The University of Minnesota’s Liberal Arts Engagement Hub in the College of Liberal Arts works to foster ethical and meaningful collaborations with disabled communities through their workshop, Inclusive Engagement: Partnering with the Disability Community, from April 28 to May 5.
The Hub seeks to facilitate reciprocal and trusting partnerships between scholars in the liberal arts and the community to respond to social challenges. Their mission is to strive to bring people together to create a hopeful future and do so through their workshops and residency program.
New this year, the workshop is held asynchronously to accommodate a larger audience of students, staff and faculty. It is part of a larger workshop through the Hub’s Collaborative Learning For Change workshop series.
Workshop participants learn how to address common accessibility barriers, access resources on digital accessibility and gain a sense of how to foster worthwhile partnerships with disability communities.
Jessica Cooley, guest curator at the Hub, helped put the workshop together with the help of the Hub’s graduate research assistant Xun Yu. As someone with a disability, Cooley said she believes it is critical to talk about accessibility and have ethical conversations with the disabled community.
“The workshop is to kind of help University folks rethink how that engagement could work in order to create these more like reciprocal and ethical relationships between the University partners and community partners,” Cooley said.
During the workshop, participants have the opportunity to reflect on why they think it is important to engage with the disability community and how to do so.
The workshop instructs faculty and staff on how to draft emails to potential disability community partners and provide resources for disabled students.
Cooley said she thinks there are great resources at the University on basic things like creating an accessible PDF and what font size to use, but those resources do not necessarily cause change in the community.
“How do we do this work from a place of disability justice, where we’re creating more of a transformative experience,” Cooley said. “Where we are thinking deeply about what it means to be in community, specifically between the university and with the disabled community.”
Yu, the Hub’s graduate research assistant, said inclusive engagement is a project the Hub has been working on for two years. Cooley said Yu has been the driving force behind the hands-on aspects of the workshop.
The third activity will be larger, Yu said, and will be for the participants to create an action plan from everything they learned in the workshop, to starting to reach out to people.
Yu said she knows there are barriers for people with disabilities at the University, and it is important to think about how the University can welcome people with disabilities.
“I think a lot of people in the University want to do that and have really good intentions, and probably what they are looking for is a way to actually do things in the right way,” Yu said.
At this moment, Cooley said disability justice and inclusion are particularly important for everyone to care about.
“Because if we ourselves are not disabled, we certainly know folks who are,” Cooley said. “And if we are fortunate enough to live long enough, we will ourselves experience the disability experience.”