Professional development for faculty related to digital accessibility has been regularly offered on the SUNY Oswego campus since 2014. The campus has a Workgroup on Accessibility Practices that runs many of the campus training and advocacy initiatives. In January of 2019 the Workgroup launched the Faculty Accessibility Fellows program. Fellows are recruited from each of the four schools to diversify the fellow pool and to have broader impact across campus. Fellows in the program commit to a one-year program that starts with an accessibility bootcamp in January and involves regular meetings with their cohort throughout each semester of the calendar year. Fellows actively work to make their own courses more accessible and inclusive. The fellows program uses a “train the trainer” model, and as such, fellows help to facilitate professional development opportunities related to accessibility during and beyond their fellowship.
To assess the program we conducted interviews with fellows who participated in the first four years/cohorts of the program. In the interviews we asked about the impact the program has had on their career, how they’ve integrated inclusive practices into their daily work, the barriers they’ve faced in implementing accessible practices, and their feedback on the fellowship experience. In this session, we’ll share preliminary data from those interviews to demonstrate the impact the fellowship program has had.
The fellows program has been an important piece of our integrated accessibility initiative at SUNY Oswego. In this session, we’ll explore how this particular program fits into the larger context of campus efforts as well as important logistics from recruiting potential fellows, to onboarding, to facilitating the year-long experience, to how to engage fellows in advocacy work beyond the fellowship. Additionally, we’ll share details about incentives/compensation and other resources necessary to run the program. Finally, we’ll provide an overview of how the program has evolved in response to our changing pool of applicants, the pandemic, and the extent to which our campus accessibility efforts have matured. Campuses interested in initiating a similar program will leave the session with the details necessary to write a convincing proposal.
The Faculty Accessibility Fellows program at SUNY Oswego started in January 2019. Fellows commit to a full calendar year of accessibility training, revise their own courses to be more accessible and inclusive, and advocate for access and inclusion practices on campus and within their disciplines. Each year our campus recruits fellows from each of our four schools to broaden the reach of our campus accessibility advocacy to many departments and disciplines. We’ve conducted interviews with alumni of the fellow program to learn more about their experience in the program and the impact participating in the program has had on them and the work they continue to do. In this session, we’ll share an overview of how the program has evolved and continues to evolve, the impact it has had on the campus, and how this program fits into our wider campus accessibility initiative.