Making Accessibility Professionals (MAP): A Holistic Approach to Student Engagement

As the pioneer land-grant university, Michigan State University (MSU) has historically been driven by the principles of quality, inclusiveness, and connectivity (https://msu.edu/morrill-celebration/history.html). To that end, digital accessibility initiatives at MSU have always centered on faculty, staff, AND students coming together to address accessibility needs. Through these rich interactions, it became clear to a number of academic faculty and staff that students should not only continue to be invited to the conversation, but that they are actually a key partner in driving innovation in our approaches to addressing our accessibility needs. We have found that students are contributing to “accessible learning experiences” (Deaton, 2016) by way of their own areas of expertise and being actively engaged in learning and understanding material specific to their different disciplines. Students are also able to advocate from the perspective of their peers, which makes them effective at engaging with diverse instructors.

Over the course of the past two years, various initiatives at Michigan State University have focused on continued student involvement and engagement surrounding topics of accessibility. Collaboration between the College of Arts & Letters (CAL), MSU IT Digital Content & Accessibility Team (DCAT), and other university partners lead to the creation of the Making Accessibility Professionals (MAP) framework.

Currently, MAP focuses on three areas of student engagement

1. Academic

2. Experiential learning

3. Professional development

MAP was developed out of a handful of commonly held beliefs among the core collaborators regarding the field of accessibility and our students. We believe students:

• Are great advocates

• Want to learn unique skills

• Want to make a difference

• Want to be innovative

We also understand the need for responsible innovation, process development, and project management within the field of digital accessibility.  

During this interactive presentation, attendees will learn about MAP and the early impact it has had on the Michigan State University campus and our digital accessibility initiatives. The following is a basic breakdown of our three-pronged approach for Making Accessibility Professionals.

The academic initiatives within MAP focus on three main principles. The first principle is that disability affects all individuals and as such, there should be open coursework for students of all majors. We have an undergraduate course that is open to Freshmen from all majors. This seminar course engages students in community, university, national, and international conversations on disability. The second principle connects to the land-grant mission of MSU, which posits that inclusion is important for building leaders. Our coursework focuses in part on empowering students to be leaders for their future workplace communities and to understand accessibility as a civil right. The third principle is that accessibility requires a person-first mindset, so these classes always focus on the experiences that individuals with disabilities have, or will have, in relation to accessibility. We will further demonstrate and provide specific examples of the academic initiative related to the MAP project during our presentation.

The experiential learning initiative within MAP focuses on connecting the work, responsibility, and mission of the university to students, and expands upon the second principle of the academic initiative, that students should be given the tools they need to be leaders in accessibility initiatives at the university. MSU has a central accessibility policy that all units are beholden to. These units work to increase the accessibility of their content by determining an accessibility liaison which reports centrally. Many of these liaisons hire student accessibility interns to learn from units with accessibility expertise (such as the central IT unit) to train the students, connect their coursework to the work of the units, and have the students increase the accessibility of material. Currently, MSU employs over 20 students whose sole focus is on accessibility, and many other students who do accessibility as part of their job. These students use their knowledge to be effective advocates, to leverage accessibility standards in meaningful ways, and to engage others in the MAP framework to further increase technical and cultural awareness for accessibility. Additionally, MSU’s involvement with the Teach Access initiative (teachaccess.org) will provide an opportunity for students to participate in a Study Away program to Silicon Valley to learn about accessibility via industry partners.

Student engagement by way of professional development has culminated in the Making Learning Accessible (MLA) conference (http://www.accessiblelearning.org/). The second annual event will be held on December 2, 2016. MLA has always maintained student involvement as a core part of the conference, from general attendance to sharing student work and research via presentation or poster sessions. In thinking about the academic conference as professional development opportunity, mentors all across MSU’s campus work with and guide their students toward submitting a proposal, preparing to present, and appropriate networking practices during the conference.

We are looking to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Making Accessibility Professionals model, to expand on some of the principles, and to elicit feedback from the participants of the OLC Innovate conference about their digital accessibility models, and plans for how to engage students to become accessibility professionals.

References

Deaton, P. J. (2016, July). Accessible Learning Experience Design and Implementation. In International Conference on HCI in Business, Government and Organizations (pp. 47-55). Springer International Publishing.