Projects

Faculty Awareness and Training in the Post-Secondary Community: An Annotated Bibliography

Best Practices: Faculty Awareness and Training in the Universities

The following are a few particularly effective practices to consider in the production of faculty awareness materials, as determined over the course of research for this project:

• Language used in guidebooks and programs should be plain and simple. This provides for a quicker read, and avoiding jargon ensures the reader obtains more information from the material.
• Documents should include as much background information as possible. Include numbers, percentages, etc, and explain the various types of disabilities in-depth. This adds relevance to the material.
• Student profile pieces, as are featured in certain sections of York University's online guide, are an effective way to illustrate the real effects of an effort toward accommodation.
• A listing of the services available at an institution, as well as an explanation of the procedures that are to be followed to access these services, allow both faculty and students to find this important information in one place.
• The production of a more lengthy guidebook, as well as additional supporting and summarizing documentation (such as pamphlets and brochures), where possible, allow faculty to absorb information in easy pieces, or more in-depth.
• Placing lengthy guides online, with tables of contents and hyperlinks, allows both for in-depth information gathering, as well as for easy navigation and comprehension of separate sections.
• The inclusion of institutional policies and provincial legislation with regard to persons with disabilities serves to inform, as well as to emphasize the fact that reasonable accommodation is the responsibility of the post-secondary institution.
• A section on appropriate disability-related language is valuable, if only to help faculty members concerned about how to speak one-on-one with students with disabilities.
• Descriptions of the various adaptive technologies and services available for accommodation (ie; note-takers, tape recorders) allow faculty to better understand students' accommodations needs.
• Working in conjunction with local disability organizations on the production of faculty awareness materials can be beneficial in ensuring that all needs and concerns are properly discussed, and that relevant background information is given.