After learning about the experiences of our peers, we wanted to expand our view of disability to established career professionals. While there tends to be resources for undergraduate students needing disability accommodations, there are less resources for career professionals. We therefore hosted a second webinar featuring STEM professionals.

Panelists featured

Our STEM Professionals Panel featured 3 separate individuals. Two of the individuals worked as professors at academic institutions. The final individual worked in industry. Out of respect for privacy, the names of the professionals have been left out, and the recording was not posted to YouTube.

During the panel, the following questions were discussed in detail:

• Have you always identified as disabled? (both in the sense of when did you “become” disabled and what has the journey looked like of identifying with the word “disabled”)
• How has being disabled interacted with your career?
• What advice or experience do you have regarding declaring that you are disabled on applications to colleges and grad schools?
• What advice would you give to PIs, professors, or managers on how to make STEM more accessible to the disabled community?

This year, the iGEM Diversity and Inclusion Committee put on a series of webinars on the theme of Mental Health in STEM. Upon learning of Team Saptasense’s efforts to organize our own webinars, the committee invited us to their meeting. During this meeting a collaboration was discussed and Team Saptasense was able to share what we learned from putting together our webinar series. We decided to collaborate on the “Neurodiversity” webinar. One of our team members was featured as the co-facilitator for the session.

Central to the idea of improving inclusion in STEM is communicating the value of diversity to youth. We aimed to educate youth on the definitions of disability, and why accommodations are important and fair. In order to communicate complex concepts like disability and inclusion to youth in an age-appropriate way, we curated our own interactive activity and delivered the activity to a group of 9 to 11 year olds at the Rochester Museum and Science Center.

The Activity/Lesson Plan

1. Start by asking children, “what does disabled mean?”, “do you know someone who is disabled?”
2. Meanwhile, pass out 2 plastic cups to each child, one filled with water and one empty.
3. Give each child a “tool”. Each child should have a different tool. Students cannot switch tools. Examples of “tools” are listed below, but can include anything that is safe to be used with water.
   1. Plastic “pipette”
   2. Pencil
   3. Tin foil
   4. Toothpick
   5. Plastic mini dinosaur
   6. Fork
4. Outline the rules of the activity: The goal of the game is to transfer as much water as you can from the full cup to the empty cup in 30 seconds using your tool.
5. Time the children for 30 seconds.
6. Use a graduated cylinder or scale to determine which child transferred the most water.
7. Award a prize to the child who transferred the most water.
8. Have a discussion. Ask the children: “How do you feel?”, “Do you think that activity was fair? Why or why not?”
9. Ask the children how this activity relates to disability!
10. Have a discussion on what accommodations are. What kind of accommodations would make this game more fair (extra time, etc)? Do you know anyone in your school who receives accommodations? Why are these accommodations fair?

Reflections

Overall, the activity was very successful in that the children enthusiastically participated in both the discussion questions and the activity itself. The children successfully and independently made the connection between how the water activity related to disability. One aspect in which to improve the activity is to avoid the use of water, which is very messy and can be spilled. In the future, beads can be transferred between cups instead to decrease the mess. Alternatively, the activity can be organized outdoors.

We developed a “rubric of accessibility” featuring principles of Universal Design. Universal Design is the school of thought in which environments are made more accessible to all, regardless of age, disability, or other factors. This is in contrast to other schools of thought in which disabled people come across barriers to access and must request accommodations to improve access. Theoretically, Universal Design eliminates the need for accommodations because the entire environment was designed with access needs in mind. For example, one of the most common accommodations in the classroom is extended time on exams. In a Universal Design classroom, ideally, all students would have ample time (~24 to- 48 hours) to complete the exam so that time is not a factor in completion, regardless of disability. More examples of how to make a classroom more universally accessible are included in our “rubric”. (see section entitled “See Our Rubric”)

Based on this framework of accessibility, we developed a self-reflection rubric tool that professors can use to evaluate how accessible their classrooms are. To ensure that our rubric would be both well-received and helpful, we discussed the idea with an access specialist from our University’s Office of Disability of Resources. We also discussed the rubric with a professor in the Department of Biology, Dr. Dan Bergstralh. From these meetings, it became clear to us that professors often actively seek out opportunities to improve access for students of various backgrounds and abilities, and thus our rubric would be well-received. We also learned that professors benefit most from direct, tangible feedback that allow them to make concrete action steps. In this way, the “check-list” like format of our rubric meets the needs of the target audience.

One of the most common questions that we received throughout all of our inclusivity efforts was “How can I be more accessible?”. We therefore decided to curate an entire webinar around this topic, focusing on STEM environments. Since the audience of our webinar was a mix of Principal Investigators, Professors, undergraduate students, and iGEM participants, we provided a diverse array of recommendations.
One of the biggest takeaways from this webinar was “realize your power”. Many of the undergraduate students that we talked to for our inclusivity efforts felt that since they aren’t a Professor teaching a class or running a lab, there is little that they can do to improve accessibility. In this webinar we specifically addressed this misconception. Even as a teaching assistant, club president, or tutor, you can create an environment of accessibility and awareness.
The following topics were discussed during the webinar:

• Accessibility in the Classroom:
  • Examples of inaccessibility:
    • long classes or teaching labs
    • lack of chairs
    • lack of virtual options
    • not allowing make-up dates/options
  • Examples of how to make class more accessible:
    • always offering virtual options
    • offering lecture material in multiple formats
    • built-in lab make-up dates
    • reducing high-stakes exams
• Accessibility in the Lab:
  • More obvious ways to make the lab more accessible:
    • tube openers
    • ergonomic pipettes
    • chairs
    • floor mats
    • sensory-friendly goggles
    • label makers
  • Less obvious ways to make the lab more accessible:
    • Scheduling breaks in long lab meetings
    • Visually describing graphs and providing background information in presentations
    • Having an official lab office for breaks
    • Maintaining and defining clear and reasonable expectations
    • Lab outing with accessibility considerations