IAG Connections and Happenings

Accessibility is an ongoing endeavor, and thus the Instructional Accessibility Group is constantly looking for new ways to guide faculty to proactive accessibility and promote accessibility awareness and inclusion. We firmly believe that proactive accessibility helps all students regardless of accommodation disclosure status.

This page contains links to the IAG posts from the CLTD Connections newsletter, as well as past events hosted by the IAG.

• The IAG is here to help Faculty! CTLD Connections #1
• 33rd ADA Commemoration (July 2023)

2024-2025 Department Visits, Trainings, and Workshops

• August 2024: Co-facilitated world cafe discussion circle on “Defining a culture of belonging at MSU Denver” at inaugural MSU Denver Community Collab Summit
• August 2024: Together with Laylonda Maines (Biology), the IAG ran “Meeting of the Minds: Collaborative Learning Using Empathy in the Classroom or Office,” a half-day workshop designed to reshape how we perceive and engage with cognitive diversity at MSU Denver.
• English Dept visit
• Art Training
• History Training
• Math Visit
• Admissions Workshop (as representatives of the Disabled Alliance and Mentorship Network)
• OER FLC Training

• The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs.
  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. 2022. ISBN-13: 978-1551528915.
  • Chapter 7: The Future is Disabled. Section by Karine Myrgianie Jean-François and Nelly Bassily .
    “A future where disability justice won looks like queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, folks of colour, and women, girls, and nonbinary humans are living in a world where disability is the norm, and where access is no longer a question but a fait accompli. Gone are the days where our disabled bodies and minds are compared to the able-bodied and able-minded. We’ve flipped the script… Because, please, did you really think this could go on, this able-bodied and -minded domination?” (p70)
• Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance.
  Edited by David Bolt and Claire Penketh. 2016. ISBN-13: 978-1-138-85866-4 (hbk) or 978-1-315-71780-7 (ebk)
  • 1. Disability, diversity, and diversion: Normalization and Avoidance in higher education. David T. Mitchell.
    “The avoidance of disability amid the professed diversity pursuits in institutions of higher education is, in many ways, a given due to the academy’s longstanding emphasis on producing members of a normative professional middle class as one key rite of passage into bourgeois (i.e., managerial) lifestyles.” (p10)
• ‘…but if you tell anyone, I’ll deny we ever met:’ the experiences of academics with invisible disabilities in the neoliberal university.
  Vera L. Dolan. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 22 Feb 2021. https://doi-org.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/09518398.2021.1885075
  • “Rather, only when disability becomes taken for granted, as simply one more dimension of the differentnesses we all carry—no more of an obstacle than the color of our eyes—will it become possible to see us disabled academics as more than able to meet and even surpass neoliberal standards of quality. Ultimately, it may very well emerge that the academy itself has a disability—one that makes it impossible to see, hear or feel how the impropriety of imposing standards of performance could ultimately disable all of its members.”
• Disability and World Language Learning: Inclusive Teaching for Diverse Learners.
  Sally S. Scott and Wade A. Edwards. ISBN-13: 978-1475837056.
• Radical Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century.
  Edited by Alice Wong. ISBN-13: 978-1984899422.
• Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist.
  Judith Heumann, with Kristen Joiner. ISBN-13: 978-0807002803.

• Digital Accessibility Committee
• HB Task Force
• Staff Senate JEDI Committee
• Curriculum Advisory Board (auxiliary)