From Reporting to Removing Barriers: Toward Transforming Accommodation Culture into Equity Culture

Abstract

This reflective case study is situated at the intersection of the literature on pedagogical partnership, child-parent research, and Critical Disability Studies. It presents a mother/daughter, faculty/student exploration of the daughter’s lived experiences of navigating, as a legally blind person, the campus and courses of a college designed for fully sighted students. After presenting our conceptual frameworks and describing, using text and a video, the daughter’s lived experience of navigating the accommodation culture on her campus, we describe the semester-long partnership process through which the video was created with the goal of moving faculty, staff, and students toward equity culture. To support others in developing such video projects on their own campuses, we draw on details of this partnership to offer guidelines for co-creating representations of the lived experiences of other students with disabilities. By synthesizing learnings from this experience and the literature noted above, we offer recommendations for transforming accommodation culture into equity culture. These recommendations include: establishing diversity as the norm in every learning context; intentionally inviting a revision of differences from deficits to resources; going beyond providing accommodations to understand students’ lived experiences; and sharing the active taking of responsibility for shifting from accommodation to equity culture.