Accessible Classroom

Optimizing the Classroom for Accessibility

"Classroom" will often be used to refer to everything that you do in a physical (or digital) Classroom including but not limited to classroom management, lesson design and preparation, lecturing, and more.  This is because building an accessible course starts with the aforementioned fundamentals-- it is built into the course from the ground up rather than the top down. 

The physical classroom is often where we meet our students for the first time. Creating a welcoming, open, inclusive, and accessible classroom will allow students to know that we care for them. Some classrooms, whether physically or pedagogically, are not immediately well-suited to providing for accessibility. However, with some minor tweaks, they can be. Some of these tweaks are obvious while others are a bit more nuanced. As we continue this lesson, you may find that you already do much, if not all, of the things that we mention here. In that case, however, consider how you implement those things. Can you streamline your processes? Better integrate the pedagogy and skills we mention into your classroom? Provide more representation of your students in course materials?

We will start with a basic introduction to the Universal Design for Learning, a pedagogy framework widely considered to be inclusive and accessible, to looking at specific aspects of the classroom including designing lectures and course content, the physical classroom, and classroom management and inclusivity. There is more to creating a fully accessible classroom, but you can use this lesson as a primer of sorts to get you started.