Shock This Space!

Crafting a student-centered effort to nurture accessibility at WSU

By Darren DeFrain, Professor of English, Wichita State University; Faculty Innovation Fellows Candidate

Students and faculty here at Wichita State University (and beyond) typically accept that universities are wellserved to make sure they offer equitable and accessible education for all students. If you’re fully sighted, imagine attending a lecture where the only seat you could find was near the back and the lecturer’s slides were in such a small font and on such a small screen that you couldn’t follow along; imagine you couldn’t even get into the lecture space in your wheelchair, or if you could, you needed to ask for help from strangers who were then only able to awkwardly sit you beside the speaker’s podium; imagine you can’t hear, but you read lips well enough — but then you attend a lecture where the speaker decided to liven up their presentation at the last minute by playing several pop songs to illustrate key points.

What faculty and students sometimes don’t understand is that embracing accessibility and equitability in education can actually create some of the most potent collision spaces on campus. Changing facilities is one difficulty, but to nurture and sustain effective change, the campus culture also needs to be changed. Campuses are places that value competing and conflicting ideas, but this kind of attitude can be something for those averse to change to hide behind. “I shouldn’t have to change my whole curriculum for one student”; “Why can’t they just take classes with other students with similar needs?”; “Doing everything necessary to make my class/classroom accessible will compromise the quality for other students”; “Disabled students don’t even typically have interest in these classes.” Even with an administration committed to creating and supporting a fully accessible campus, convincing skeptical faculty and busy students that accessibility ultimately benefits everyone needs to be part of any solution.

During my time teaching English, I have catalogued a library of anecdotes concerning what happens when universities don’t take accessibility seriously or seriously enough. I’ve talked to peers at other institutions who unveiled new laboratories, meant to showcase innovation and entrepreneurial vision, only to have someone show up at the launch in a wheelchair who can’t easily navigate the space. While this isn’t something any public-facing university wants to project, it goes beyond embarrassment (for the institution and the affected individuals).

Lawsuits against institutions that fail in their efforts to make their classes and spaces accessible and equitable are gaining steam. We are more than 30 years on from The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and affected Americans looking to get their education or take part in public events at public colleges and universities probably feel their patience at its limits. If colleges and universities had more deeply understood these issues after the ADA, there wouldn’t be this sense of urgency now to make overdo changes and repairs to facilities and offerings. Change is always hardest when it needs to happen yesterday.

The Shock This Space! App looks to marshal the energies and talents of WSU students to increase campus accessibility awareness and potential through a unique combination of graphic storytelling and 3D modeling. Working with Disability Services, Shocker Studios, and the Office of Student Involvement, Shock This Space! will start with a hack-a-thon this fall (2021). Just prior to the hack-a-thon, students will provide opportunities for faculty and peers to experience life without sight, sound, or full mobility. At the hack-a-thon, students from all walks will then generate graphic stories (comics) that explain and explore what accessibility is and why it is important for the entire WSU community. These narratives will then be archived for ease of access on the app (in fully accessible ways!).

But the functionality of the app doesn’t stop there. Once completed, the app will be able to use 3D modeling to explore existing campus spaces to see if they are fully accessible. If they’re not, users can utilize 3D modeling technology to digitally re-design the spaces and consider and suggest improvements.

I developed this concept (with the explicit help of my mentors) during my time in the Faculty Innovation Fellows Program. I initially felt a little overwhelmed in my FIF cohort, given how little my entire career has intersected with the Engineering side of campus. So I wanted to do something in my wheelhouse. Perhaps because of my Humanities background, I have been especially drawn to the first phase of Design Thinking: Empathizing. I frequently work with our Disabilities Services, so I have a sense of what so many of our students contend with in trying to be truly part of our campus. Students drive cultural change on campus, so this project is meant to involve students at every step to help engage their peers and even drag along the occasional unwilling or unsuspecting faculty member.

I have been working with Kelly Johnson at Shocker Studios, WSU Disability Services, Tia Hill, WSU’s Assistant Director of Student Involvement, and Disability Services. Hill’s ambition is to start an advertising blitz later this spring to generate enthusiasm ahead of fall’s hack-a-thon. Students can create their own teams, or they can be put onto teams that balance drawing, storytelling, and other skills. After so much isolation due to COVID, the hackathon promises to create an opportunity for students to work together in groups to create something fun, functional, and that develops empathy. There will be prizes awarded to the teams who create the best graphic narratives that explain accessibility and why it is important for the campus overall.

The next phase of the process will be to work with the folks at Shocker Studios to create the 3D modeling features so that students, faculty and members of the public can explore campus spaces to see how accessible they are. Once the graphic narratives are finished, they will be digitized and archived on the finished app as well. I hope the app will continue to receive such graphic narratives and that this “library” might make its way to other campuses.

I certainly look forward to our students having fun creating these narratives. And hopefully their agency in this project leads to better and better understanding as to how we continue to make WSU a place where students feel welcome to learn and contribute.