All Aboard the Accommodation Train

Having just graduated from a teacher education program, I spent a lot of time in my education classes talking about differentiation instruction, including enrichment and accommodation. However, it was always in an abstract way. My professors would talk about how it should always be adapted based on the student’s circumstances; however, this led to us not learning very practical methods for accommodating. Despite having my Mild/Moderate special education certification, I feel underprepared for helping students with disabilities or special learning needs because I do not think I have enough practical application knowledge. The focus on practical application – in the form of syllabus design – is what I appreciated most about Womack’s “Teaching is Accommodation.”

As Womack expresses, “accommodation is the most basic act and art of teaching.” In the student-centered age of education, teachers need to view accommodation as the first part of lesson planning and teacher, not the last thing they think about. I think one reason that accommodation can be challenging for teachers, is that they see it as a deviation from their pre-constructed norms (Womack 497). However, as Womack asserts, “learning strategies seemingly become not-an-accommodation-once they are no longer novel” (Womack 497). As teachers, we are instrumental in creating the learning environment without our classrooms. Therefore, we should take care to promote inclusive environments that meet the needs of all students.

There were two sections of this work that I was influenced by from personal experience. This was the legal scope and requirements of ADA and Section 504 and the history of “handedness.” I witnessed the limited scope of ADA through the experience of my friend, Mackenzie, this past year. She was diagnosed with severe ADHD at the age of 9 and has been taking medication since then. She also always received accommodations in the form of alternatively testing locations and extra time on assessments. Despite her ADHD, Mackenzie is a diligent student and is starting graduate school at the University of Georgia, studying Speech Pathology. However, the first step in the graduate school admissions process was to take the GRE standardized exam. She went to the Office of Disabilities to have her disability paperwork validated in order to receive accommodation on the GRE exam. She called the office countless times, went in person to the office four times, and even had her father call the office only to hear back from them weeks later that they could not process her paperwork without her full ADHD medical history file. Knowing that she would have to deal with a beaurocratic mess, she started the process months before she planned on taking the GRE. Still, the lack of clear policies and assistance in the Office of Disabilities demonstrate how challenging it can be for students to receive the accommodation. What makes Mackenzie’s case so interesting is that she was receiving accommodations at the University of Mississippi, but the Office of Disability would not recognize those accommodations for a national standardized exam without out getting written notice for two medical professionals. Ultimately, she received accommodations, but the amount of effort that she had to put into getting them placed an extra burden on her disability.

The other experience I had with ostracizing a perceived disability is handedness. My ninth grade English teacher, Maria Klein, first told me about handedness. She was a victim of handedness correction, which ultimately led her to have a unique disability. As Womak describes, “the history of handedness – in which schoolchildren were forbidden from using their left hand because of a medical or moral norm – demonstrates in short how difference is made into disability. Ms. Klein’s dominant hand is her left, but in grade school she was forced to use her right. From psychological research, we know now that this is mildly damaging to cognitive and visual aspects of the brain. Initially, she adapted and learned to use her right hand; however, when she learned cursive her disability became more prominent. Do to switching her dominant hand to a non-dominant hand; Ms. Klein lost the ability to tell directions. When writing cursive, she would also accidentally write backwards or in mirror images. Later on this caused a delay in getting her drivers license because she cannot differentiate between directions. When driving, she uses the terms “drivers side” and “passenger side” in order to know whether to turn left or right. This example of early education “correction” demonstrates why teachers need to be knowledgeable about accommodating appropriately for student differences.

I appreciated that Womack focused on one type of text – course syllabi – and then analyzed the various accommodations that could be made. This helped me to focus lest on the text, and more on the ways to adjust it using universal design. Womack asserts that the main purpose behind universal design (UD) is

“...creating access for students with disabilities and empowering all students” (500).

In regard to the creation of accommodating syllabi, Womack focuses on a few key aspects. First, moving away from the idea of syllabi being contracts. Contract-like syllabi have a tendency to “rely on text-heavy visual design, negative punishment language, defensive and even combative policies, and cold-tone disability statements” (501). This type of syllabi make students less likely to feel comfortable approaching teachers when they are having issues, therefore dissuading them from access to an important resource. Furthermore, Womack discusses the various ways to reformat syllabi and other course documents to be more effective for students with varying learning disabilities. These include simple things such as formatting text in bullet-pointed columns instead of paragraphs and changing text to a more dyslexia-friendly font. Throughout Womack’s piece, she shows simply forms of accommodation that would be easy to integrate into any classroom.