Being an Elbow: A Phenomenological Autoethnography of Faculty-Student Collaboration for Accommodations

Abstract

Hybrid and online courses and advances in assistive technologies make accommodating students with disabilities ever-changing, requiring innovation. This reality, coupled with students’ reluctance to disclose disabilities, points toward a need for replacing accommodations directed at those with disabilities with universal design whereby they become accessible to all—virtually eliminating the need for accommodations. In this paper, a master's of social work student (Chad) and his instructor (Regina) document their collaborations to revise a social work research course to meet his request for accommodations to make options more universally accessible. These revisions are done through reflections from both Chad and Regina from a phenomenological autoethnographic perspective—depicting their lived experiences.

Keywords:

• teaching research
• universal design
• students with disabilities
• hybrid course
• online course
• technology in social work education

Notes

¹“Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2010, para. 1).

²The phenomenological perspective focuses on depicting the lived experience of a phenomenon (Moustakas, 1994).

³An approach to instruction where “accommodations” are actually integrated in a way that benefits all the students, increasing universal access (Center for Universal Design, 2011).