Reframing Literacies of Success: The Importance of Access and Transparency in the Communications Classroom

Abstract

Reframing Literacies of Success: The Importance of Access and Transparency in the Communications Classroom Hannah Soyer (bio) Accessibility in the classroom is an all-encompassing approach to education that is necessary and beneficial not just for students with disabilities (visible and invisible), but also for students with different learning styles, students from different class backgrounds, and students whose first language may not be English. The root word of accessibility is access, and when we choose to foreground this in our teaching, all students benefit. As stated by disability and design scholar Bess Williamson, access is “most powerful when interpreted broadly, bringing notice to mobility and communication barriers that may not be as tangible as sidewalk curbs and public announcement systems.”1 It is most powerful when interpreted broadly because it catalyzes an understanding of barriers that various communities face and allows for the beginning of this barrier removal. Pairing this broad understanding of access with a sense of transparency is important for fostering trust and accountability, something I have come to believe is necessary in my own teaching practice. My first semester of teaching Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Kansas forced me to think a lot about these concepts. I am a physically disabled woman who uses a motorized wheelchair, and as I entered the classroom each morning––hyper aware of the fact that I was, at most, five years older than my students––I had no teaching persona in the form of armor to distance myself from my students, or to form a shield of authority around me. I was overly conscious of my physical presence in the classroom as a small, young, wheelchair using woman, an identity I could not hide. I didn’t know how to pretend an authority of my students I felt I did not have (due not to my disability, but rather my age, and also a healthy dose of imposter syndrome), and so, instead, leaned into transparency [End Page 21] and honesty as my teaching practice. In order to do this, I had to develop a certain level of self-awareness as an instructor, which then became an important skill for my students to develop as well. Applying the concept of access to teaching is not simply about responding to individual students’ accommodations, but rather designing a course and approach to teaching proactively, in which disability (i.e., “othered” bodyminds) are considered and integrated from the beginning. This means utilizing many different formats of material, such as video with closed captioning, transcripts, audio, etc. This doesn’t just benefit students who are blind or deaf, but also students with different learning styles. In addition, having video or audio along with a transcript and closed captions allows for more access for speakers of other languages. Because I am unable to hide my disability, and because I believe strongly in increased representation and discussion of disability, I chose to incorporate material that deals with disability into my curriculum, something which I continue to do today. Structuring course content around diversity and working to highlight voices of marginalized communities is especially important when discussing communication and storytelling. For instance, I have used famed blind model Molly Burke’s Instagram account as a way to discuss how image descriptions in captions are another form of communication that are also a point of access for visually impaired individuals. I also always incorporate Chimimanda Agozie’s well-known Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” into my writing classes, as a way to get students thinking about the ways in which literacy is “socially constructed and enacted,” as rhetoric scholar J. Blake Scott asserts.2 Incorporating material that centers diverse voices and being proactive about providing material in different formats is a two-pronged approach to access, which looks at both course content and design, and allows for a broad interpretation of access, one which benefits all students. When looking at a course on communication, specifically, access means we must rethink our preconceived notions of what “communication” is, beyond simply vocalized speech or written text. I taught four semesters of Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Kansas, a course which has an emphasis on rhetorical...