Phase 3: Recommendations
This section of our report will include the three recommendations that our team came up with to start discussions around disability studies on Lafayette’s campus. All recommendations include different types of improvements to the current system of Lafayette College that will open up channels that will increase the existence of course offerings, research projects and networking opportunities around disability studies.
- Curricular Improvement: Offering a lower level and interdisciplinary Disability Studies course
Our team’s Lafayette audit has established different agents on campus who are doing curricular work on disabilities in terms of courses and research. However these courses are major specific and prone to the upperclassmen of these majors. They also focus on specific disabilities, rather than talking about disability studies as an academic discipline. That is why we recommend that Lafayette offer an introductory course on disability studies and do so as an interdisciplinary course.
Offering an introductory, interdisciplinary, disability studies course will create a space for students and professors who are interested in disability studies to connect with each other and establish a common language on the matter. This way, the introductory course can be a platform to clarify the basics and create a common language within campus which is harder to do with a course that is disability type specific.
Similar courses can be found both at University of Washington (UW) and MIT. UW is offering an Introduction to Disability Studies course that focuses on discussing
what disability is and identities around disabilities (refer to Appendix B for the course syllabus). The course also touches upon discussing policy and laws around disabled people (McDonnell, 2020). Another course is also offered at MIT called Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology (PPAT). This one is a more specialized course that focuses on designing assistive technology with someone who has the specific disability (PPAT, 2020). This course is co-taught by six instructors from Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and Health Sciences & Technology departments. Both courses have different insights to offer for an interdisciplinary course at Lafayette. UW’s course showcases the intellectual base needed for a course and the PPAT course is a great example on how to incorporate the design process into a semester-long course.
Implementation of an introductory course comes with challenges. Currently professors are limited to their departmental obligations in terms of offering a certain number of mandatory courses that departments have to offer their major-specific students. That is why offering disability specific courses either as a capstone or a higher level elective exclusive for students within the major is common. However, breaking these academic barriers to introduce an introductory course is needed for the Lafayette community by laying out the groundwork for more to come. The Hanson Center for Inclusive STEM Education can come into play to bring incentives to overcome these academic barriers. The importance of doing such from within is crucial to tie greater connections between already existing agents at Lafayette, and that’s why other forces on campus such as the Hanson Center should lay out an incentive to enable a current professor to offer such a course. Once this course is offered, it can also have an effect on
an expansive time scale. This course can be a place where research projects can develop, and feed into higher level classes as well.
The course should be an interdisciplinary course to enable different majors and class levels to take the course and exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of the academic discipline. At its core, this would take the shape of two departments working together to build this course. For example, the two instructors could be from engineering studies and psychology departments that can teach the course together. Higher level electives are only available for students who are upperclassmen of the specific major, which is a small group of students given Lafayette’s small campus. An introductory interdisciplinary course brings together students from different majors, thus, different perspectives together, and creates an opportunity for these students to take up ‘higher level’ opportunities around disability studies later in their Lafayette career. On top of that, disability studies itself requires an interdisciplinary approach to understand the current socio-technical nature of disabilities. For example, from an engineering perspective engineers do have capabilities to design for disabilities. However, they would need sociology and psychology’s help to understand how to meet the needs of people with disabilities and how those have not been met historically.
As this course will create a baseline of understanding disability studies on the campus, our team also hopes that it would also bring up the discussion around accessibility of Lafayette’s campus. The college being on the hill and some buildings being built before the Americans with Disabilities Act, Lafayette College has a lot of areas of improvement on accessibility. We believe that to build a strong disability studies curriculum on campus, the accessibility of the campus must improve hand in hand to make campus more accessible for disabled students and community partners. Our efforts, including future efforts to come, would not be possible, or appropriate, if the campus is not inclusive of the disabled community by design.
- Research Power Improvement: Hiring a Professor or a Fellow
One of the obstacles to teaching a disabilities studies course is lack of a professor from disability studies. Dr. Michael Nees might be the most suited given that he has the background on this topic and already teaches a capstone on disability and assistive technologies. Yet, his responsibilities in the courses he already teaches in addition to his research endeavors would certainly stretch his time thin. Moreover, there is a demonstrated need for this conversation to be interdisciplinary and for the faculty member who leads this change, to be willing and able to offer numerous opportunities. Given this need and that a course offering or one-time event would not sufficiently address an ever-evolving field, Lafayette hiring a professor or fellow would facilitate continuous dialogue around disability studies.
Collectively, the Engineering Studies Department and the Hanson Center are in a position to hire three tenured-track faculty members to Lafayette. The background qualifications of any of the new professorships is flexible and could include someone with a background in human centered design, specifically in the disability field – akin to those who work or are trained by the exemplar schools in this report’s Phase 2.
Getting new faculty lines is a difficult process and over a faculty member’s lifetime is a multi-million dollar investment. Lafayette has planned benchmarks to increase the size of the student faculty and in tandem, increase the size of the faculty proportionately. In this COVID moment, not knowing where enrollment will stand, and with the introduction of a new college President will prioritize the expansion plans, there is uncertainty about what the future of hiring looks like. Engineering Studies Chair, Dr. Benjamin Cohen, explained that due to the college’s financial uncertainty, at best, hiring a tenured-track position through the Engineering Studies Department or the Hanson Center would not happen for several years (Cohen, 2020).
Tenured-track faculty is not the only kind of hiring the college does. According to the Hanson Center, it is quicker and easier to get funding for a position that is more short term, like a Fellow. Currently, Lafayette has Dr. Matthew Andler in the Philosophy department as the Louise M. Olmsted Fellow for Ethics. Part of their charge in their two year role is to foster conversations on campus. They are teaching classes, facilitating workshops, etc. Dr. Andler is currently working on a Race and Racial Justice Series (Lafayette News, 2019).
At Harvey Mudd, there is the Hixon-Riggs Fellow who works on projects which examine the social dimensions of science and technology (The Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellowship). Every one to two years, someone new, generally someone freshly out of graduate school, comes in. This allows the individual to bring new ideas that are current with the moment to foster communication with the community.
Regardless of whether a new faculty member would teach a newly designed class, coordinate events, or launch new research projects, the number one need for Lafayette that this solution would address is determining a point person for all conversations of disability on campus. Developing a research agenda for a small college is challenging, but the first step is having faculty with the expertise and latitude to lay the foundation for future endeavors.
- Activities Improvement: Speaker Series/Workshops
After speaking with several faculty members who have backgrounds in and/or currently do research in disability at Lafayette, we found that we have more resources on campus than we had originally thought. The primary reason that we (and many other people) did not initially take note of the amount of faculty members doing disability work is that few of these faculty members collaborate on their work. While there are professors in engineering, mathematics, neuroscience, and psychology that do some sort of work in the disability field, there is no connection between them. As Dr. Rossman of the Hanson Center had stated, we need someone on campus to establish the “connective tissue” between all of these professors and organizations (Kimber & Rossman, 2020).
As a way to capitalize on the resources that we already have on our own campus and establish the connection between the various faculty members that have an interest in disability studies, we plan to propose a speaker series through the Hanson Center which focuses on the topic of disability studies and disability in engineering. Lafayette professors could use this as an opportunity to speak about their individual research efforts within the disability field. By doing this, the Hanson Center will serve as the liaison between these professors, as well as between professors and students who are interested in disability research. At this point in time, the Hanson Center seems to be the best pathway for us to take in order to truly implement disability studies at Lafayette. By working with them, we plan to start from the ground up; in order to spread knowledge and awareness across campus about disability in engineering – and the lack thereof – it would be beneficial for the Hanson Center to bring in external speakers and hold workshops that relate to the topic and can educate students. As Dr. Michael Nees, Professor of Psychology, had explained to us, many students have never considered what life is like for people with disabilities, especially on an inaccessible campus like Lafayette (Nees, 2020). Just as his Disability Studies Capstone serves as a discussion-based foundational approach for his students, we would like to provide an opportunity such as a forum for the student population on campus through the Hanson Center.
In order to remain aligned with our original goal of improving engineering for disability, it is important to continue to intertwine engineering research and education within our Hanson Center efforts. As we know, and as many faculty members we have spoken with have mentioned), the most effective way to spark change on a college campus is through the student body. Therefore, we believe it would be beneficial to include our many engineering clubs (i.e. SWE, ASCE, ASME, IEEE, Best Society, AIChE) in these Hanson Center workshops. There are already some workshops in the works. As previously mentioned in Phase 2, Professor Chawne Kimber, co-founder of the Hanson Center and Professor of Mathematics, plans to hold a workshop in January on universal design. This workshop will focus on how design should include more than just the demographic of nondisabled people and how designs can be more accessible to everyone (Kimber & Rossman, 2020). In addition to this, initially proposals from Erin McKenney led to an event that was held in Fall 2020 from a member of the deaf community – Dr. Jaipreet Virdi held the talk “Hearing Happiness” to speak about the history of deafness and systemic oppression against people of the deaf community. Along with this, Erin is also pushing forth efforts to make campus events and speakers accessible to more people. Closed captioning (during virtual events) and sign language interpretation should be mandated for spectators who may have auditory impairments, as they were for Dr. Virdi’s talk.
Because the Hanson Center’s primary focus is holistic inclusive STEM education, and they are an established organization on campus, it would make the most sense for us to take our capstone project and education reform proposals to them before taking it to the next level. After speaking with some faculty members, we learned that the tenure-track hiring process can take years, and is essentially a several million-dollar investment in a professor. For this reason, the College is likely not going to rush the process of possibly hiring a disability studies professor – our most viable starting point is spreading awareness and knowledge on campus in the hopes that professors and students will begin their own initiatives in disability studies, as we have seen with many other initiatives in the past.
After we had spoken about our proposals with the Hanson Center, our team recalled that each year, the first – year students are required to read a summer reading book. This book often aligns with the interdisciplinary aspect of a liberal arts institution like Lafayette and educates students about current societal issues. Following this, the College brings in the author of the summer reading book as a guest speaker on campus. We hope to work with the Hanson Center to propose that next year’s (or another year in the future) summer reading novel is “What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World” by Dr. Sara Hendren. As we have discussed in class, our team is reading this book to educate ourselves on human-centered design and how inaccessible our world is for people with disabilities. We think it would be very beneficial for first-year students to read this book, and for us to be able to bring Dr. Hendren in to give a talk following the assignment. Of course, the entire campus would be invited to this talk, and we hope to have it co-sponsored by the Hanson Center.
Please click here to access the Conclusion.