Core Area 3a: Understanding and Engaging with Legislation

Guidelines

Statements here should show how relevant legislation, has influenced your work. You are not expected to have expert knowledge of all of these areas, but are expected to be aware of how they relate to and impact upon your current practice.

Equality Act 2010

The Equality Act of 2010 came into force to reduce inequalities across different groups of people. The act outlines the characteristics upon which it is illegal to discriminate against a person. Part 6 of this Act outlines how this applies to Education with Chapter 2 specifically relating to Further and Higher Education. In this chapter, the Act outlines how an institution should not discriminate against any student based on the protected characteristics in relation to the admissions process but also in relation to treatment of any student throughout the course of their studies. For example, an institution should ensure that all students have equal access to facilities and services, including they way it provides education to students, and that 'reasonable adjustments' are the responsibility of the institution.

Accessibility Legislation

Relating to the Equality Act, new Accessibility Legislation came into force in September 2018, which required all public facing bodies to ensure any public facing content (including VLE or intranet content) was accessible. They were given a year to ensure that necessary adjustments were made to ensure they met with the new legislation (see WCAG 2.1).

Beginnings

I first became aware of the issues around equality, diversity and inclusion in HE when I attended and chaired a York Learning and Teaching Forum Workshop on Inclusive Learning and Teaching Environments in 2018 which introduced me to the idea of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In this session, I learned that changes to UK legislation and funding meant that more responsibility was being placed on institutions to make teaching and learning materials, and environments accessible to all, and less responsibility on the student to seek out support for their individual needs. In practice, this partly means anticipating possible barriers to learning to try to ensure the needs of all students are met. Although this session was before the accessibility legislation outlined above, it was extremely useful in that it opened my eyes to a lot of potential barriers I had not previously thought about, and some of these could be resolved through fairly simple changes (e.g. using templates). However, it wasn't until the following year when the legislation needed to be acted upon did the majority of changes happen to my teaching practice.

Changes

In order to meet the new requirements of the Accessibility Legislation, during the summer of 2019, as a department, we updated all teaching materials (e.g. PowerPoint slides) and our Blackboard VLE pages. Each member of staff was responsible for making the appropriate amendments to their content and to their own modules' VLE pages. To support us in this role, a member from the University's Programme Development and Learning Technology team gave an overview of the necessary checks in a staff meeting, and we were given funds to pay two GTAs to be trained and then subsequently support staff with the required amendments. The key areas we were advised to pay attention to were (this is not an exhaustive list):

• To provide alt text to all images, including the use of the notes section if needed

• To use templates in all documents as much as possible

• To use good colour contrast

• To make sure hyperlinks were meaningful

• To consider the 'tab order' of a document

• To have simple structures to VLE pages

• To add descriptions of the content of VLE folders

• To use accessibility checker tools (e.g. on Word, PowerPoint).

The majority of the summer of 2019 was therefore spent updating my teaching materials to meet these requirements. This actually took longer than I thought it would which was perhaps testament to how poorly my materials were originally designed in terms of accessibility. I truly sympathised with any student who needed these amendments to properly access my teaching materials but were unable to due to my set up of my materials and VLE pages. While making changes to my PowerPoint slides, one of the areas that I really struggled with was maintaining creativity in slides while also ensuring they met with the accessibility guidelines. For example, I had previously used coloured text boxes on slides to represent different concepts or groups of participants in experiments, relying on the colour to differentiate between them. In line with the training we'd received, I realised that this was not only problematic for students who may be colour blind but that screen readers would also struggle to read the content in a way that the student could understand. I therefore had to make changes by adding text (black on white background) onto the slide to represent the different information. I felt this was considerably less creative than the original slide so in order to create a compromise between the original slides and the newly accessible versions, I decided the best course of action was to include an image (labelled as decorative) which used the coloured coding from the original slide. This ensured that the slide was accessible but also included a visualisation of the information for those students who might benefit from seeing the information in that format. Although the whole process of making my materials and VLE sites accessible took a lot longer than I thought it would, I did find it a cathartic experience which served to highlight the issues some students might have had with my materials previously. To have made my materials more accessible to a wider range of students was a rewarding experience.

Impact on GTA Training

As already mentioned elsewhere in this portfolio, the GTAs in our department play a large role in small group tutorial teaching and marking assessments in Years 1 and 2 of our undergraduate degree. Although GTAs do not design the teaching, they are able to make changes to PowerPoint slides, and they speak to students in small groups. As the GTA Coordinator who is responsible for training new GTAs, I recognised that as a group, they had not been included in the staff training for equality, diversity and inclusion and I therefore felt it was important to incorporate information on this in the Introductory Session they attend as part of their training. This happened around the same time one of our GTAs did a project on UDL as part of her York Learning and Teaching Award (something I encourage the GTAs to do). Working together with this GTA, we designed a short session on Equality and Diversity that was tailored for our GTAs and to the experiences they have as part of their role. We included information on the characteristics protected by law, unconscious bias and how to deal with this, and making sure documents such as PowerPoint Slides were accessible. This provides the GTAs with the information they need to ensure they are delivering teaching that is accessible to as many students as possible.

I am keen that my teaching is as accessible as it can be and that I keep the ethos of equality, diversity and inclusion at the heart of my practice. To enable me to stay up to date with different tools that can help this, I am keen to attend events where colleagues across the profession are sharing good practice. Although I have heard of Xerte and know that it is a platform that has been designed with accessibility in mind, I have never used it so this is one area I'm keen to learn about.

I am on many mailing lists (e.g. Future Teacher, Advance HE, and WonkHE) all of which highlight events (e.g. webinars, conferences) that are focused on equality, diversity and inclusion. This is ever more so recently since due to the pandemic and remote learning, students and staff have had to rely on technology even more so than normal. Clear gaps have become apparent. For example, students do not always have the technology they need to access the learning materials (e.g. slow internet connection makes online synchronous classes difficult). It will be interesting to see how colleagues across HE (and FE) have supported students with their different needs, and how this can translate to my own teaching. Additionally, I will be interested to explore different types of assessment that are more accessible. I have already spoken in section 2a about an interest in alternative assessments such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and as outlined in the recent Jisc report on Rethinking assessment, some students with disabilities have reported positive changes to assessment as a result of the circumstances the pandemic has provided. For example, being able to do exams online has been extremely beneficial for some students. Learning how others have made positive changes to assessments by making them more accessible is therefore another area I'm keen to explore. As Teaching Enhancement Champion in our department, I will share what I've learned with my colleagues so we can ensure our students have an experience that is accessible as possible.