JENN AUBREY
<Contributor>
How many times have you been sitting in class waiting for the lecture to begin while the professor attempts to turn on the electronic recording equipment at the front of the room? I imagine we’ve all been there. Although some of us may be happy for the chance to grab food or to have avoided the embarrassment of showing up late, the experience is certainly frustrating for well-intentioned professors, and may have very negative consequences for accommodated students whose access to the classroom depends on the successful recording of that lecture.
We all learn in different ways. If you’ve attended a first year Dean’s Fellow session or if you’ve read someone else’s summary you probably know how stressful these differences can be. Now imagine that the difference isn’t the type that you can overcome by seeking out a student who has your learning style or by looking at a different summary or text. What if the barrier is so strong that, despite the awesome intelligence that got you this far, you just aren’t able to learn as much as you need to by sitting through a lecture once and doing readings on your own? Should you be denied the opportunity to learn about the law simply because you learn differently?
Thankfully, the answer is no. When a student faces these barriers, the Osgoode and York administration seek to accommodate their learning style in order to account for the fact that the teaching methods used at the school do not work for everyone. Students receive accommodation after a complex evaluation process that also determines the specific support they receive. Sometimes another student in the class will take notes for them; other times they will receive audio recordings of the lectures.
Concerns regarding the high failure rates of the Audio Recording program prompted the Osgoode administration to make some recent changes. At this point, there are two systems in place to record lectures for accommodated students. Osgoode staff continue their best efforts to make the traditional audio recording equipment work and minimize the failure rate of this approach. Additionally, accommodated students have now been given permission to record the lectures themselves or to find someone else to do so on their behalf.
Both of these approaches have strengths and weaknesses that are being considered by your Student Caucus and Academic Planning and Policy Committee. Our goal at this point is to evaluate these, and any other potential alternatives in order to provide the Osgoode administration with recommendations regarding the lecture recording policy for accommodated students. If you have any suggestions regarding ways to improve the current Audio Recording policy or suggestions regarding alternative ways to record lectures for accommodated students, please email me at jenniferaubrey@osgoode.yorku.ca or chat with me in person anytime.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this issue and would like to emphasize one point that I keep coming back to. The Audio Recording policy isn’t only an issue for accommodated students and the administration. It is a community concern that we ought to think about in a collective way.
Rather than framing disability in terms of the individual, I would like us to consider the ways that the environment at Osgoode disables people. By “the environment,” I mean the accumulation of all of the ways we interact with each other as those interactions are shaped by the procedures or structures at Osgoode, such as the teaching and grading mechanisms. Individuals are not disabled in some pre-social sense: environments disable certain people and enable others. For those of us who benefit from the current structure, I believe there exists a responsibility to always seek ways to expand and alter this context: to make it more accessible and open to difference. In this sense, accommodation is the responsibility of the community as a whole.
One way we may be able to make the current Audio Recording policy more effective is by having student volunteers in each class who can assist professors in setting up the audio recording equipment. Operating similarly to the Dean’s Scribe program, this idea would require widespread student support and is just one example of the way we can work together to build a more accessible Osgoode community. Please give these ideas some thought. I look forward to hearing from you.