Welcome to Episode 125 of the Think UDL podcast: Cultivating a Culture of Accessibility with Rebecca Mushtare. Rebecca Mushtare is the associate dean of Graduate Studies and a professor of art and design at SUNY Oswego. With John Kane, she co-founded and co-hosts the Tea for Teaching podcast.
Rebecca’s primary research areas are inclusive design, design for older adults, and digital accessibility. She’s committed to designing equitable and transparent experiences in and out of the classroom. At SUNY Oswego she co-founded the Workgroup on Accessibility Practices in 2016 which has been responsible for many accessibility initiatives on campus including the Faculty Accessibility Fellows program that launched in 2019. She’s expanded her work on accessibility within SUNY by serving on the SUNY Empowering Students with Disabilities Task Force and working with the SUNY Center for Professional Development to offer workshops and training. Additionally, Rebecca has worked to spread these practices within civic engagement spaces including the local Vote Oswego initiative and the national civic engagement coalition, Students Learn Students Vote. She’s co-authored research articles related to accessibility in the Journal for Postsecondary Education and Disability, Journal of Communication in Healthcare, and the eJournal of Public Affairs. You can also find her work in community engagement projects like the Recollection Project. In today’s conversation, Rebecca and I talk about digital accessibility practices, accessibility plans, accessibility fellows and 10-day, 5-day Accessibility challenges. But throughout this conversation we find out we all have a role to play in accessibility on our campuses and we hope this episode gives you some ideas for yours! Thank you for listening to this conversation on the Think UDL podcast.
Resources
Find Rebecca Mushtare on LinkedIn
See Oswego’s 10 Day Accessibility Challenge here
And find our more about the Recollection Project here
Transcript
1:00:58
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
accessibility, campus, students, UDL, faculty, learning, teaching, access, accessible, initiatives, include, accommodations
SPEAKERS
Rebecca Mushtare, Lillian Nave
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian Nave. And I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 125 of the think UDL podcast, cultivating a culture of accessibility with Rebecca Mushtare. Rebecca Mushtare is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Art and Design at SUNY Oswego. With John Kane, she co founded and Co-hosts the Tes for Teaching podcast one of my favorite Teaching and Learning podcasts. Rebecca’s primary research areas are inclusive design designed for older adults and digital accessibility. She’s committed to designing equitable and transparent experiences in and out of the classroom. at SUNY Oswego, she co founded the workgroup on accessibility practices and 2016, which has been responsible for many accessibility initiatives on campus, including the faculty accessibility Fellows Program that launched in 2019. She has expanded her work on accessibility within Sunni by serving on the Sunni empowering students with disabilities Task Force, and working with the Sunni Center for Professional Development to offer workshops and training. Additionally, Rebecca has worked to spread these practices within civic engagement spaces, including the local vote Oswego initiative, and the National Civic Engagement coalition students learn students vote. She co authored research articles related to accessibility in the journal for Post Secondary Education and Disability, Journal of Communication in healthcare, and the Journal of Public Affairs. You can also find her work in community engagement projects like the recollection project. And today’s conversation, Rebecca, and I talk about digital accessibility practices, accessibility plans, accessibility fellows and 10 day five day accessibility challenges. But throughout this conversation, we find out we all have a role to play in accessibility on our campuses. And we hope this episode gives you some idea for yours. Thank you for listening to this conversation on the think UDL podcast. Thank you to our sponsor, Texthelp, a global technology company, helping people all over the world to understand and to be understood, it has led the way in creating innovative technology for the workplace and education sectors, including K 12. right through to higher education for the last three decades. Discover their impact at text dot help forward slash learn more, that’s learn m o r e. Well, Rebecca, I’d like to welcome you to the think UDL podcast today.
Rebecca Mushtare 03:29
Thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I’m
Lillian Nave 03:34
Well, I’m a frequent listener to Tea for teaching. And I’m very glad to have you and that we get to have this chance to exchange a little bit about what you do at Oswego. So I’ll start off as I do every podcast and ask you my question, what makes you a different kind of learner?
Rebecca Mushtare 03:53
You know, I thought a bit about how I might answer this question, because I knew it was coming, of course. And it really comes down to the idea that I’m an interaction designer, and that impacts how I approach situations, questions and problems. And really, anyone with expertise starts to hone in on their discipline, and to think in those terms, right and really influences how we interact with the world. So I tend to look at systems strategy. I look at how audiences are impacted, and I think about the barriers they face, their needs and their desires, which you’ll see completely embedded in how I talk about accessibility and UDL. Yes.
Lillian Nave 04:38
Oh, everything you were saying was like, well, this tracks total.
Rebecca Mushtare 04:44
Guilty as charged. Yes. Yes.
Lillian Nave 04:46
So that it’s just influences everything you do, right? How you learn how you teach all of that, right? Definitely. So So I was Thinking about there are actually quite a few things I could ask you about or that we could have this podcast talk a lot about, but you do have a really comprehensive, and I think, really helpful and interesting thing that all of my listeners would be really interested in. And that’s how you have really made a big impact at Oswego. And Oswego has done a lot with accessibility, and digital accessibility. And so I wanted to ask a lot about that, because we have a lot to learn. So I’ll start off with asking about your campus Accessibility Plan and go from there.
Rebecca Mushtare 05:33
Yeah, thanks for that question. I’ve been really honored to be a part of our accessibility initiatives at SUNY Oswego. Since I joined the faculty in 2012. Initially, when I joined the faculty, I was doing accessibility work just as part of the what I was teaching, I’m teaching web design classes. So I’m teaching accessibility standards as part of the curriculum. And I quickly connected with my co host, John Kane, who is the director of our teaching center, and I started offering some workshops to faculty on some of these principles and how they might apply them to, you know, presentations, documents, etc, just kind of one off little workshops during our professional development times. And then I became the associate director of the teaching center. And I use that as an opportunity to start raising awareness about digital accessibility. So we started formalizing more workshops on this topic. And we started a workgroup on accessibility practices. And I co founded that with an instructional designer at our institution at the time. And this is where our grass roots initiative started. It came from the faculty and staff, we were working together to troubleshoot and to address, like, tricky situations, like I didn’t know how to do this particular accessibility thing. And you know, we would look into it and research it, etc. And so that group started growing. It was kind of formally formed and founded in 2016, and expanded to include a wide swath of folks across campus, right, and continues to grow. So we had people from our Instructional Technology Services, we had instructional designers, obviously, the teaching center was involved. We had folks in, you know, who were working on our website. We obviously had our disability services folks, the librarians, right, and it’s expanded to include at the time, I was the only faculty member, but now there’s many more faculty members involved and an attempt to include students and that sort of thing. Yeah. But the foundation of our plan, is this idea that we had this grassroots group working on things that mattered to us. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 08:07
fantastic place to start. Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 08:09
So we had this group, and then, you know, around the same time, July, you know, the following year 2017, that campus had an Office of Civil Rights Complaint, as many campuses did at that time. Right. And so the institution, right, in terms of administration, etc, we’re working on addressing that complaint. Yeah. And we connected and decided, hey, maybe we should coordinate?
Lillian Nave 08:40
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 08:42
And so as a result of that coordination, we really have both kind of a top down bottom up approach to our plan. Yeah. Right. And the plan has a formal component, because all of SUNY, all of the SUNY schools have plans that include benchmarks around the campus website, digital content, classrooms, library and procurement. Yeah. But that didn’t really speak to how we worked. Right. So we really have this kind of top down bottom up and really formalized a way for those to connect through a digital accessibility steering committee that we have representation on. Okay,
Lillian Nave 09:20
great. Yeah. That that is, by the way, I’ve talked to a lot of folks about how do you create this campus change? And when you have the grassroots start, it’s just so much better, easier catches on fire, and there’s less resistance, of course, than if it is the top down, right. Like, oh, we it’s more that’s compliance, rather than this is a mission, right? Yeah,
Rebecca Mushtare 09:47
we are definitely about kind of cultivating this culture of access rather than the idea of only being compliant compliance. Not enough for us. Yeah. Not acceptable.
Lillian Nave 09:58
Yes. I’ve noticed I by the really great stuff I’ve seen that you guys have come out with. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 10:05
So our workgroup has a bunch of different initiatives that we work on. And I would say, that’s really where a lot of our accessibility work comes from, with the support of the steering committee, right. That’s how we get resources, etc. So that workgroup, as I mentioned, involves a wide variety of folks. And we have a few different resources, we developed our accessibility website, which has tutorials, and an overview of what we call the five principles. And really, it’s, you know, there are many digital accessibility principles and strategies one should do to make sure their digital content is fully accessible. But for like the average content creator, we distilled it down to five key things, you know, to make it manageable, memorable, etc, right? So we, we focus on things like making sure we’re identifying content types. So that’s like, if you’re in Microsoft Word, or Google Docs, you’re using the heading structure that’s available to you, you’re using lists, etc. So that the content is structured for someone who might be using a screen reader, an audio player, etc. We focus on the second one is provide text equivalents. And for us, that’s the giant bucket of things that are in alternative formats, right? So alternative text for images, transcripts, captions, and then descriptions. So if you’re in a live presentation, and you’re talking about a chart on a screen, you’re describing what that looks like, rather than assuming everybody can see it. Yes. And then our third is using color carefully.
Lillian Nave 11:49
I liked the way you say that. Yeah. So you should use
Rebecca Mushtare 11:53
color, but use it carefully. And that includes things like considering color contrast, and not using color alone to communicate information. Right. We also talk about descriptive hyperlinks so that screen readers aren’t reading out like http, colon slash, right, right. But rather a tells tell somebody where they’re going, and we know that this link is going to place the Z. Right, right. And then finally, clear language. Like, let’s not use convoluted language when we need to provide instructions, or we need to give someone steps or to help someone with a process expect, especially around things that are like administrative processes and procedures.
Lillian Nave 12:40
That’s a fantastic toolbox that that faculty need to have. And you’ve distilled it really well, I must say, like, not only does faculty faculty need help with actually how to teach things, because they’re experts. But how is that going to be taught? That accessibility piece is like, even more needed? And we don’t talk about it enough, hence, I got to talk to you.
Rebecca Mushtare 13:06
Yeah, I mean, I think that for us, access is the foundation to even being able to do things like UDL. Yeah. If people can’t get the information, then they can’t do anything with information. Absolutely.
Lillian Nave 13:20
Absolutely. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 13:22
So the other resources, I guess I can finish the the list here. We also have professional development, what workshops that I mentioned, that we, that we offer, through our teaching and learning center, are the large mission of our group is to raise awareness of these things. We also have offered a 10 day and five day accessibility challenge at various times. We offer consultations when the problems are tricky. Yeah. We collaborate on research. So a lot of the folks involved had been on various research papers and and we’ve done research on some of our initiatives like the challenge. Yeah. And we also launched a faculty accessibility Fellows Program in 2019. And it’s still going strong. Nice.
Lillian Nave 14:10
This is fantastic stuff. So is this something you said it was grassroots? But then it also became really a part of Sunnis directive across all institutions? So how does this fit into something like us? We goes, diversity and inclusion initiatives or something like that?
Rebecca Mushtare 14:33
Yeah, that’s a great question, because it’s not obvious. Yeah. One of the things I should point out is that our Chief Technology Officer Sean Moriarty, and I collaborate a lot. So he would represent the top down and he would say that the top down approach, and I would represent maybe the bottom up approach and we coordinate and work carefully. Our work with Sunni and kind of how this connects to the bigger Sunni picture. Um, is that Shawn is our kind of electronic information technology officer for our institution. Yeah. And he serves as the SUNY electronic information technology accessibility officers advisory group.
Lillian Nave 15:15
co chair. Yeah. Wow. That’s great. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 15:17
So we have access to folks when we’re trying to coordinate and, you know, lift things and, you know, give opportunities for other Sunnis as well. And he’s been the key supporter and helping get resources for a lot of the grassroots initiatives, because he thinks it’s important, yes, sees the the risk aspect of it. But also just that it’s the right thing to do. Yes. And it has worked really well at advocating for what we need, both on our campus and at the SUNY level at the system level. And so what I would say is like, right now is a good example, our campus is going through the strategic planning process. Everyone always kind of dreads it’s a big beast of an activity, right. And there is an equity informed Student Success subcommittee over the strategic plan. And there are tons of folks that have been involved in our work on
16:21
that committee. Fantastic. Yeah. And we’ve
Rebecca Mushtare 16:25
we’ve been talking about, you know, we need to make sure that we’re raising awareness of these issues, so that it is a part of our ongoing policies or ongoing strategic mission. And so every time we’re working on an IT Strategic Plan, or other strategic plans for various aspects of the campus, we’ve been trying to make sure that accessibility is addressed. And it’s not, and it’s dressed. explicitly. That’s what we’re working towards, because it’s been implicit. Right, yeah, in saying that diversity, equity and inclusion is important. But access, as we may have observed in many occasions, is overlooked in a lot of dei research and initiatives across all of higher ed. Yeah, I mean, we’re seeing a shift here, but like, historically, not really represented. And, you know, the identity of disability or ability as a characteristic isn’t a way that folks have defined diversity often. And we’re seeing that change, too. And I would say, it’s definitely embedded in the work that we do on our campus, our chief diversity officer is on our digital accessibility steering committee. Good. And, you know, they work with us on various things. And there’s represent representations from folks that are on that team in our workgroup as well. So there’s a lot of cross pollination back and forth, which I think is really important. And a lot of the faculty who’ve been involved in the workgroup, or in our Fellows Program have served on their schools, dei committees.
Lillian Nave 18:08
Yeah. Great. Yes, it’s fantastic. And I certainly have seen in the last several years, the inclusion of disability in diversity initiatives, and it’s certainly a push that that I’m making, and I’m seeing and learning about having interviewed the diversity Cultural Center, director from Syracuse, and really, we need to change what that diversity includes. Right? Because it was not the about access, it wasn’t about disability. And, yeah, it needs to be. So I’m glad to see that. Yeah,
Rebecca Mushtare 18:49
I mean, we have multiple identities. We’re complex human beings. And this is one aspect of diversity in a place where really equity needs to be considered. Absolutely,
Lillian Nave 19:00
yeah, it makes such a huge difference. So and, you know, there are just so many intersecting parts of that. So, you know, when we might be thinking about this happens a lot in UDL, when we might be thinking about how can we make something accessible for like a screen reader or something, that we might have one original purpose in mind, maybe because of disability site or something like that. It’s also needed in many other areas, like students who are returning parents or veterans or, you know, having all of those accessible ways. Is this going to be helpful for so many populations? So it’s just like needed in so many layers? Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 19:45
And, you know, some of the most maybe, quote unquote, at risk students might be depending on phones or mobile devices is the way they’re accessing any of the information and if we’re not being Careful and making sure that we’re following accessibility principles with our digital content, those students might not have the same access to information, just like students who might be using assistive technologies might not have access to that same information. And that’s just not equitable.
Lillian Nave 20:16
Exactly, exactly. So. So I really appreciate how it’s situated. And, and the work that you and your team with all of your access that you have, especially into the larger system of SUNY. So let’s see thinking about your particular campus as we go. What you mentioned this, what can you tell me about your faculty accessibility fellows?
Rebecca Mushtare 20:42
So this program has a little bit of a funny story. And so, you know, Sean Moriarty, who I mentioned earlier, our chief technology officer had been sitting on our hay been attending and participating in our workgroup on accessibility practices, which gave us some nice connections. But he also served on kind of the advisory board for the teaching center. So we had lots of interactions with him, and continue to have interactions with them. It’s not like that stopped. And we were just kind of throwing around the idea that like, we need more faculty involved in our accessibility initiative, because I was the only faculty actively involved in the workgroup at that time most most was support staff and professional staff on our campus. And, you know, we throw out this idea of a Fellows Program, because we had some other models on our campus. We previously had assessment fellows, writing fellows. So we had some models that existed on how to kind of upskill faculty in a particular area, and then to have that group of faculty serve as liaisons and kind of spread the word Yeah. And so we kind of threw this idea out. And Shawn said, Well, if you write a proposal, I’ll shop it around and try to get resources for it. Nice, you’d love to hear that. I love to hear that. I don’t think he thought I was going to do it like the next day. But in fact, he said that, but I got it to him with details even about budgeting and how much it would cost. And, you know, we proposed essentially that a faculty member would commit to a year fellowship program, they would get a course release, or the equivalent pay for a course and additional course, once for the whole year. Yeah. So it wasn’t big, and a little bit of travel money associated with either upskilling and accessibility or spreading the word of accessibility in their discipline. Oh, that’s great. Yeah. So that’s, that’s essentially what the budget was. And we propose that we wanted a fellow from one of each of our four schools. So in the scheme of things, not a super expensive right program, and he was able to collaborate with the provost to get the funding. And we launched that the, you know, we, I think we were talking about it. And in the summer, and by the next January, we had a program that was launching, and I served as the first kind of facilitator of that program, we run it January, through a calendar year, rather than an academic year, intentionally. So that the first half of the year is more of like a boot camp and upskilling and getting the technical skills necessary to do the things that people want to be able to do. And then they have the summer to implement into a course etc. And then this happens throughout the whole program, but it’s a little more concentrated. The second half is we talk, we talk about some pedagogical strategies and kind of bigger picture items. It starts earlier than that, but it’s concentrated in the second kind of part of the fellowship. And that’s when folks that are participating bring things that they’d like to explore. So often we’re talking about things like ableism. So we’ve read academic ableism, or parts of it in the past, we talk a lot about the relationship between accessibility and accommodations, and universal design for learning and how they all interact with one another. Yeah, we talk about inclusive pedagogy, and things like tilt, or transparency and learning and teaching. Teaching. I was like, wait,
Lillian Nave 24:40
I know. I always forget. So I have to say it many times before I get it right tilt tilting your assignments and assessments, right. Fantastic.
Rebecca Mushtare 24:49
Yeah, so all of those sorts of things are really part of the fellowship program, with really the idea that there’s a concentration on on the access control. on
Lillian Nave 25:00
it. Yeah. Wow. That’s amazing. Okay. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 25:04
So the first year was in 2019. You might notice some good timing there.
Lillian Nave 25:08
Yeah. So January to December 2019. Okay. Yeah. So
Rebecca Mushtare 25:13
we had a full, we actually had a lot of interest in that first cohort and the provost and Shawn decided to fund more. So we had a slightly bigger class that first round. So we had a strong cohort of support available. Yes. When the pandemic hit, yes, everybody was using more digital content. So we were well positioned, we had already kind of developed a bunch of workshops and some other things. So we were able to share that with our whole campus. And we’re positioned to share some of our expertise with SUNY and help with some of their upskilling of faculty across the system as well, because we already had a bunch of folks that went through some of this kind of training and professional development.
Lillian Nave 25:57
Oh, wow. Fantastic. Yeah. Just at the right time. Yeah. And did that continue? Yeah,
Rebecca Mushtare 26:04
we still have, we still have groups. And what we’ve done is that I facilitated the first cohort. And the baton has been passed multiple times. Now, a, an alum of the fellows program, always runs the next cohorts, and also serves as a co chair of the workgroup, and has a seat at the steering committee. Fantastic.
Lillian Nave 26:29
You’ve Oh, wow, you’ve really pulled it in. So but how many folks have gone through this accessibility Fellows Program since 2019?
Rebecca Mushtare 26:40
I’d say we have somewhere between 20 and 25. I should have that number memorized, but I don’t, but they are on our accessibility website. And you can kind of see the wide range of disciplines represented, which I think is really quite amazing. So we’ve had a chemist who’s been one of our faculty facilitators in the past, folks from business, psychology, are in design. Yeah, that wouldn’t was easy to tick that box. Yeah. And others. Yeah, Communication Studies, the School of Education. I mean, we’ve had a wide range of folks participating, which really gives us experts in a lot of different disciplines. When folks get stuck, we have people that we can refer faculty and staff to
Lillian Nave 27:26
Yeah, and I’ve noticed that it really does depend on disciplines, what your accessibility challenges are, and you know, things like that I am not in I’m not in the math department. I’m humanities for first year seminar, art, all that. And so the math department is going to have a lot of different accessibility issues like how are you reading? superscripts? subscripts? How’s that come across on a screen reader? How do you even input an equation? So you can read it on multiple formats? You know, what sort of software do you need? What all of those questions I didn’t know a thing about. But I knew that we needed to describe an art image, you know, I knew we needed to have a lot of multiple formats for if we’re going to look at images versus descriptions, and that sort of thing. So having that multiple discipline is imperative in higher ed, because all those challenges are going to be really nuanced and different. So and you get a new faculty member, and they’re like, I’m so excited to teach my subject. And then they didn’t realize that their students either can’t see or can’t, you know, can’t access whatever they’re teaching, because they didn’t realize you have to make it accessible.
Rebecca Mushtare 28:40
Yeah, and you know, the kinds of conversations we have been really incredible. Certainly, we’ve talked about, like chemical formulas and how that presents challenges in chemistry. We’ve talked to folks, faculty in music about how automated transcripts don’t work well with the singing voice. And then it’s really problematic when the singing voice is not in English. Right, we’ve discussed the the challenges of learning a second language and what that means for accessibility. So we’ve had really rich conversations. And I think one of the powers of the fellows program is that it is interdisciplinary. All of the fellows at any given time are from different disciplines. And that a raises awareness about the challenges but also allows for some really interesting troubleshooting and networking across the faculty to resolve challenges and barriers that people are facing in terms of access. Yeah,
Lillian Nave 29:37
it really, I think it really asks a lot more questions so that you might say, Oh, I never would have thought about that in my subject matter. But learned it from like thinking about musical notation. Oh, wow. That’s it’s like a different code. How do we make that more accessible? And then it might make me think about my discipline and what are those things that are really understandable for me, but me may be completely blocked or inaccessible for a novice learner that we really need to teach so, and not assume everybody knows how whatever the superscript subscript or something works. So anyway, that we need them to be multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary for the fabulous conversations, but also because it serves all of our students that way. Yeah,
Rebecca Mushtare 30:25
I think one other thing we can add to thinking about this in the mix, too, is that we have novice users of assistant assistive technology to Yes, right, right. Disability is an identity that folks come into at different parts of their lives. And also, sometimes they come in and out of that’s true. And so we do also, we can’t also expect necessarily that someone who’s using assistive technology is an expert at that, either. And that is really an important consideration, as we’re thinking about what does it mean to have access to something? Yeah,
Lillian Nave 30:57
and, you know, that brings me back to one of the things you said earlier about, like the five main, like, accessibility ideas, especially for like, somebody new to accessibility. And that last one was clear language. And just being clear, you already mentioned tilt, transparency, and learning and teaching, which is about being clear. And you state the purpose, why you’re doing this. And for so long, I found that there was this mystery kind of behind higher ed and, and learning, like, you had to sort of peel away or claw your way through to kind of get at some things like it was, that was the so called rigor, in essence, like you had to figure it out. And it wasn’t really it’s not really serving the learners or serving the purpose of learning. And so being clear, being direct, explaining things, and making, you know, making things as clear as possible, including things like how to use assistive technology, or, you know, just not making things overly overly complicated. is also being accessible. It’s not dumbing things down, because I get that a lot about UDL. Right, it is just being clear. And yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 32:20
It’s so helpful. And it needs to happen in many, many spaces. You know, I think one of the things that we often talk about with faculty both in the Fellows Program, and just as, as the work that we do, as a workgroup, is about the misconception of whether or not students with disabilities are even in our classes. Yeah. And the reality is, of course, they’re in our classes, they, for a wide variety of reasons may choose not to disclose right there in your class. And they may not decide or even know that they qualify for accommodations. Yeah. So we have many students in our spaces and faculty and staff with disabilities and barriers that are not maybe obvious to us. Yeah. Right. And so providing that opportunity, and the clarity around how does one get an accommodation? And that you may be, you know, you may be qualified to an accommodation, and you might not even know it, yeah. But there’s stigma around these identities. And that also leads to a wide range of reasons why folks choose not to disclose.
Lillian Nave 33:35
Yeah, right. And there is an interplay, right, between the accommodations and UDL, they do not cancel each other out. And accessibility. But I have found that if we can make things much more accessible than the general need, or the greater need for accommodations can dwindle a little bit, just because it’s not adding one more barrier or two more or three more, that that then says, Okay, well, this is, in essence broken, I need something or some other way to fix it. If we can at least, decrease so many of those barriers. We’re helping everybody and we’re helping ourselves as instructors to it makes I think it’s our teaching a lot easier when when we can make that accessible to our students. And we’re not answering a bunch of extra questions, because we’ve, we’ve we’ve answered it ahead of time, in essence by making it available.
Rebecca Mushtare 34:40
Yeah, sometimes there’s some there’s startup cost to making things accessible or to implementing UDL. But those startup costs have really big payoffs later on, because ultimately, the workload is less Yes, and the workload is less because we’ve already made Are many of the accommodations students we’re seeking ahead of time. Yeah. And so they don’t need to seek those accommodations. They don’t need to be a one off solution. Because we’ve already designed with a much wider variety of students and student needs in mind to start with, that doesn’t mean that accommodations go away. Because many students have complex things going on. And they need different they need an additional accommodation that can’t be accomplished with just meeting accessibility principles. Yeah. But it can help and alleviate a lot of that, that need and including the need to have to disclose True,
Lillian Nave 35:40
true. Yeah, it is just so interconnected. All of these reasons why students might need access or might and, and also the reasons why, as an instructor, we may or may not know it. So the one of the big things about why I started the podcast, it was just about raising awareness about these things, because I didn’t know when I started had no clue. You think, oh, this is gonna be great. I get to talk about the thing I love all the time. And then you don’t realize how, how many other things are involved in that process of sharing this information. So here we are. And here you are, you’re doing amazing thing. So I’ve got another one, you do something like an accessibility challenge right at Oswego. Tell me about the your accessibility challenges that you that you hold.
Rebecca Mushtare 36:35
Yeah, so our accessibility challenges, and it’s, it’s come in a couple of different forms. We’ve done the 10 day challenge a couple times, we also did a five day challenge and what have you, but they all have a similar structure. The first one we worked on, was in fall of 2020. And the reason why we decided to work on developing a challenge was for a few reasons. One was to, you know, address the wide need that we had across campus and making things more accessible. Now that we’re using and relying on more digital means of communication. Yes, right. And digital materials. So there was that need, like just professional development need. There was huge burnout, I don’t know if anyone noticed. It big lift to convert a lot of things to a digital platform. So we were looking for something that was fun and gamified. Yeah, to to alleviate some of the stress around that. And really, to just bring people together around a common cause. So good. All of those things worked really well. So we essentially created a 10 day challenge. We developed it during the fall semester, we implemented it in January of 2021. Okay, so that’s one of the first round happened, we had wide participation across faculty, staff, and students, we encouraged everyone to participate. And it was very important for us to get students involved. And we’ve been working more towards more student involvement. It’s a place where we could grow for sure. And really, what we did was we started with like, what are some definitions like what do we mean by accessibility? How’s that different from accommodation, like just some basic, laying the groundwork so that we all were starting from a common place? Yeah. And then we introduced a new topic each day, we introduced them just during the work week. And it was one topic per day, they were sent out, you signed up, and then you got emails on a daily basis with a challenge for the day. And it would provide resources and kind of an upskill. So if you already like had a skill, like there was, you know, the the next step, the next layer, and we offered during that first challenge, digital resources that were available asynchronously in the email, but then each day had a supplemental, synchronous workshop that you could attend, as well as Office
Lillian Nave 39:13
Hours. Great every day, every
Rebecca Mushtare 39:17
day for that 10 day period, which coincided with our teaching Center’s annual set of professional development workshops that were at that time of year. So we did that on purpose, because people would expect professional development at that
Lillian Nave 39:31
time getting ready for the semester or something. Yeah, okay. Yep. So
Rebecca Mushtare 39:35
we’ve been able to offer the challenge a few times, we’ve taken a pause because we know people need a break. We’re still feeling burnout and what have you. And right now we’re working on an on demand Brightspace course our campuses have Brightspace campus as is all of SUNY. So we got a grant from SUNY to work on this kind of on demand course that we’re hoping to pilot on our campus. So this spring, we’re getting close that really kind of emulates and was is really about making this challenge something that’s available more on demand and packaged and not have to have so much kind of make maintenance around it right, like facilitation that it can kind of run itself. Okay,
Lillian Nave 40:17
great. So people who aren’t there or you know, missed that 110 Day option can do it at any time. So, yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 40:25
And then we’re thinking that we would promote the idea that like different divisions could challenge other divisions or, you know, to really like play with a gamification component. Yeah. So this one has a way to kind of earn points Nice. So that we can really play with that gamification idea. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 40:42
Well, that’s about recruiting interest. And, and yeah, keeping people interested in the long term, very UDL of you. Yes. I
Rebecca Mushtare 40:49
mean, we tried recently to do that.
Lillian Nave 40:53
Wow. So the word that keeps coming up in my brain about all the things you’re doing is this culture of accessibility, that you mentioned early on this, that you are creating a culture where it’s not a one off, it is not a compulsion, a requirement. It’s just that this is like who we are, this is what we do. And here are all these different ways that we’re really pulling it into campus, we’re, and we’re pushing it out, you know, in all different ways. I really appreciated that you said, one of the outcomes of the accessibility fellows was not just on campus, but that they would share with their discipline, maybe at a conference, right?
Rebecca Mushtare 41:33
Yeah, yeah. And we’ve had some great outcomes there. Yeah, that’s
Lillian Nave 41:37
a fantastic. So I just love that you’ve really done a systematic look at how accessibility should fit into campus and how it also is, you know, all throughout the SUNY system, State University of New York, lots of schools serving, you know, 1000s of students 10s of 1000s of students, I should say. So you’ve had some good thinking about things like roles and responsibilities on the campus. And I wanted to ask you about that if you could articulate a little bit more how you see the roles and responsibilities, different people throughout the campus play in regards to accessibility, because it’s not just the teaching center. And it’s not just the faculty, you’ve said a couple times, like you had students involved, you had, you know, administrators you had like learning technology. So that’s what I want to know, I think people would really benefit from hearing the work you guys have done about roles and responsibilities in regards to accessibility?
Rebecca Mushtare 42:38
Yeah, our consistent message is that we all have a role in cultivating a culture of access in the organizations that were a part of. And that might look different for different people like how we do that may look different because our relative power in a particular situation or role might be different. Yeah. And so our general messaging is that everyone has a role. And everyone’s invited to do this, because a culture is something that is a result of everyone’s behaviors and ways that they exist in the world. And not just like a set of rules and regulations. Right, right. It’s something that we really do have to cultivate, we all have to play a role and in embed this work in everything we do, from planning of things, our daily practices, the policies we write, the procedures we have, whatever those things are, that we are involved in, we have an opportunity to raise awareness about accessibility and to ask questions related to this. So we do give regular updates to like faculty assembly and President’s Council, etc, on work related to accessibility on our campus as a way to have like reporting out reminding people. But Shawn and I have been working really hard to like really think about how can we help folks understand not just what the digital principles are, because we’ve we have some mechanisms to do that. But how do we really cultivate this culture, which I think is really moving, moving more in the direction of ally ship and advocacy than just kind of getting the job done? Yeah. And so we’ve developed what we’re calling kind of the ramps model. We shared it at EDUCAUSE, this past fall, and we call it the ramps model, we think of ramps as something that’s tied to access already. So hopefully that makes it easy to remember. But the R stands for request. The A stands for amplify. M stands for Model. P stands for prioritize, and S stands for support. And just really quickly I can give you some examples. Requesting is this idea that no matter no matter our role, we II can request folks follow accessibility principle. So for example, if we’re in a meeting, and there’s microphones, we can request that folks use that microphone whether or not we individually or personally need that. Right, you could make that request. As a faculty member, we can request that our students follow accessibility principles as a requirement for an assignment. Because we have them follow style guides, like MLA and APA, it’s no different, right? It’s the same kind of criteria. So there’s lots of ways we can make those kinds of requests, we can request from kind of a position of, like, relative less amount of power in a situation as a student, we can request certain principles be followed, like, Could you turn the captions on please? Yeah. Right. And then also in a place of power, like making it a requirement on assignment? Yeah. We can amplify voices very easily as well, by making sure that we’re, if we’re in conversations, let’s say we’re planning a student club event, as students, as a student, we can amplify the voices of people with disabilities by just starting the conversation about what what access features will this event have, for example, and how will we make sure that we’re communicating that information, right? Modeling, which is follow the accessibility principles, right, like, just be doing it in part of your daily life. And, you know, hopefully, others will observe this, that’s a little more of a passive way of engaging, but still an important one prioritizing, if you’re in a position where you have decision making power about people’s time or your budget. Yep, put your resources where your mouth is, and make sure you’re investing your resources into that. But also, as individuals, we have the resource of our time, and we can choose to spend some of our time on accessibility. And then finally, it’s about support and support looks different for different people again, but this is the idea that like, you know, give, if you hear that someone else is also engaging in their accessibility journey, like, let them know that you’re also doing it, help them learn how to use an accessibility checker, etc. Yeah. And, you know, part of it is just like sometimes asking for the resources we need. So for example, the workgroup, and you know, was like, Hey, we’re a Google campus, we’re using Google Docs. There’s no accessibility checker here. Yeah. So our campus invested in grackle, which is an add on accessibility checker for the Google Suite. And, you know, so part of our work now is training people in in in that that exists and how to use it, etc. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 47:56
Wow. I love ramps, that’s a great acronym. And that just made me think about how deep the culture is of accessibility and in, in my subject matter that I’m teaching now about intercultural competence and learn a lot about culture and, and the different levels or layers of culture, if if we think about maybe an iceberg or an onion, we only see that top part of the iceberg, we only see the outside of the onion, but the real culture is very, very deep. So the things we can see on your campus are things like grackle, right, that you’ve added that or that you have the accessibility challenge or, or some policies that are written on a website, but that deeper understanding are things like values, and even before that assumptions, and it seems to me that the deeply held belief that this is showing that that tip of the iceberg is showing is that all of your students, and all of the faculty, everybody associated with this campus, let’s say is valued, that everybody deserves access, that every every person is worthwhile. And everybody deserves to have everything equally. Right. That’s, that’s a belief that is being shown by the things we can see at the tip of the iceberg. And it is often not stated, right? It’s just shown, but when we like look down deep we say wow, look at all of this large culture that you have going, it’s showing what you value, which of course makes me so happy and interested and and why I love what you’re doing. Is that at the core, you’re saying all of this matters. You know, that’s not the front of the webpage says, you matter. But that’s exactly what this translates to.
Rebecca Mushtare 50:08
I think that’s really our responsibility as a public institution. Yeah. And, you know, I do hope that the constituents in our campus feel that way, that it’s that everyone is valued. And that this is just part of that work. Yeah. And I think that, you know, as we’ve been working on our strategic plan, and I’ve been in different rooms with different voices, I’ve really heard folks talk about equity in really deep engaging in meaningful ways. That really makes me grateful that I am a part of a campus that has a community of people who really care about this work. Yeah, you know, and the fact that our group that’s directly working on accessibility has grown significantly, in really about five years. Is to me incredible, and amazing. And I am, I just love to be able to shout from the rooftops to say, like, the work that my colleagues do is amazing. Yeah.
Lillian Nave 51:13
It’s, it’s, it’s fantastic. It’s, it’s needed. And it is like very affirming, Soul affirming, as an educator, right? That this is, this is so important. And you have a lot to show for it. So in that iceberg of deep valuing your students, your community, learning in general, the, the fruit, this is a totally wrong metaphor. There’s no fruit on an iceberg, but, but the stuff that’s above the water level is is the is viewed as seen, and we can see how important and kind of large the stuff you’ve been doing is and, and so we can we know, what is deep there in the values? I appreciate that.
Rebecca Mushtare 51:57
Yeah, when you’re talking about that, it’s really funny, when we’ve talked about some of the work on our campus, we’ve talked about, like, the whole, like, how big the whole of accessibility, sort of like, it can be really daunting, you know, but like, we just don’t want the hole to get bigger. Yeah, you know, so it’s like, you know, you, you can you can put in one shovel at a time, and it doesn’t really look like it’s getting smaller, but at least it’s not expanding. And then really the work that we’re doing moving forward is much more accessible. And we’re not investing all of our time necessarily in retro actively kind of retrofitting, right, things that weren’t designed that way. But we really have this philosophy moving forward and in the things that are now and in the
Lillian Nave 52:43
future. Yeah, absolutely. So okay, so somebody’s listening to this, and they’re like, I want to do this, or our campus needs this, or how can we really show that we have the same value? What’s your advice to others when they want to make their University’s campuses systems actually accessible?
Rebecca Mushtare 53:04
Yeah, I mean, what a loaded question.
Lillian Nave 53:08
We’re gonna solve all the problems right now, Rebecca, let’s hear I
Rebecca Mushtare 53:11
think, I think the real power for us in getting things to happen was that we did have a really strong grassroots initiative that involves a wide variety of people. So part of it is just starting to identify who else cares about this, on your campus, places to look include teaching centers, the folks who work maybe for the campus, Digital Marketing and Communications Office, folks in the library, instructional designers, faculty that teach in certain disciplines where this might be part of their curriculum. These are places to start. And then they will also know people Yeah. Right. And you can kind of build that network, but part of it is just getting like a cohort of people who care about it that represent a wide variety of constituents. Student voice is really important in making things happen, as we all know that if students start, you know, say, like, we demand this of our education, then, you know, strategic priorities will start aligning with that. Yeah. But I think it’s also really important to find to strategically find those partners who exist in an administrative level and who have some decision making power. We’re have access to budgets and other folks who have decision making power, because it’s one thing for it to be at the grassroots level. But if you don’t have resources, besides the labor of the volunteers who are participating, it’s really hard to lift things and we haven’t had a ton of resources, but we have had enough that we could do some of the things that we needed to do beyond this and that does mean that have various divisions have allowed faculty and staff to dedicate time towards this initiative? Yeah, right to be a part of the workgroup? Because that division now is saying like, this is important work. Right.
Lillian Nave 55:13
Right. And you had said one of the parts of ramps is that prioritize? So yeah, so volunteers can prioritize time, but also admin, and the system office or whatever can prioritize some of those resources that will be very helpful along the way. At
Rebecca Mushtare 55:34
some point, yeah, this work costs some money. Yeah. But as,
Lillian Nave 55:38
as you mentioned before, it saves a lot of money to in the long run, right? If you put up in some of that startup costs, like grackle, or something like that, that makes things like across the board more accessibility, like an accessibility checker, then think of all of the time and resources that would have been devoted to fixing that later on, like, a 10,000 documents that were not accessible, or something like that, that. I mean, it’s like a small upfront as compared to a really large payoff. So when we prioritize, I feel like the prioritize is just like smarter ways of using the time and money in the design process that pays really big dividends. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 56:22
I think, you know, it’s really easy if this is work that really speaks to you to fall into the trap of only using assess social justice argument for the work. Yeah. And that is an important argument, and one that I deeply aligned with, but you need to be able to make the business case, right, you need to talk about risk, you do need to talk about compliance. You do need to talk about, you know, DFW, right?
Lillian Nave 56:48
You need to draw? Yeah, yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 56:50
You need to talk about all of the things that will get different kinds of constituents involved.
Lillian Nave 56:57
Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s it’s a real world thing. It’s not this Lovey Dovey, aren’t we awesome. And we’re just so caring. And aren’t we just the best educators now? Well, maybe we are interested in what we do. And we want to do it well, but also, it makes a lot of sense. Makes sense for the university, it makes sense for the students, you know, to, to do these things. So I appreciate that, that it’s not just the social justice See, idea. It’s, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah.
Rebecca Mushtare 57:29
And you really have to think about ways that things can be measurable, and demonstrate that, like you have achieved a thing. Yeah. And that’s important. That’s how that’s how resources, get, you know, allocated to initiatives and things. And so it’s important for us to do that work, to be able to get the resources and things necessary to to lift this, these kinds of initiatives to the, to the level of it can become a cultural change, rather than just this little initiative in the corner that nobody really notices.
Lillian Nave 58:01
Right? Right. Absolutely. Well, this is a lot to think about, and a lot of resources that I can add to our resource tab here for this particular episode. And I just wanted to thank you so much for taking your time to be on my podcast, I get to interview you and, and I love by the way, I’m gonna get another plug for your tea for teaching you and John Kane, just a fantastic other higher ed podcast that I love. So thank you so much, Rebecca, for being here with me to talk about the fabulous things you’re doing at Oswego.
Rebecca Mushtare 58:38
I really appreciate you inviting me to join you. It’s great to have all of the higher ed podcast coordinate some time to connect. And you know, your podcast is something is is one that means a lot to me, because obviously, it’s on a topic that I care very deeply about. Absolutely.
Lillian Nave 58:58
Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you for talking to me today. Great. You can follow the think UDL podcast on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to find out when new episodes will be released. And also see transcripts and additional materials at the think udl.org website. Thank you again to our sponsor, textile Texthelp is focused on helping all people learn, understand and communicate through the use of digital education and accessibility tools. Texthelp and its people are working towards a world where difference disability and language are no longer barriers to learning and succeeding, with over 50 million users worldwide. The Texthelp suite of products includes Read and Write equate to an orbit note. They work alongside existing platforms such as Microsoft Office and G Suite and enabled Have to be integrated quickly into any classroom or workspace with ease. Texthelp has changed the lives of millions worldwide and strives to impact the literacy and understanding of 1 billion people by 2030. Visit tech stock help forward slash learn more, that’s l earn m o r e to unlock unlimited learner potential. The music on the podcast was performed by the Oddyssey quartet comprised of Rex Shepherd, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Coachez an I am your host, Lillian Nave. Thank you for joining us on The think UDL podcast