Conference focus: creating an inclusive community

Born in the ADA: Creating an Inclusive College Community, a daylong conference taking place on Friday, May 2, will explore the educational realities for college students with learning disabilities as well as their contributions to a diverse and inclusive campus.

According organizer Jamin Totino, the conference will be especially beneficial for faculty interested in examining curriculum and instruction in the context of universal design?i.e., curriculum whose wide variety of learning styles and ways of demonstrating knowledge reduces or eliminates the need for accommodation?and in gaining a stronger understanding of the process of disabilities accommodation at the college level. Totino, Student Academic Services' Coordinator for Students with Disabilities at Skidmore, currently serves approximately 150 students, most with learning disabilities.

Free and open to Skidmore faculty and staff, the conference will begin with 8:30 a.m. registration in the Dana/Palamountain lobby. A discussion of the historical background of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 will be presented by Dr. Jane Jarrow, president of Disability Access Information and Support, at 9 a.m. in Gannett Auditorium. Since the passage of those two acts, a steady increase in the numbers of students with learning disabilities and attention deficit disorder has created "an increased awareness that students with cognitive disabilities can be very successful college students and contributing members of society," according to learning specialist Dr. Lydia Block of Ohio Wesleyan University, who will deliver the event's keynote address at 10 a.m., also in Gannett Auditorium. Dr. Block will explore the types of learning disabilities most common among college students and discuss strategies for helping students identify obstacles and work through them in instructional settings.

Additional sessions will consider federal legislation and legal statutes, ideas for inclusive curricula, accommodations such as residential requests, reduced course loads, and therapy animals; best practices and case studies; technologies to assist print-related learning disabilities; and a consideration of the mental health issues such as self-esteem, anxiety, and depression that students with learning disabilities may face.

A panel discussion at 3:45 p.m. will allow students, parents, and faculty to share personal accounts of living with a learning disability. The conference will conclude with a curator's tour of the ongoing exhibition, Joseph Grigely: Saint Cecilia, at the Tang Museum. Grigely, an artist who has been deaf since childhood, creates works that explore the failures, idiosyncrasies, and ruptures of language and communication.

Among the conference's speakers are Michele Fish, associate director of Student Disability Services at Cornell University; Cyrus Hamilton, also of Cornell University, who helped create the first document-conversion center for students with print disabilities; Marcus Hotaling, director of the counseling center at Union College; and Julia Routbort, director of the Skidmore Counseling Center.