Making Equity Equitable

This resource is to help instructors, faculty, teaching assistants, and staff reflect on time saving actions that can support equity. Often when inclusion and accessibility asks are presented the common discussion centers around time commitments to this work. Since equity work is everyone’s responsibility, as a way to be an ethical part of the Brock and St. Catharine’s community, and that equity is highlighted in Brock University’s Academic Plan, it is important to remember that there are time saving actions that can be put in place at different points of the academic year to support inclusion.  

What Can I Do?

If I need to rethink assessment strategies based on OASIS

  • The Senior Educational Developer, Accessibility & Inclusion, Ann Gagné ([email protected]) is available to consult on accessible pedagogical strategies.  

If I don’t have time to caption videos accurately

  • Brock has many resources that caption videos using artificial intelligence and these will improve with more uses of the tools such as YuJa. 
  • You can also make caption editing be part of a pedagogical strategy to support a welcoming and community building practice that is equitable. You can have learners take turns flagging edits that are needed in the content and posting accurate captions or transcripts, which will also allow you as the instructor to know how the learners are engaging with and accessing content.  

If I don’t have time to create an accurate transcript of audio files

  • Brock has many resources to support creating transcripts of audio files. Such as Microsoft Word 365 online which has a 300 minute (5 hour) transcription limit per month 
  • You can also make transcript editing be part of a pedagogical strategy to support community building and equitable practices. You can have learners take turns flagging edits that are needed in the content and posting accurate captions or transcripts.

If I am unsure of the accessibility of the documents I’ve created in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel

  • Use the accessibility checkers that are part of the tools you are using, but also note that these do not mean that all accessibility issues will be flagged or guarantee complete accessibility of your document, but it is a great place to start.  Accessibility checkers can identify things like missing alt-text descriptions and inaccuracies with header organization and reading structure of the document for example.  

If I want to incorporate more accessible and inclusive pedagogy in my lecture, lab, seminar and don’t have a lot of time?

These seven “plus ones” can be helpful to think about and don’t take a lot of time  

  1. Add multimodality to the content in some of your modules (a brief video, an audio clip, infographics) 
  2. Add a 1-hour café session as a drop-in for students to build community, no pressure to talk about course content, just a place to be with other students. This can be done in person or online. 
  3. Add the voice of one person not represented in your course content and readings (gender, disability, geographical origin, race, class) 
  4. Add a collaborative formative activity with a tangible deliverable (study notes, mind map, prompting questions for further exploration) 
  5. Provide instructions for an assessment in one other way (a 1-2min video or audio file with transcript) 
  6. Ask students to bring in an artifact that relates to a course concept, such as a URL, an image, or a video.  
  7. Bring the land where you live and the land where your students live into your course in some way. 

Need more information?

If you are interested in learning more about the UDL “plus one” framework you may want to read: Tobin, T. J., & Behling, K. T. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. West Virginia University Press. Available at the Brock Library