles and different embodied experiences to still participate in learning if traditional lecture styles or writing prompts do not work for them. Drew M. Longmore (2023) further suggests that students might benefit from explicitly exploring code switching in class. Code switching is when those who use different dialects or languages such as African American English (AAE) change their communication style to assimilate to the Standard American English expected of them in professional contexts. These practical skills help students to realize how their linguistic diversity is erased, and work to preserve it while using so-called professional language when required. (We must note that in a linguistically just world such code-switching would not be required, and rather we would challenge what we consider to even be “professional language.” It is a delicate balance that one must toe between preparing students for a normative professional workforce and preserving natural linguistic diversity.)

Accessible Assignment Design: Much of accessible assignment design involves embracing and leaning into principles of WAC that believe in heavy scaffolding, increased time to work through ideas and skills, and writing to learn. Joanna Tai et al. (2022) expand on these principles of WAC by arguing that closed book exams privilege those who can recall information quickly under pressure, which sets some students with disabilities up for failure (such as those with anxiety, learning disabilities, or memory disabilities). The authors urge educators not to remove students from the accessibility tools that they use to learn such as the Internet or other digital tools, suggesting that we rely more on group work, open-book exams without time limits, and multimodal writing. Some might wonder why we cannot approach these disabilities through individual accommodations such as accessibility office requests for extra time. However, this assumes that those with disabilities have the resources to get the formal diagnoses required for such accommodations (which are often expensive), or the knowledge to use the accessibility office (a particular struggle for first-generation college students). In terms of how we assess students, we must recognize that students approach educational labor from unequal positions of time and space, as Penny Jane Burke (2022) observes. Some students might be working multiple jobs, commuting long distances, or not have adequate space to work. When designing assignments, we should be cognizant of these constraints, and not burden all students with labor that only our most privileged students can complete. Such a philosophy includes questioning what our assessment criteria are?  Who is deemed as failing and why? Are our assessment criteria reinforcing conformity and normativity?

Teachers as Access Makers – Interview with Kathleen Lyons

Dr. Kathleen Lyons is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Composition at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. At FDU, she also serves as the Assistant Director of Writing at the Florham campus. She enjoys teaching first-year writing as well as classes on disability rhetoric and technical and professional communication. In her leadership and teaching roles, she prioritizes accessibility and mindfulness to support student learning and community building. Currently, Dr. Lyons' research explores the role of writing instructors as access-makers in higher education.

In this interview, we talk to Dr. Lyons about teachers being access makers. We cover many topics: why intersectionality and interdisciplinarity are important to accessible pedagogy, how accessibility is a long process, some strategies for implementing accessibility in the classroom, and some thoughts on why this work is important during our current moment of the adjunctification of labor and the attack on diverse education. One of our favorite moments from the interview is when Dr. Lyons asked us, “what do we mean when we say something makes sense?” suggesting the criteria of making sense is a colonial invention. Additionally, we are quite drawn to her insistence that anyone can do accessible pedagogy because making access can be as big or small as you have the capacity for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJvH6uMxnak 

Pedagogy, Disability, and Care – Interview with Talia Schaffer

Talia Schaffer is a Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY and the Graduate Center, CUNY, whose work focuses on gender, disability, care, and domesticity in the Victorian novel. She is the author of Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction (Princeton UP, 2021); Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction (Oxford UP, 2016); Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford UP, 2011); and The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture on Late-Victorian England (University Press of Virginia, 2000), along with several edited collections, most recently Care and Disability, forthcoming with Routledge in Feb 2025. She can be reached at talia.schaffer65@login.cuny.edu

In this interview, we talk with Professor Schaffer about cultivating communities of care in the classroom and in our critical work. We discuss many insightful topics such as how Professor Schaffer’s pedagogy and literary criticism are connected by care, how to create care across teaching modalities, and why care is so important for teaching within the CUNY system. One of our favorite moments from the interview is when Professor Schaffer argues that we need to create a space for students to understand their needs (which are often obscure even to them!) and feel comfortable expressing those needs. As educators, we cannot assume what their needs are because this will always lead to needs going unmet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuA0e5efeOw 

Accessible Pedagogy in the Classroom: 10 Practical Suggestions

It can often feel overwhelming to incorporate new theory into one’s pedagogy. To help with this, we’ve written 10 practical suggestions for implementing accessible pedagogy into the classroom. The guide covers a wide array of topics from accessible pedagogy, to communities of care, to approaches to diverse learners.

1. To incorporate accessible pedagogy, the first thing to consider is what you are already doing well that is accessible. We encourage you to take stock of all that you do in your classroom, from assignment design to lecture structure, to how you communicate with students and how these acts increase or limit access for people from marginalized groups based on dis/ability, gender identity, race, class, sexuality, or other marginalized body positions.

2. Be vulnerable with your students. When you show your students that you exist as a body in the classroom, your students will feel much more comfortable existing in and sharing their embodied experiences with you. This can look like being honest about the disabilities that you hold and how you are hampered by them, talking about your mental health, revealing how systems of race or gender oppress you in education, or how you struggle with content or writing. Essentially, this suggestion asks you to break down the highly intellectualized version of a teacher, humanizing yourself in the process. This conversation, that can happen at the start of the semester, articulates interdependency and solidarity to encourage collaborative access.

3. Connected to being vulnerable is being open and honest about why you are doing something in the classroom. Revealing the motivation for your pedagogical choices will not only build trust in the classroom, but will also reveal to you how you are or are not being accessible. For example, talk to your students about why you might be teaching them about alt-text (text that is included with an image to assist those with a visual disability and use screen readers). In our interview, Kathleen Lyons shared a story about students having an “ah-ha” moment when they realized you could include alt-text on Instagram posts, making them realize that they can become access makers in their day-to-day lives.

4. When cultivating a community of care in your classroom, which is one of the ways to do accessible pedagogy, the most important thing is establishing a continuous, kind, and compassionate dialogue with students. Talia Schaffer suggested that this often involves making time for students in various ways: group work in-class where students work together on something and you circulate as the teacher, individual email exchanges about feedback, or required individual meetings with students. Probably the most important part of this work is building in time for group work in the classroom because this establishes a community of learners and offers space for students to have a voice when they might not feel comfortable speaking in larger class discussions for a variety of dis/ability reasons. It is vital that when creating a community of care, however, that you do not give up your authority as the teacher. As Schaffer suggests, you are a facilitator of a care community, not an equal member of it.

5. Use multimodal assignments and allow students to choose how they want to be assessed. As the scholars covered in the digest suggest, multimodality is one of the best ways to create accessible assignments. But, to avoid simply replacing one mode of intellectual labor with another that might marginalize people in different ways, give students the option to choose which type of assignments they want to do. Giving them agency in their own learning and assessment shows that we trust they know themselves and how they learn best. One example from our own teaching is asking students to create an unstructured voice recording on a topic rather than crafting a written response, but still giving students the option to craft a written response if speaking terrifies them. Audio recordings are common communication tools often used to replace texting, so students are usually comfortable with this technology. It also allows students to rely on their native linguistic diversity.

6. Following along in a lecture is often difficult for students, especially if it is a morning class and students stayed up late working. Audio processing disorders or hearing disabilities make this even more challenging. Consider creating supplemental video lectures that pair with your lectures on important concepts so that students who cannot follow along with the material in class without the pressure of keeping up in-class. Be sure to make subtitles for these lectures. This is often easy to do if you are working from a script: when uploading a video to YouTube, there is an option to add captions and you can copy + paste your script directly in there. YouTube also has AI captions now that can get close to approximating what you are saying. You can also edit this transcription for further accuracy. Please see this guide on using subtitles with YouTube.

7. Slow things down and cover less topics. Designing accessible pedagogy takes time, and requires more time in the classroom to teach concepts. This is because there are a lot more things that you have to do: giving students time to read assignment instructions in-class and explaining them out-loud with opportunities for questions, checking in with students’ well-being at the beginning of class, repetition of key concepts within the same class session and from previous lessons, and scheduling individual meetings (during class time because students might not be able to make other times!) to check in about assignments. Narrow in on the most essential concepts and skills you want students to take away from the class, and get rid of the rest. Students will learn more even though you are teaching less because the content is more accessible to them.

8. Centralize disabled, queer, and racial perspectives in your course content. Valuing these experiences, and showing your students that you value them, means making them integral to the course, not merely one unit among many. One of the problems with the university is that it is centered on ability, and how it attempts to incorporate and normativize different embodied experiences. Resisting the urge to just “include” without challenging normative knowledge production simply appropriates different embodied experiences without deconstructing systemic violence done to them.

9. Do not require medical documentation for accessibility requests; make that clear to your students. As highlighted in the summary of accessible pedagogy scholarship, getting medical documentation for accessibility requests is often expensive and impossible for many students. Eliminate these institutional barriers to entry for students by trusting them when they ask for something. We also suggest making new accommodations you come across universally available for all students in the future. This brings you closer to Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which is always a long process of access making.

10. Embrace multilingual communication. Many of our students come from multilingual backgrounds, and implementing accessible pedagogy must embrace this. An example of a multilingual assignment you could do ais sk students to interview someone from another culture or linguistic background than them. Then, have them create a video about that experience or write a reflective essay about that experience. Have them publish this video or written work on YouTube or on Medium to encourage students to see themselves as access makers in the world.

Until Next Time…

We hope you enjoyed our fifth edition of The WAC Reader. We plan on organizing time to discuss some of these new pathways in WAC at Hostos this year, especially at our annual WAC Professional Development Day in the Spring. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts! If you have a moment, please take our quick Google Forms survey linked below.