Phase 2: Lafayette Audit
Introduction
As part of this project, our team has conducted an audit of the projects and research that involve disability studies and design for disability at Lafayette College. Our audit of various disability courses, research, and opportunities has yielded that there are several endeavors and professors with backgrounds either in or adjacent to the disability studies field at Lafayette; however there is a lack of coordination between projects and awareness of each other’s endeavors. A recurring theme is there is a lack of a “point person” for the topics that fall under disability studies, and thus faculty and students do not know who to ask in order to find opportunities. After a series of interviews, the topics to follow are (1) what Lafayette is currently doing and (2) what are supplemental opportunities in the works and the knowledge gaps identified.
- What is Lafayette Currently Doing
Dr. Michael Nees’s Disability Research Background and Classes
Dr. Michael Nees is in Lafayette Psychology’s Department and received his PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Engineering Psychology. This background positioned him to teach PSYC 226: Human Factors and Engineering Psychology. “It is not a disabilities focused course but accessibility and issues related to disability are ever-present in that course. It is a course about design and one of the values of good design is inclusiveness and accessibility” (Nees, 2020).
With Dr. Nees’ training in Engineering Psychology, he worked in a lab studying auditory perception especially with a focus on auditory displays. This is anything an engineer designs to make sound in order to inform an audience of something (i.e. the different sounds a phone makes, different sounds a car makes, etc.). Auditory displays also include assistive technologies for people with visual impairments and this was the central focus of the lab. “If vis[ion] is difficult, audio is one way to get information to you” (Nees, 2020). Screen readers is a prime example of assistive technology that will read out information on a screen. “If webpages are designed and coded correctly, screen readers should be able to make the information available to a person who is visually impaired” (Nees, 2020).
Coming from this background, Dr. Nees worked on audio graphs, different tones and melodies that would illustrate information in textbooks from cartesian coordinates. He worked on audio assistive technology since graduate school and has participated in brown bag speaker engagements for the Center of Visual Impairment in Atlanta, Georgia. This was an opportunity for weekly or monthly meetings for different researchers to describe the projects they were working on and receive feedback. Dr. Nees was also “peripherally involved” on projects for the Georgia Academy of the Blind, testing technologies in schools. Just before arriving at Lafayette, Dr. Nees took part in projects in Kenya that historically and continuously have residential programs for people who are blind (Nees, 2020).
When Dr. Nees arrived at Lafayette, he continued to work on audio assistive technologies. He published some pieces and started some projects in this area. At this point, his interest focused on testing accommodations for visually impaired students as it relates to standardized and entry exams (i.e. SAT, LSAT, etc.). Dr. Nees conducted a couple of studies, trying out prototypes, and research with cited undergraduate students at Lafayette. A challenge with continuing this research was that now Dr. Nees did not have access to people with visual impairments locally in the Lehigh Valley and as time passed, he was less connected with his contacts at the Center for Visual Impairment. Twice he had projects that fell through. He attempted to run focus groups in relation to his interest in standardized tests; he was in contact with a service center for people with visual impairments in Allentown, had an agreement, processed his research request through the Institutional Review Board (IRB), and when this project was ready to start, he did not hear back from the recruiter. In his second effort on this project, he partnered with a teacher in Allentown who had students with visual impairments, but when the project was ready to start, having similarly been processed with IRB, there was only one respondent. Dr. Nees explains that finding individuals who are visually imparied and have taken standardized exams is already a small section of people, but in the Lehigh Valley, he found it to be challenging. At this point, halfway through his “tenure-clock,” Dr. Nees realized he “couldn’t be putting his research efforts into these projects that were fizzling out.” He emphasized that he could adapt his project in a way for the undergraduate students to utilize the prototypes, but in these types of projects, he really wanted individuals with the specific disability (Nees, 2020).
Dr. Nees has continued to write about audio assistive technologies, but in 2017 he started a new endeavor: teaching a capstone course. He was already teaching PSYC 332: Perception, a course on the human senses, which touched on sensory disabilities – namely visual and hearing impairments. In this course, he shows the film Sound and Fury, which is about two sets of deaf parents trying to decide if it is the right decision to give their children cochlear implants. “The response I got from students watching that film was really intense and they really wanted to talk about it” (Nees, 2020). At the same time, Dr. Nees was presented with an opportunity to create a new capstone course and the student’s enthusiasm led him to create PSYC 490: Disabilities and Assistive Technologies (See Appendix A for the course syllabus). He has taught it twice now, the first time in Fall 2017, and the response “completely blew [him] away.” It’s a seminar class where he assigns readings and leads discussions. As a capstone class, the availability is limited to Senior Psychology majors. Dr. Nees explained that the composition of his students included some with disabilities, but most joined because they have never considered this topic before. Dr. Nees described the experience as “transformative” as the class has tackled different controversial areas from the ethical dialoge with cochillear impants to the interection of disability and reproductive rights (i.e. conversations on abortions, genetic testing, etc.) (Nees, 2020).
Recently, Dr. Nees has reconnected with the Kenya projects he used to work with, now as a paid consultant with an NGO. He is currently examining the accessibility of banking services and has data from people with a wide-spread of disabilities, trying to understand the experience of going to the bank or using banking services online (Nees, 2020).
Dr. Gabel and Dr. Yu’s Department Collaboration
Dr. Lisa Gabel in the Neuroscience Department and Dr. Yih-Choung Yu in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department are currently working on a brain computer interface. While not inspired from a disability studies perspective, the project is inherently designed for people with voluntary motor control disabilities. They are focusing on severe disabilities, specifically, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis – commonly known as ALS – and Locked-in syndrome where physical activity is limited to “maybe a slight turn of the head and ocular motor activity but nothing else.” The device is intended to utilize signals from the brain to operate the movement of wheelchairs: moving left, right, forward, and stopping. The device, if successful, is also intended for military veterans who are wheel-chair users (Gabel & Yu, 2020).
Before coming to Lafayette, Dr. Yu worked for a medical device company. In his PhD research, he worked on design for an artificial heart. Dr. Gabel’s background is in studying neurodevelopmental disorders, in which she teaches a class on that. Together, they teach the cross-listed ECE 205/NEUR 205: Human Machine & Advances in Medical Technology. Their co-taught class, Dr. Gabel’s first year seminar, and Dr. Yu’s Engineering 101 module tend to be a feeder for students into their research projects (Gabel & Yu, 2020).
Additionally, the two have continued to collaborate on a dyslexia project. They have designed a detection tool which can identify individuals with dyslexia even before they begin to read. “This will allow interventions while they learn how to read and they may never display a deficit. As opposed to now, when most kids are not diagnosed until [age] 12” (Gabel & Yu, 2020).
Some students with disabilities migrate to Dr. Gabel and Dr. Yu’s lab, but currently they have no students with mobility challenges working on the brain computer interface project. They find students with disabilities tend to be interested in research to better understand that disability. There are no individuals (students, Easton residents, etc.) within the target population – mobility challenges – involved in testing the device because currently the professors believe the device would not be safe for a member of that community to operate it. Regardless, they want to receive feedback from individuals with these disabilities and are in-communication with disabled veterans as well as they read a lot of literature on ALS and Locked-in syndrome to identify the needs. Dr. Gabel’s First Year Seminar, FYS 148: Melding Mind and Machine, focuses on the literature (Gabel & Yu, 2020).
Mechanical Engineering
During our conversation with the Hanson Center, it became apparent numerous Mechanical Engineering Professors work on capstone projects in the field of disability and these projects are not usually limited to Mechanical Engineering students, although the composition is often just Mechanical Engineering students. In the past, Dr. Toby Rossman worked on adaptive technology for students with a range of disabilities to participate in music education (i.e. a recorder adaptation, a keyboard adaptation). This year he is working on a project for students with disabilities and remote learning challenges. Dr. Brent Utter is currently working on a wheelchair project. Dr. Alex Brown, who is also the head of the new BioMechanics concentration, worked on an assistive device for handwriting two years ago for people with motor challenges (Rossman, J., 2020).
Dr. Utter’s senior design team, through a two-semester endeavor, is working on an attachment device to wheelchairs that would stabilize the movement of the chairs while on a decline or incline path, specifically those with a grade (slope) too steep for many wheelchair users. The team’s website explains the group decided on the project through conversations between each other. They were tasked with a project that was either a medical device or through the use of 3D printers (Motivation, 2020). A team member who asked for anonymity in order to speak more freely explained that the project was specifically inspired by the student group discussing the inaccessibility of Lafayette’s campus on College Hill, focusing on the incline up Sullivan Road, from Bushkill Drive to March Field (Doe, 2020). The website discloses that after receiving an IRB approval, the group has interviewed one wheelchair user and the team intends to interview more through the December 2020/January 2021 interim. The website also shares that the team is conducting surveys of healthcare providers “[which] focus on the current difficulties faced when tackling inclines and declines in a wheelchair as well as user interface preferences” (External Partnerships and Stakeholders, 2020). The team member expressed regret for the team not engaging more wheelchair users as well as already having the design in place before the one interview. They furthered that healthcare providers are not the best equipped to answer questions about wheelchair use since (1) the experience of the devices are either assumptions or second-hand knowledge, (2) the group had difficulty finding wheelchair users to interview due to Lafayette’s lack of wheelchair using students, and (3) the constraints of the project itself was not conducive for better community partnership (Doe, 2020). The team member identified that while doing this project through a graded class, students must meet internal deadlines, some of which for the design of the device were before the IRB request was approved (Doe, 2020). The constraints, including cost of the device, were imposed by group members, none of which are wheelchair users themselves, informed from their literature review (Doe, 2020). The group will be releasing the next version of their report, with updates, on December 6, 2020 (Utter, 2020).
Commonalities
The Computer Brain Interface, Dyslexia, and Mechanical Engineering Wheelchair Projects all derive from professor or student interest, rather than from members of the disabled communities themselves. Dr. Nees and the team member of the wheelchair project both identified difficulty in finding participants who are members of the disability community in respect to their specific projects; the latter of which is partially a result of Lafayette student composition. In both cases, the time-scale of the project is not conducive to effective community partnership. Engineering and Sustainable Community Development claims, “if engineers are committed to the sustainability of engineering development projects, and to community self-determination through those projects, they must think critically about their motivations, approaches, and relationships to those communities” (Lucena, p. 7, 2010). The authors offer steps for effective community development. These include (1) self-reflection before and throughout the project, (2) meaningful ways to learn about the community, (3) expanding time-scale, (4) plans for failure, and (5) individual/project assessment (Lucena, p. 106-112, 2010). As Lafayette moves to implement our team’s recommendations, those involved in the process need to center projects on assistive technology or the disability community at-large around the voices of the individuals with disabilities as well as practice the steps for effective community development.
- Supplemental Opportunities and Knowledge Gap
Disability Speaker Event
On July 10, 2020 Lafayette College announced Professor Temple Grandin of Colorado State University would deliver the keynote speech for Lafayette’s Commencement ceremony. One of the reasons Lafayette chose her was because “Grandin is a leading specialist and lecturer on autism, a condition that she has had since birth” (Lafayette Today, 2020). When this announcement came, Erin McKenney ‘20, felt obliged to let the College know how disappointed she was in the selection. In a letter to the Lafayette President’s office, Erin wrote:
“In the middle of a global pandemic, where both disabled people and people with low incomes are particularly at risk, Lafayette College chose an ableist and classist speaker. Dr. Grandin has repeatedly expressed that she does not support disabled people who cannot work. She has insulted their character and their parents’ choices, while failing to consider the systemic repercussions of ableism. She has also supported [Applied Behavior Analysis] and special diets to “treat” autism, both of which are highly controversial and largely opposed by the autistic community. Many autistic people have protested Dr. Grandin’s previous statements and many have been harmed by them” (McKenney, 2020).
In the conclusion of this letter and in the substance of a secondary one, Erin urged the college to host an event led by a disability advocate to counteract the harmful messaging Dr. Gradin’s presence and content of her keynote address imposed on the community (McKenney, 2020).
Erin is currently a PhD student in clinical psychology at Rowan University. Her senior honors thesis at Lafayette was “How timing of accessibility to alternative communication devices in childhood influences well-being and subjective feelings of independence in adulthood among non-speaking individuals”. At Rowan, she is in the process of examining how the obstacles to receive accommodations at colleges are creating heightened levels of stress on students with disabilities and leading to detrimental mental health outcomes. With her background in disability advocacy and adjacent to disability studies, Erin has taken it upon herself to coordinate a speaking event (McKenney, 2020).
She has met with President Alison Byerly and her assistant, Melissa Starace. The inception of the speaking event was that it will occur in November 2020 and focus on ableism and universal design (McKenney, 2020). The coordinators were deciding between Dr. Jaipreet Virdi and Lydia Brown. Dr. Virdi is a Professor at the University of Delaware who teaches about the history of disability perspectives in American society, with a specialty in deaf culture, being a member of the community herself. Mx. Brown “co-leads the project on disability rights and algorithmic fairness at the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, teaches for Georgetown University’s Disability Studies Program through the Department of English, and supports the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network’s public policy advocacy” (Brown). “They have worked to advance transformative change through organizing in the streets, writing legislation, conducting anti-ableism workshops, testifying at regulatory and policy hearings, and disrupting institutional complacency everywhere from the academy to state agencies and the nonprofit-industrial complex” (Brown, 2020).
The original plan was there would be a Question and Answers segment after the guest speaker with Erin, Dr. Matthew Andler in Philosophy, Marty Sullivan from the Academic Resource Hub, and one more person. The last person was intended to be either Dr. Lauren Meyers or Dr. Michael Nees in Psychology/Neuroscience. Dr. Meyers and Dr. Andler do not have a background in disability. Dr. Andler’s speciality is focused on LGBTQ and gender inclusion, not disability, but their role as the Louise M. Olsted Fellow for Ethics is to spur dialogue through various events as it relates to injustice (Lafayette News, 2019).
“I think one reality that our campus has quite not realized is that we do [not] have anyone on campus who actually does disability studies work.” Erin believes she was invited into this discussion panel because she is the closest thing Lafayette has to someone with a disability studies background, yet she studied psychology and anthropology & sociology. “I am not in disability studies. We should all be a little concerned about that piece” (McKenney, 2020).
The reason the President’s office brought in Lauren Meyers is because they equated a background in child development with developmental disability. When Erin raised that there needs to be a person with a background in neurodiversity (i.e. Autism), the President’s Office took that to mean someone in the neuroscience department. Erin identified there is a bigger need for understanding language on campus, like what the word neurodiversity means. There is a disconnect where when people hear neurodiversity, they believe bringing together people in neuroscience with race and diversity can speak to it. People need to realize the language gap that exists and we need to build an understanding to fill it. This speaking event might be the first opportunity for the majority of the Lafayette community to engage in this dialogue (McKenney, 2020).
The President’s Office was able to secure Dr. Virdi for a lunch talk on Tuesday, November 10th. Dr. Virdi’s presentation centered on her new book, Hearing Happiness, which examines the curative nature of conversation related to deafness through a historical lens of medical procedures and audio assistive technologies. During her presentation, Dr. Virdi focused on the evolution of assistive technologies and opened the dialogue to the complexity of seeing deafness as a condition to be “fixed.” Due to the limited amount of time during a lunch talk, the presentation was followed by questions from this project group, Erin McKenney, and audience members. With a week to advertise, compounded by the difficulty in advertising while the country was waiting for the U.S. Presidential results, the event was extremely well attended for a lunch talk with over 110 attendees, after excluding the people involved in planning, and individuals who were not able to attend had requested access to the video recording. This event helped signify that discussions around disability is a salient topic for the Lafayette community, but also has much enthusiasm.
Hanson Center
Lafayette College’s Hanson Center for Inclusive STEM Education and Studies is a recently founded initiative. As of July 2020, Dr. Chawne Kimber of the Mathematics Department and Dr. Jennifer Rossman of the Mechanical Engineering Department became the first directors.
There is a physical space dedicated to the Hanson Center in the Rockwell Integrated Science Center and in a non-pandemic academic term, the directors would be utilizing the space. The objectives of the Hanson Center are three-fold: (1) to think about and support students whose identities have historically been excluded from STEM, (2) supporting faculty to think about how teaching might create barriers that lead to underrepresentation, and (3) looking at curriculum which looks at STEM with perspectives of history, ethnic studies, gender studies, and disability studies – critiquing and contextualizing STEM practices and studies. Dr. Rossman characterizes STEM education as an ecosystem, where in a healthy state, the composition includes people with diversity in identity and everyone is supportive of each other, affirming the inclusivity (Kimber & Rossman, 2020).
Dr. Rossman contends Lafayette’s Engineering Studies is currently best positioned to have these conversations. “These students are doing STEM and partnering with others in STEM which is enhanced by looking at STEM through these critical lenses, appreciating the way that STEM is not neutral and socially constructed.” She acknowledges there are not many places and classes that take these perspectives; there is a Gender & STEM class, a few first-year seminars, and, unaware of Dr. Nees’s course, no disability studies class (Kimber & Rossman, 2020).
One of the issues identified with disability projects is that there are various projects happening, but they are not connected, the groups are not communicating with one another, and the projects are not communicated to the wider college community.
Dr. Kimber explained that for a long time at Lafayette, the idea was that many buildings on the campus were excused from complying accessibility standards since they pre-date the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and therefore, Lafayette took the stance that if a student has a disability, the student should go elsewhere. Dr. Kimber mentioned that these attitudes have changed, specifically over the past few years in the Provost Office, and the Hanson Center now can be utilized as a tool to help speed up change (Kimber & Rossman, 2020).
Dr. Kimber described that the Hanson Center started with a summer program whose goal is to support women in STEM. At the same time, the college hired Professor Mary Armstrong whose expertise was in gender inclusivity in STEM. The campus started looking at new areas of focus: to modernize curriculum and to modernize how the college supports students. Over a three year process, there were several votes from the faculty, who ended up agreeing that inclusive STEM was an important priority. From there, the development office got involved and Heidi Hanson became the central donor for this mission, establishing the Hanson Center (Kimber & Rossman, 2020).
The Hanson Center is currently capitalizing on already existing peer mentoring programs across departments, asking departments to have community-based approaches on their projects, and has the funding for two faculty lines of professors who specialize in intersectionality. The Center is also putting together a universal design training workshop in January 2021 for Lafayette faculty. While the focus will be ADA compliance, the intention is accessibility in education at-large. COVID-19 has made the faculty more aware of accessibility challenges. Dr. Kimber used to be the director of the Center for the Integration and Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (CITLS) where faculty go for these workshops and hosted training on accessibility. The attendance was less than desirable, but through the COVID-19 moment of reckoning on exacerbated inequality in education, Dr. Kimber hopes it will lead more faculty members to her Hanson Center workshop (Kimber & Rossman, 2020).
Please click here to access Phase 3: Recommendations.