CAST's 4th Annual Symposium: Empowering Learners

In this session, participants will identify a specific classroom challenge, and design a strategy to improve classroom communication and interaction.
 
This session will describe a project that aims to improve resources available for faculty who work with deaf and hard of hearing students in mainstream postsecondary settings by creating training environments where faculty are encouraged to experiment with and innovate new resources and strategies for accessible and inclusive pedagogy. These strategies respond to immediate needs in the classroom, and become part of a web-based Accessibility ToolKit (ATK). Using UDL principles as an introduction and hook, faculty identify a current communication and collaboration challenge in their classrooms. They then brainstorm, develop, test, and implement their strategy in the classroom. Key components of this faculty development model include a semester long Faculty Learning Community, alongside a partnership with a student observer and mentor.
 
Participants in this session will identify one of their own classroom communication and collaboration challenges, i.e., points where specific students have not been fully included in the classroom activity. Participants will practice developing strategies to address these challenges. We will lead participants through a process of brainstorming solutions, with insights from snapshots of what our students have identified as challenging and how they have proposed solutions. Participants will also fine-tune the design of their strategy.
 
Participants will learn more about deaf and hard of hearing students in mainstreamed settings. They will care about the intersectionality of communication and collaboration challenges for all kinds of students, including deaf and hard of hearing, English as a second language, veterans, those on the spectrum, and first generation college students.

The core take-away is that faculty can start small (i.e., identify one thing to address), and transform their course to be more accessible and inclusive. We will engage learners via visual and spoken examples, and share a number of strategies we have found to be successful, as well as our website toolkit. We will offer a number of options for them to take action: They can keep in touch with our work (our next grant proposal will focus on developing a consortium of colleges and universities doing this kind of work), use any strategies from the existing toolkit in their own classrooms, and develop new strategies.
 
TAGS: Accessible Materials and Technologies, Higher Ed, Special Education/Inclusion