17 minute read
FEATURE
FEATURES EQUITY, NOT EQUALITY
@badgerherald
UW disability community mobilizes for more equitable accommodation access, campus climate
Note: This article uses person-first language (“people with disabilities”) and identityfirst language (“disabled people”) interchangeably, per the mixed use in various interviews. It should be noted that people may prefer either term or different terms.
One day in fall 1994, University of Wisconsin law student Brigid McGuire rolled up to a desk, revved up an electric saw and cut it in half to make room for her motorized wheelchair.
This moment was the final straw for McGuire after she had received nine parking tickets in one semester. Her offense — the inability to find parking close enough to the law building to accommodate her disability. At one point, an assistant dean had McGuire arrested for trying to prevent her car from being towed after parking in the grass on Bascom Hill during construction.
McGuire’s struggle and act of defiance came four years after March 1990, when hundreds of disability rights activists abandoned their mobility aids to pull and drag their bodies up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to bring awareness to the need for legislation ensuring access for people with all kinds of disabilities.
This protest, known as the Capitol Crawl, inspired the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act to be signed into law in July 1990. The ADA is known as a critical moment for disability civil rights law, and the realm of higher education, this means that students, staff and faculty are entitled to accommodations that facilitate full participation in teaching and learning.
Though the ADA can provide countless accommodations to the UW campus community, McGuire’s story shows it doesn’t mean they always get them. Today, the McBurney Disability Resource Center holds a crucial and appreciated role in securing such access for students with disabilities, however, McBurney only addresses a handful of the issues faced by disabled students, staff and faculty on campus.
Following the footsteps of McGuire and the Capitol Crawl protesters, UW students and employees in the disabled community are continuing the fight for further recognition and inclusion on campus — for not just equality, but equity.
MCBURNEY 101
Where other students are banned from using laptops in classes or certain elevators on campus, UW senior Justin Myrah has access thanks to the McBurney Center. Myrah, who has hemiplegic cerebral palsy, can use a laptop to take notes even if instructors have policies against technology and can use elevators otherwise closed to the student body.
Students themselves are the ones who know their access needs best, but the McBurney Center is the main avenue to adequately meet those needs through university-provided accommodations.
According to its website, the McBurney Center serves approximately 4,000 students who have been determined eligible for accommodations. These accommodations range from extra testing time and flexible deadlines to having an accessible shower in residence halls.
McBurney Center Director Mari Magler assures that any student who thinks they may be in need of extra support in the classroom may apply for McBurney’s services. A common misconception is that one must have an official diagnosis before applying for accommodations.
After submitting an accommodation application, students meet with an assigned access consultant who evaluates how to make the educational or housing environment most accessible for them. Magler said the initial meeting is the most important, as it is when the McBurney Center gets to know the student in general, in addition to what barriers exist for them on campus.
Once a student has been approved for accommodations, they can go into their McBurney Connect online portal each semester and choose which accommodations they would like for each class, so they can tailor their accommodations to meet the specific demands of different courses, Magler said.
After selecting class accommodations, the portal generates a Faculty Notification Letter, which is sent to instructors at the beginning of the semester. Students are encouraged to meet with each of their instructors to discuss everything as well.
But, ease of access to accommodations is not equal for all students seeking them, as administrative barriers and actual adoption by instructors create more hoops to jump through.
BEYOND UNDERGRAD
UW graduate student Amy Van Aartsen is one of many who finds herself in a complicated gray area created by the decentralized nature of accommodations across campus.
The Employee Disability Resource Center, also known as EDR, helps UW employees secure accommodations through an assigned disability representative in their respective school or college, Magler said.
But since graduate students must work with both the McBurney Center and EDR to fully ensure an accessible experience at UW, it can be difficult to know where to go.
“[Grad students] play a lot of roles on campus, and I think it can be harder to navigate those roles when you have a disability,” Van Aartsen said.
UW sociology graduate student and teaching assistant Sara Trongone has an autoimmune disease and takes medication that makes her immunocompromised. Prior to the pandemic, she said she didn’t have any issues with asking for time off for transfusion appointments. But the pandemic has changed the scope of her access needs.
Trongone wanted to teach remotely for the fall 2021 semester, but after conversations with her disability representative and friends who were being denied or ignored, she felt discouraged from pursuing an official request. “When I talked to a [representative] from the disability and accommodations office for the university, they just sort of said, ‘No one is getting accommodations,’” Trongone said. “At this point the university’s made it pretty clear … that what makes the university money is satisfied students, and most students seem to want to be in a classroom [to be satisfied].” Trongone is not the only UW employee who felt discouraged at the start of the academic year, as faculty members and others questioned some of the accommodations denied last semester. Thirtyone faculty members submitted accommodation requests, but only half of them were approved and one-third were still being processed less than a week before classes started. Magler said remote learning has become a popular accommodation request for both students and faculty since the start of the pandemic. The process for students requesting remote learning is the same as other accommodations, but it does require more documentation to fully understand the barriers presented by in-person instruction.
For faculty, course modality is set by individual departments based on what modality will fit effectively with the course, according to UW spokesperson Meredith McGlone. Faculty accommodations, COVID-19-related and not, are determined and approved on an individual basis. Even without a pandemic, many individuals still face a vast bureaucracy if they encounter challenges with their accommodations.
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While the McBurney Center often successfully approves students’ appropriate and documented accommodations, the rest of campus is not always on the same page.
UW sophomore Priyanka Guptasarma said she sometimes spends a lot of energy just communicating how to work out her accommodations with instructors, particularly in her STEM classes.
“If a professor says no, you reach out to McBurney to help you, and then the professor responds, and then you have to respond and it’s almost like a three-credit course every semester is just getting accommodations,” Guptasarma said.
For students, there are generally two grounds for which an instructor can deny accommodations. One is called a “fundamental alteration,” or when an accommodation would change the very nature of the class. In this case, Magler said the McBurney Center will work with the student, professor, department or academic advisor to either find an alternate class or work out an alternate accommodation.
The other is “undue burden,” which usually arises in the form of too high of a cost to implement an accommodation, but Magler said this is a relatively rare occurrence.
Students are not obligated to share a disability status, which could subject them to unwarranted medical questions or stigmatization.
UW sophomore Brelynn Bille stressed that students, particularly those with invisible disabilities, should not feel pressured to disclose anything besides their accommodations.
“[Sometimes] professors go way too far in terms of making students almost justify their accommodations, and they have absolutely no right to be doing that,” Bille said. “There’s definitely a huge disconnect with professors at times with what is and isn’t appropriate for them to be doing when they receive our Faculty Notification Letters.”
Should a student face challenges with a professor, Magler said they should get in touch with their McBurney access consultant. There is also a grievance policy and bias incident report form students can fill out to address the issue.
Myrah, Bille and Guptasarma said they believe faculty could use more training on how to both implement accommodations in their specific classes and interact with students who have accommodations — but proper access to accommodations is just the start of improving disability inclusion on campus.
REDEFINING ACCESS & INCLUSION
When Magler worked for University of Minnesota’s disability office, she remembers a conversation with a blind student who said to her, “I might have the total access I need in class, but if nobody comes and sits by me and asks me how my weekend was or asks me to lunch, I don’t have inclusion.” UW students and staff echo that sentiment — in order for disabled people to be fully welcomed on campus, the campus has to reshape how it thinks about access and disability more broadly.
In her ideal world, Bille said access means a complete elimination of physical and social barriers while awarding students with disabilities the exact same freedoms as nondisabled people.
Myrah knows that not every person is going to want to discuss their individual disability and accommodations, and deciding whether or not to disclose a disability is a right. But he also believes having more open conversations about disabilities in general can minimize the stigmatization and othering of disability as a rare and personal phenomenon.
“[There’s] the idea that disability is a private issue, but disability isn’t a private issue, so faculty, professors [and] administrators need to quit treating it like one,” Myrah said. “The people I’ve talked to are disability-friendly but that doesn’t mean there’s a culture of disability [acceptance] on campus … because it’s just not talked about.”
Many hoped the pandemic and the adjustments made during it would expand people’s understanding of accommodations and access. But Trongone said it unfortunately seems like the pandemic is being treated as an inconvenience society needs to overcome rather than an opportunity to learn how to be flexible and accommodating to people with all types of different access needs.
FINDING COMMUNITY
When freshman Emmett Lockwood first stepped onto campus this past fall, he was excited to find a hub for queer students — the Gender and Sexuality Campus Center, also known as the GSCC, which serves as a way for many LGBTQ+ affiliates and organizations to connect with each other. His next question — whether there was a similar entity for the disability community.
Advocates for Diverse Abilities, or ADA Badgers, is a student organization for students with disabilities and allies to come together
to engage in raising awareness on disability-related issues, listen to guest speakers and support each other. “We definitely have just had meetings where it’s a vent session [and] we talk about frustrations we might “ “Once you get disabled people in a room together, once disabled people start talking to each other, so many more ideas about have about accessibility on campus or complications people have had with McBurney accommodations,” Bille said.how the university could do better arise,” Similarly, Van Aartsen founded the organization BadgerSTART as a Emmett Lockwood way for all UW students to find connections with each other and advocate for issues facing the community. She is hoping to rebrand BadgerSTART to be a part of a national organization called Disability Rights, Education, Activism and Mentoring, known as DREAM. Other ways students with disabilities have found ways to connect are specialized groups such as Chronic Health Allies Mentorship Program, also called CHAMP, Law Students with Disabilities Coalition and Disability Advocacy Coalition in Medicine. These organizations sprinkled across campus undoubtedly serve a valuable purpose and show the resiliency disabled people have in building connections among one another. But Lockwood and others point to an issue of mainstream lack of recognition of disabled identity, which creates challenges in fostering a cohesive community. “Disability is an important part of identity, and I think it’s just really valuable for students to grow in that identity and also come together with those that have a shared identity,” Van Aartsen said. This collective desire for mainstream identity-based inclusion led Lockwood to use his internship with ASM to start coalition-building and create a Disabled Students Cultural Center, or the DSCC. After garnering support from clubs, the McBurney Center and fellow students, he is currently in the process of gaining approval from Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Gabe Javier to start the DSCC. Lockwood envisions the DSCC functioning like the GSCC by bringing awareness to student organizations with shared goals, creating space for meetings, providing formal and informal mentorship and connecting students with resources, including the McBurney Center. “Once you get disabled people in a room together, once disabled people start talking to each other, so many more ideas about how the university could do better arise,” Lockwood said. Lockwood also believes the DSCC can bring more visibility and recognition of disability culture and community to campus, and having a physical space beyond an accommodations office would help solidify the disability community as a valid identity group with a voice in campus decisions. This visibility would ideally encourage conversations about accessible education and celebrate disability identity and all the community has to offer. “Disability culture, from what I’ve seen, is always about meeting the other person where they’re at [and] making sure that you’re doing the best you can to be accessible,” Lockwood said. “It’s about accommodating each other and holding space for each other, but also finding joy in the aspects of us that many other people don’t know how to find joy in.”
Read the full story featuring an interview with GWS professor Sami Schalk online at badgerherald.com
@badgerherald UW Dance faculty, students wrap up annual Faculty Concert
Dance Department professors, students alike took to stage in artful display of choreography for 2022 concert edition
by Meryl Hubbard
ArtsEtc. Writer
Every winter, the University of Wisconsin Dance Department presents the Faculty Concert, where different professors in the department display their choreography in one collective show. Dance majors and students involved in dance studies have the opportunity to audition for different pieces, which they work on for the first semester of the school year.
The 2022 Faculty Concert had six different showings and wrapped up their final show Feb. 12. Every year the department invites a guest artist to audition and choreograph a piece on the dancers. This year, Natalie Desch set a piece that was choreographed by José Limón.
Natalie Desch is an assistant professor of dance at the University of Utah. She earned her BFA at The Juilliard School and her MFA at the University of Washington. She performed with the Limón Dance Company for five years and then spent another 11 years with Doug Varone and Dancers in NYC.
José Limón passed away in 1972. Though Desch did not get to work with him directly, she learned his technique and values from professors and dancers who worked with Limón while he was alive.
“It was really, really amazing to have that transfer of information, through classes and watching, I mean, really watching,” Desch said. “Taking information through my personal perceptions was a huge learning experience.”
Desch emphasizes the importance of dance being shared and passed down through generations. After performing with the Limón Company for many years, she was able to set one of his pieces on the dancers here in Madison.
“I was tasked with a restaging of a Limón work, meaning that I’m charged with teaching the dance, but also making sure that the elements that surround and support the dance are in place to recreate the vision of the choreography,” Desch said. “It’s just a really exciting process to have the information in my body and share it physically with the dancers. That’s the most critical part — it is movement that is shared.”
The piece is titled, “Dances for Isadora” and was first performed in 1971. The piece consists of five solos that reflect different stages of Isadora Duncan’s life. It has a theatrical and somewhat dramatic storyline, according to Desch.
“Her name was Isadora Duncan, a very formidable and very important person in dance history but more formally, in concert dance history,” Desch said. “This concert dance where we go to the theater, where we have an audience and spectators — it’s kind of its own genre that was very important to Isadora and also very important to Limón several decades later.”
In creating “Dances for Isadora,” Limón considered it as an homage to Isadora Duncan and her impact on modern dance. Duncan brought forth a new chapter in American dance by implementing new philosophies and breaking some ties with some Western European traditional dance, according to Desch.
UW presented “Dances for Isadora” as the final piece for every concert. The five solos were double-cast — meaning, 10 dancers were selected to perform Limóns work. The dancers had one week to learn the choreography and be ready to perform on stage.
Erin Walsh, a dance major at UW, worked with Natalie Desch and performed the solo titled “Maenad.’’ She enjoyed learning from
Desch and being a part of the process.
“She’s probably like my favorite outside person I’ve ever worked with here,”
Walsh said. “She is very good about being descriptive and detailed with her teachings and her choreography — overall a very positive influence and I loved working with her.”
Walsh has trained in many forms of dance and noticed how the Limón technique reassembled and differentiated from other modern teachings.
“I think the Limón technique is pretty similar to most modern techniques,” Walsh said. “It works with a lot of curves, carves and shaping. What I learned the most is his emphasis is on the work in the hands. A lot of your distal ends are emphasized whereas in other techniques the inner core is more emphasized.”
Natalie Desch continues the teachings of Limón through her detailed instruction.
She helps students learn the quality of the movement as well as the history.
In between Isadora Duncan and José Limón, Desch mentioned a third artist named Doris Humphrey. After Duncan started breaking the rules of traditional dance, Humphrey continued this investigation in her work, according to Desch.
This was the “investigation of movement that occurred between two axes,” Desch said.
As depicted in the graphic to the left, the vertical axis represents perfection and uprightness, and the horizontal axis represents failure and lack of reason. Humphrey was inspired by the Greeks and also connected these axes to Apollo and Dionysus, according to Desch.
“If we go not so specifically to Apollo and Dionysus, we go to the idea of being alive and being not alive,” Desch said. “All of the drama, all of the exciting stuff that happens in life — happens between these two axes.”
The arc in between represents this fluctuation in life — how perfection is unattainable yet strived for, and how humans individually understand death and evilness within. Humphrey let her movement represent this fluctuation and rebound between the two axes, which later influenced Limón and some of his movement qualities, Desch said.
“We’re making mistakes all the time as humans,” Desch said. “So that is represented by the fall and the unsuccess that we oftentimes have, but the rebound — the fall and recovery is the interesting part. We inevitably will not succeed at everything, but our tendency is really interesting. Our tendency is that we strive to get up again and strive to carry on and go towards this axis, this axis of progress.”
Photo · In an investigation between the two axes depicted above, renown artist Doris Humphrey shaped her movement to represent humanity’s continous fluctation between the points of the arc
Meryl Hubbard
The Badger Herald Photo · Natalie Desch, assistant professor of dance at the University of Utah
