 Hello, good morning. Thank you for joining us for the Celebrate Learning Week keynote. We're happy to help you join us. We will get started shortly as more people come in. But right now, I just want to bring your attention to the image we have on screen. We have an image of university students walking outdoors with today's session title of the keynote with Dr. Timothy Cortez on the hurdle and the highway, how we think about inclusion, accommodation, and disability and why it matters. We'll get started shortly in about one minute. Thank you for your patience. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our keynote talk for Celebrate Learning Week 2022, the hurdle and the highway, how we think about inclusion, accommodation, and disability and why it matters with Timothy Cortez. The 13th annual Celebrate Learning Week, I can't believe it's 13 years already, is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and VP Academic. And for a second year, it is taking place on both campuses through the medium of online. So it's sponsored by Provost Offices on both campuses. My name is Christina Hendricks. I'm the Academic Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at UBC Vancouver and also a professor of teaching in the Philosophy Department. I want to begin by acknowledging that I am joining you from the campus of the University of British Columbia Vancouver, which is located on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Some of you may be joining from UBC Okanagan, which is on the traditional territory of the Silks Okanagan people. Now, in previous years, Celebrate Learning Week has been held, well, previous to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's been held in person. And we have all been located in one place where we acknowledge that place where we are located. And perhaps it's easier to do a land acknowledgement in that situation. But it's no less important when we're meeting online. And it's not as if we're online like in the ether, right? We're each in various spaces. We're coming here grounded in a space. And many of us are doing so from British Columbia. And if so, many places are on unceded traditional territory of indigenous peoples. So for those of us who are guests on these lands, I often try to think about how can I act as a good guest and contribute to decolonization and reconciliation? One way is to start learning more about the lands, the people, the culture, and the history of the places where we are living, working, and playing. And many indigenous nations have websites that provide really useful information about their lands and cultures and histories. So for example, at EBC Vancouver, the Musqueam Nation has a website with some educational resources that talks about their culture, their language, their history, their territory, their stories. It's really a wonderful set of educational resources that you can review yourself and also use in teaching and learning. And in Okanagan, the Syoaks Okanagan Nation website also has information about their language, culture, and history. So those are good places to start if you're located on those lands. And for those of us at EBC, we can also learn about the memorandum of affiliation with the Musqueam Nation and EBC and the memorandum of understanding with the Syoaks Okanagan Nation, which guide EBC's relationships with these nations. And I think it's useful for us to recognize the agreements that do exist and guide our work within the communities of the First Nations people. As we learned today about accessibility and inclusion, let's also keep in mind that the institutional structures and practices we're working to have people be included in have been built upon colonial practices and values. And that EBC is working and has made strong commitments through these memoranda and through the Indigenous Strategic Plan to uphold Indigenous human rights, to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to actions, and to work in partnership with local communities towards reconciliation. So I encourage all of us at EBC to take a look at the Indigenous Strategic Plan, which provides a really clear framework for locating really everybody's work within the Strategic Plan and supporting Indigenous human rights. There's also fantastic toolkits that you can take a look at to help you get started with the Indigenous Strategic Plan. So talking then about Celebrate Learning Week in particular, this is an opportunity for us to recognize all of the hard work and talent and teaching and learning commitments and achievements at EBC. Throughout this whole week, we've got events from UBC folks in Vancouver, UBC folks in Okanagan, and others. And we're working together across campuses to host a series of in-person and online events. The theme of this year's Celebrate Learning Week is Promoting Inclusivity and Accessibility. We've got over 35 events that highlight accessibility for people with disabilities, along with inclusive learning, living, and working environments for students, faculty, and staff. So we've got a full list of events at celebratelearning.ubc.ca. So talking about some practical things about the session today. We have a few housekeeping items before we get started. So we invite you to participate in the session. However, makes most sense to you with your camera on or off. Sit down, stand up, walk around, have a snack, have a pet beside you, whatever works for you. Please keep your microphone off when you're not speaking. There will be a chance to speak on the microphone if you wish later during the Q&A. Please note that the session is being recorded and it will be shared afterwards as a resource on the Celebrate Learning Wiki. If you do not wish to have your voice or video recorded, please keep both of those off. The chat will not be recorded. The event has a live captioner. You can enable this feature by clicking on the CC button on the bottom of the Zoom screen. And we also have two American Sign Language interpreters joining us today. So thank you very much to all of those folks for their assistance during the session. We've disabled the general Zoom chat for this event because our keynote speaker is unable to attend to the chat while also doing the talk and we want to limit distractions for him. So you can still engage in the session through Zoom reactions at the bottom of your screen. You can use the private message Zoom chat if you're having any technical difficulties. So Rachel Lee is our tech support. And if you're having problems, please connect with Rachel Lee through the Zoom chat. Later in the session will be time for questions and there will be several ways to engage. So during the presentation, we have an opportunity for you to post questions using an online site called Slido. You do not need to have an account. You can just go to the website and type in your question. On the slide now is a community agreement slide that has several words on it that I'm just going to describe. So to ensure an open, inclusive and respectful dialogue and participation, we'd like to start by recognizing this space as a place of learning for all of us. And we'd like to share with you a community agreement which describes a set of guidelines that helped us set our intentions for how we'll work together today. So starting at the top right, we would like us all to acknowledge that this is a space of learning. So learning from and with each other. Next, we'd like to acknowledge that discussions regarding diversity, inclusion and discrimination can sometimes raise strong emotions. They can sometimes be uncomfortable. They can be felt. These emotions can be felt quite differently by different people for various reasons. For those who are sharing lived experience of discrimination or other harms or for whom this might bring up those experiences, I hope we receive their discomfort with care. And for those who have not lived that experience, I hope we can lean into discomfort and use it to guide our growth. So that's the third note. The third word is recognition, recognizing that discomfort and recognizing these emotions and working with them to support our learning. So next word is impact. We ask that you listen to each other's perspectives and that you be accountable for the impact of our words, even when this is different from our intentions. And lastly, responsibility. We recognize that we're all responsible for equitable, generative and respectful dialogue and facilitators in this session, including myself, our Q&A facilitators who you will meet later and our keynote speaker supports this goal of responsibility for equity. So please join us in helping to set the space for a generative and respectful dialogue as you engage with the session today. And finally, now we'll be able to introduce our keynote speaker, Timothy Cordis. We're excited to welcome Dr. Timothy Cordis who's joined us this year for the Celebrate Learning Week keynote address. Dr. Cordis is a blind person who graduated as a valedictorian from the University of Notre Dame. He went on to earn a PhD in biomolecular chemistry and an MD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In graduate school, he developed software to describe protein structures with sound. Dr. Cordis also completed a general psychiatry residency at the University of Wisconsin in 2011 and a fellowship in addiction psychiatry in 2012. He's board certified in both. From 2012 to 2018, he worked for the Veterans Administration and from 2016 to 2017, he led the Madison Veterans Administration as the Medical Director for Addiction Services. He's currently the Interim Director of the Psychiatry Department at the University Health Services which serves students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's presented nationally and internationally on the lessons he's acquired while navigating this path. So I want to say thank you, Dr. Cordis, for joining us. Welcome, and I look forward to your talk. Thanks so much. It's really great to be here with you guys virtually. I'm on a de Jopeland in Madison, Wisconsin. It's about 75 degrees out there today. It looks a little warmer than maybe what you guys have. So I'm really thankful. It's really neat that an institution focuses on learning and gives it this spotlight. And so it's nice to be a part of that and I'm really glad I was invited. Let me get my slides going here. So disclaimer, I don't have any financial conflicts of interest to disclose. I will say I'm an unapologetic advocate for people with disabilities and that comes through. So I don't consider that a conflict. I consider that an interest. These opinions are solely my own. They don't represent the University of Wisconsin, Madison or Point and Click, a software company I work for. So yeah, in my background, I've been the student. I've been the graduate student. I've been the researcher. I've been the doctor. I've been the leader of doctors. And so I think that gives me some perspective to think about how we think about accommodation. As a psychiatrist, I know that how we approach things, how we think about them makes a lot of difference in our outcomes. So we can talk about that. We can talk about how we recognize our biases and ways to become better learners. I'll give you an example case of how this plays out and then move from the hurdle to the highway. How do we convey most people safely to the goal of learning with the least impediments and then ideas on how to generalize from there? And then ultimately we'll begin to put it all together. So there should be a picture of a hurdle, I believe. And so in this notion, we think of educational tasks as hurdles that students or learners overcome on the way to their path of enlightenment or learning or training. And the disability may present additional challenges there. And some students may need extra accommodation to clear the hurdle. This comes through in our language all the time, overcoming challenges. And it's the default way of how we think about it. The person with the disability needs to clear the hurdle, which turns out to be perpendicular to the path of learning a lot of times as our hurdle demonstrates. So how did this really present to me? Well, I was about 18. I was going to study at the University of Notre Dame. And before I set foot in a classroom, I met with all the heads of the departments. They were showing interest and they sat on one side of a large boardroom table. I put my seeing eye dog to rest underneath and I sat on the other side with my parents. And the head of the biology department, slid a book much like this over to my father pointing at a picture, much like this, and said, how is he going to learn this, right? Here's the hurdle, how is he going to learn this? And so what was he saying really? He was saying, teach me how I'm a scientist, I'm a learner, I'm a scholar, teach me. So with non-judgmental curiosity, the teacher can become the student again. So we talked about the tools and techniques of blindness, things, mobility, using Braille, recorded media. Back in those days, it was cassette tapes, which would be in anacritism today. Braille, the ability to make raise-line drawings by tracing on paper that exposes a raised line where you drew, and we told them about all those things. And so we helped them learn because they presented some non-judgmental curiosity. It was gratifying. I ran into Dr. Deum in the next semester on campus and he said, I wonder if I gave all the students dart glasses if they would do as well as you. It was a compliment and I thanked him for that. And then he told me to go get a haircut because I look like a hippie. I appreciated the first more than the latter, but probably got a haircut anyways. So we all have these biases, and this is a common one. Could I clear the hurdle if I, and then you insert yourself into the picture, if I couldn't see, if I was deaf or I was hard of hearing, if I didn't have full mobility, if I struggled with depression. So we always tend to put ourselves in the center of this question. And it doesn't always happen consciously, but it happens nonetheless. So as a psychiatrist, we have this idea that comes from psychotherapy of the counter-transference. And so this is a construct that encompasses how a therapist feels towards a patient. And often it needs to be brought into conscious awareness. We all see through our own lens. And in order to design or accommodate, we have to know what our lens is telling us and how it might be distorting the image. So it's not just the functional disability, it's the perception of the disability. So it's not just what I can do, it's what you think I can do. So this is met in a tongue-in-cheek fashion to sort of describe that, that where we stand matters. So let's consider a radio advertisement directed mainly towards people with visual disabilities or people who are blind. So I'm just gonna help you out here. So it's a radio ad, you might hear some violins rising gently and then the voiceover comes on. Just consider that for 12 hours a day, these people are helpless. They're unable to read their books, find their way around their homes, unable even to match their socks. These are the sighted people all around us and they are in desperate need of light bulbs. Please consider donating to lighted for the sighted, even a few dollars can buy light and safety for these among us. So if you're a blind person or a person who is blind, that would make sense from where you stand. But to most of you, I imagine that seemed a little odd. So we really need to stop and reflect on our personal preconceptions. If we could first know where we are and whether we are attending, we could then better judge what to do and how to do it. So it's worth it every now and then just to pause and see what we're carrying with us. So let's do a quick check. Can people with a visual impairment become a successful physician? Yep. Heart of hearing or deaf, yes. Mobility impairments, yep. Mental health disorders, yes. So all these people can reach the level of physician which requires significant training, knowledge and education. So the disability may be obvious, but it's only one part of a human's complex identity. So let me give you a story to illustrate this. I was in high school, I was in the drama club. I had a bit part in a school play. I was a doorman and my stage directions called for me to walk to the center of the stage down a set of steps without a railing and then exit the theater. We realized the safest way for me to do this was with my seeing eye dog. So I said my lines, you know, good night Mr. Denison. And then I walked to center stage with my dog and I took the steps out. It was a normal rehearsal. So it all seemed normal to me. My mom caught me afterwards and she said, you know, I was sitting next to a lady who said, I thought I'd seen the play before but I don't remember the dog. So all she saw was the dog. And I just wanted to check in, can I get feedback that I re-engaged my screen after that exercise a couple of slides back? Yes, we're seeing those. Okay, awesome. Flying with the iceberg on. Iceberg, yep, the slide with the iceberg. Okay, all right. So what's beneath the surface, right? The individuals had the opportunity to learn skills, to handle whatever their situation may be, to develop strategies to compensate, to acquire their own tools, maybe even develop them. And other strengths may develop because of how the person has grown in the presence or absence of certain challenges. The brain itself can adapt and then all those other things that make us unique individuals happen, right? Whether that's our ethnicity, our gender, our spirituality, whatever that is, is on top of and connected to all the above. And those things matter when we approach inclusivity, when we approach accommodation. So what happens in the brain? As the psychiatrist said, I can't help this. So there's this thing called neuroplasticity and this is the ability of the brain to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Now, if you made it to this seminar, your brain made some new connections today. So congratulations. And so neuroplasticity allows the brain to compensate for injury or in response to new situations. Now, this is fascinating. So this is an image of brain activity and what it's showing is that the occipital cortex, so this is the back of your brain that typically processes visual information in sighted information in a blind person reading Braille, they can see it light up when a blind person reads Braille. So other things we know is that, so you can have Braille reading activate visual cortex. You can have auditory cortex activated when folks are lip reading. The way I think about this is the brain is a greedy real estate developer. It's not going to let space go unclaimed or unused if it can help it. And so that gives me a sense of wonder. There's so much we don't know. So given that, how do we discover, right? So first of all, we start to be aware of our own biases, the lenses we're seeing through, Star Wars quote for any fans out there, unlearn what you have learned because sometimes the things we've learned get in the way and sometimes they're just wrong. And then we can use non-judgmental curiosity. How is it for you? Tell me, try to peek into someone else's lived experience. And then we align the goal to teach with their goal to learn. We're both here for the same reason. And so let's put those reasons together and get some synergy. And then I call this relocating the uncertainty. So we say to ourselves, well, it will be done. Let's figure out how instead of spending our time trying to decide if something can be done. I'll give you a perfect example of this. So I was in medical school and we have a two week anesthesiology rotation. And one of the tasks in that rotation is to put a breathing tube down the throat of a patient to breathe for them. So I had this wonderful attending physician. His name was George Art. And he came in one day and he said, Tim, I know how you're going to intubate a patient. And this is wonderful news to me because I didn't have a clue. But he had aligned his goal with mine. And so what did we do? Well, we used a combination of tools. One of them being this tool called the fast tracks. So first of all, he figured out how to make a extended stethoscope so I could hear the patient's breath sounds while I was standing at the head of the bed like the anesthesiologist, the head of the table like the anesthesiologist. And then we found that the CO2 monitors on the anesthesia machines could play tones to let you know if your innovation tube was in the right spot. And this is called a fast track. So this is a device that you can put down the airway and sort of slide it and slide it back and then snake a breathing tube through. And that was how I would use it to intubate. So they brought in the patient, we put on the stethoscope, I put my hand over their mouth to bag them and mask ventilate them. And then I put in the T-tube and then I heard the boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, which meant the patient was breathing. And then I had to stop and take a breath myself because I successfully done it. But by putting these things together and relocating the uncertainty, we'll figure out how to do this. That's how we achieved this goal. So in this process, we learn about the students and we learn about ourselves and just the nature of learning in general. And the student becomes the collaborator, not just the vessel we're filling with knowledge, right? And I sort of paraphrased the old saying in a little different way, when the teacher is ready, the competent student will appear. When we're ready to participate in this learning, the student will be there. So I'll give you an example for my life that I think illustrates several of these concepts. So the question is how, so images or protein structure are often used in large colored balls or overlapping frames and spheres and it can be a complicated appearing image. So how could a blind person see protein structure? It's a good question. I was in grad school and had to answer this question for myself. The first thing we need to do is check our assumptions. The atomic structure of a protein is actually smaller than the wavelength of light that you could use to look at it. So it turns out nobody sees protein structures. What people see are common representations of protein structures using visual imagery. That visual image is no more valid than other ways you could represent it. It's just the common way that a lot of folks who happen to have sight do it. So once we started with that, well, we needed to back up and say, well, what do we really need to do? Well, we need a way to appreciate the distances between atoms, check. We need a way to understand some spatial relationships and we need a way to use a tool in near real time. So we can't spend hours or days in developing this on multiple structures. So what could we do? Well, we take a look at our survey. We look, what's in our toolkit? What was in my toolkit at the time? So we have technology, we have computing resources. There's publicly available routines to put together graphics and protein modeling images. I had the support of my supervisor, Katrina Forrest, and this is important. I couldn't have done this without her backing and collaboration. And I had some techniques and skills. I had auditory spatial abilities. I had some musical experience. I had a short-lived stint in a band in high school, and I had some programming experience. So these days, if we were to face this problem again, it might be different. We might be able to 3D print, simply, relatively simply and easily make models. This might look a little differently now, but these are the tools we had at the time. So what we decided is we would make a program. A friend suggested I call it Timball, text interface to macro molecules. So what you do is you essentially scroll through 3D space, excuse me, of a protein with a selection sphere, and then the text output, which can be read on Braille or speech, et cetera, will describe what's in the circle or what's in the sphere. So as you imagine scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet, cell by cell and reading what's in each cell, you're just doing the same thing in three dimensions with this program. And it'll tell you what's in the spot, and then you can sort of use it to make queries and understand how close and what things are related in space. So that was a good start. But then we said, well, we really could do something more to enhance the spatial sense. So we added some auditory functions that plays tones to indicate the atom's location and identity. For example, an organ might represent oxygen, a carbon might be a piano. And then we said, well, let's use the left and right here for x-axis, y-axis would be pitch, and z-axis would be softer and louder as if it's coming towards you or away from you. We even added hi-hats to sort of tell you when you're moving, if you're going to the left or right, as a quick cue if it was subtle and hard to distinguish. So that was interesting. And then this is a picture of what Timwell Output might look like, kind of like a spider web sphere with atom representing spheres inside it. I found a collaborator named Britt Carlson and one of her goals was to go into education and teaching. And so we had this idea that this tool could be useful not just for me or potentially folks with visual impairments, but it could be more useful to folks in general. So she helped me develop the program, including this graphic interface, that lets a person typically used to viewing sighted information, understand what Timwell was playing and quote-unquote looking at. So if we're lucky here, I'll give you a quick video of Timwell in action. So I need to enable sound sharing. Now you will hear my speech synthesizer briefly. So I will turn that off as soon as possible, but we'll also give you a sense of what I'm hearing right now. So we'll go back here. Leave a news, PowerPoint, slide show, dash up, talk for final.ptx. Ready, video, video, video, virtual PC, virtual slide 27, back Timwell, video, video, video, video, video. So here's an example of Timwell in action. It's playing its way through an alpha helix, which is a common structure in protein chemistry. So you'll hear the rising tones as they move across, sort of cyclically rising and falling as it spirals. Unfortunately, because of how we've recorded, I didn't get the stereo data, but I think this will give you a general sense. Slide, video, video, video, video. So let me get my audio back here. More button drop down. Space, pause recording, leave fault, media info, turn on original sound. Stereo left there, mode check, optimize for video, mode check, turn on original, media info, leave fault, pause recording, stop recording, hold show sub, view full trans, sub title setting, rate out the reactions, disable edit, hide names of edit, remote control, hide video, hide floating, share sound, check. All right. So we actually did a small study with folks who were in the protein sciences and had them turn off the graphic displays and folks were able to identify structures such as alpha helices. There's a thing called the beta sheet and a loop with using just these sound cues after a little bit of training. So this type of thing certainly could be useful for folks, not just folks with visual impairments. These days I'm gratified. You know, when I open my iPhone, I can check the precipitation chart or even the stocks and iOS now uses audio cues to convey graphic information in a 2D sense. So it's neat to see these concepts generalizing. So my speech, and I think the slides are out of sync here, hold on folks. So when folks are given a chance and with collaboration and awareness of our biases and the ability to utilize skills towards a well-defined goal, students with disabilities can overcome a variety of educational hurdles. This is the traditional sense. We know this intuitively, right? But every approach has its strengths and has its weaknesses, right? What are the shortcomings of this hurdle approach? So you can get sidetracked with the obstacle and forget about the actual, the learning goal. And there's argument that it's less efficient for mass education. And individuals just, they may have their own barriers for seeking accommodation. So, you know, the individual might not even know there's resources or know where to look. They might have had past experiences that leave them with frustrations about the systems. We've all probably had some frustrations with those systems in our lives. You know, they wish to not have the problem and maybe if they just don't engage, you know, that helps them with that process at least temporarily. They wish they didn't have to ask for help. And, you know, there's the thought that, well, if I ask for help, will this somehow disclosure, de-legitimize what I've learned, what I'm doing? And they say, they're stigma. Or the disability itself gets in the way. For example, like a problem with mental health. And these, many of these are identified in surveys of college age youth. So, I see young adults with various mental health problems. And when these presented as disabilities, they're invisible. We can only see the shadow they cast sometimes. And they can interfere with the typical processes of accommodation. And we're seeing the effect, not the cause. So, you know, if someone's highly anxious, that's a barrier to their participation in class. So we see someone who never speaks up or looks unprepared when you call on them, right? Someone who has depression, which often overlaps with a little motivation. We see someone who's, you know, not showing up to class or struggling with their assignments. And so I tend to, when possible, think of the saying, fix the problem, not the blame. Our biases on these can run deep because we don't see the wheelchair or the cane or the seeing eye dog. So we need to be especially careful here. But why is this important? Well, this is from a Google search, mainly. So, you know, a variety of, you know, very famous, successful, important folks, you know, for example, have struggled with mental illness. You know, Beethoven, I assume a music program might wanna have him or Churchill in political science or Isaac Newton, perhaps in a physics program, right? And even Beethoven later in life had problems with hearing impairment. And you know, maybe there's a correlation potentially between bipolar disorder and creativity. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Abraham Lincoln. Again, folks who struggled with these problems but also made tremendous contributions. And then, you know, folks in the visual and film industries Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, the Goldberg, you know, and I think maybe, you know, the economics department certainly could work with Charles Schwab, Richard Branson. So it's, you know, these folks have challenges, often invisible, but also potentially have a lot they can contribute. So, this is mandatory in many places, the COVID-19 slide. So students, you know, arriving at university now have had very different lives than many of us who attended university previously. Potentially less structured social interaction in school, they've had challenges with online coursework, you know, maybe even they missed some typical rituals of adolescence and adulthood or they were different. They had the additional pandemic associated stresses. So these folks may be more prevalent in the university population now more than ever. So currently, I work as a psychiatrist at a university with around 40,000 students. It's interesting to note when we think about barriers, when I went to hire for the job, I was interviewing one of the head folks and I said, aren't you going to ask me how I'm going to do blah, blah, blah? And she said, no, no, we get it, we know you can handle this now. And so it was nice to know that there are points and situations where the disability and the hurdle does not take center stage. So I've seen students succeed with all these problems and more, you know, young people are in a learning space. They're ready to grow and adapt. Their brains have not finished maturing. They're often highly motivated. So, you know, we can tap into that. And that's why we need to do that by building highways. So I believe this is a picture of a highway outdoor scene. So we go from hurdles to highways. So highways that convey people safely, quickly, the majority of folks towards the learning goals. So I saw, I peeked ahead, I think tomorrow at noon, there's a talk on universal design. I think that would be really awesome. Well, there's a lot of great talks, but I did see that on the agenda too. But universal design, and there are different sub-genres, universal design for learning. I intend to talk about this in more the broader context. So what's the goal? The goal is to design the best for the most. So you wanna have information in different formats, course materials. You wanna have clear and comprehensive expectations. You know, that makes sense. Potentially choices in ways of learning and how to present what you've learned. And the environment, you know, minimize the physical barriers and components to learning. The challenge is at that level. You wanna have a core space that's physically accessible. And you wanna support respectful communication among learners like we had with those intention statements before this seminar. And so you wanna create an environment that improves learning for disabled and non-disabled folks. And a lot of times collaboration is a handy way to do that because everyone has their own strengths. And when you put folks together, we naturally tend to work in ways that kinda optimize strengths. So what are some ideas? So you begin with the goal in mind. You know, why are we teaching this? What's the core? You know, where are we going with this and how does the task relate to it? So if the goal is to show mastery, can you give people opportunities to write versus present? Things like that. Is it important that people dispense their knowledge at a high rate or can you give them time to take home tests or do tests with where time is not the pressure? You know, I see students whose focus or wakefulness varies throughout the day. So can students have, you know, testing at different times a day to optimize how they learn and work best? Another neat concept is the flipped classroom. I've seen some really interesting work on this where students engage with the learning activity, not just watch a video of a lecture, but engage with the learning activity and then come to class to work on something collaboratively. I've seen, you know, publications where this has been done 1,200 student engineering courses. It's a pretty fascinating way to build in some inherent inclusivity. So, you know, these are complementary processes. I'll give you an example. When I went to work at University of Wisconsin, I called the company who makes the medical record software point and click and I said, hey, you know, I'm a blind person. I'm interested in this. And I wound up working for the company and they told me, you know, we're building from the ground up a web platform and we want it to be accessible. We want to build it right from the ground up and would you be involved in that effort? So these things happen collaboratively out in the world. You sort of have to tap into them. And these individual processes that we talked about with the hurdles and the group processes that we talked about with the design can happen simultaneously. And there's common components. You know, we need to be aware of our assumptions. We need to tap into the available tools. We need to focus on the goal at hand, right? And the more we build the universe, this is the cool part. The more we build universally, the less individual accommodation may be needed. But it also frees up the bandwidth so that we can help with the hurdles when they approach. So if you can get 80% of your students, 85, whatever cruising with these universal techniques that frees up energy and time to help the individuals with the individual hurdles. So iteration is expected. Success is not final and failure is not fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts from Winston Churchill. We don't have to get it completed right the first time and we won't. But in these ways, faculty, teachers, leaders can be models of continual growth, right? So we hold ourselves accountable, we collaborate and we share what we've learned. So in doing this, you know, it's not just what we're delivering that is teaching. It's we're the message. It's how we demonstrate these processes as leaders. So just a final pearl, you know, an oyster starts by facing an initial challenge, a different something that that shapes, that seems odd. You know, is that a unique student with an educational challenge? And you have the educator seeking to teach for all, right? With time care and iterative smoothing, right? The grain of sand in the pearl or in the oyster becomes the pearl, right? So it's through this iterative process of adapting to challenge and smoothing and highway building that we build, right? And this can be the story of education for all, including those folks with disabilities. So those are my thoughts. Thanks for your time and I will be happy to participate in the Q&A shortly. I, along with a couple of their folks are moderating the question and answer period. So Jillian or Sue, do you have any on Slido? We do, we have a few questions coming through and some are getting some votes up. So I'll read the top question right now. Over the past several years, we have seen more opportunities for online learning. From your perspective, are there more or less hurdles introduced as the mode of instruction shifts to online settings? Okay, it's a great question. I guess I will build an analogy. When I was in the hospital learning to be a physician, all our charts were on paper, often handwritten, and that was not easy for a blind student. And that I said to myself, when this goes electronic, it's all going to get better. And that was partially true, but when things change formats or go electronic, often it can create other barriers. So I can't say globally, it's an improvement. I think for some it's better. For example, I see folks with significant social anxiety who love the online format. For folks with visual impairments, sometimes figuring out the contents of slides and things like that can be a challenge. I know it's also can be challenging for folks who want to read the lips. And things like that. So I think it's a mixed, like most things, I think it's a mixed bag, but most mixed bags have opportunities built in. Thank you. Still don't see any hands up, so we can go to another question from Slido. Absolutely. Yeah, this question is sort of teaching related. Something that comes up in discussions of inclusive and accessible teaching is that it requires extra effort and strains the instructors already limited time and resources. How do you address that kind of response to inclusive teaching? That's a great question. I mean, there are so many stresses on instructors' time and resources already, like I tell I hear that as a concern. I think it can be that it may be investment now with payoff later if you're, for example, designing universally or changing things to make them more accessible in the future. So I think there may be an increased workload temporarily, but I think it certainly could pay dividends in the long run. That's, I'd encourage people to try to take the long view when they can. Tilly, we'll keep going. Okay, the next question, how do you find out if people need a highway? How can you offer these supports or how do you advertise that extra supports are available thinking of folks who may not realize they're available or know how to ask for them? Right, exactly. And that's the beauty of the highway. So in this metaphor, that should be sort of built into the course. So the course is designed in a way, you know, in an auditorium that you can get to mobility-wise challenges, Braille labels on the door, you know, where information's available, those sort of things that, so the idea is to build the highway into the class design so the student doesn't necessarily have to ask for it. And that's the universal and universal design approach. Can I ask a quick follow-up? Sure. Sorry. It's Christina. Yeah. So if I'm thinking about the highway and I just was thinking about some specific things I might do for students who are visually impaired or blind or those with mental health challenges. So like just what are a couple of things that might be particularly impactful? Yeah. So just like the course materials, like how are they accessible? Is there an accessible webpage? Can folks get to them in a way that's meaningful using Braille, enlargement, whatever? Or are there recorded lectures in a way that someone who started hearing or deaf could access? So it's sort of building it from the ground up with those approaches. Thanks. Sure. And just a reminder, you can also use the raised hand function in Zoom and speak on the mic if you choose, but you also could use Slido instead. Oh, somebody's going to speak up, right? Maybe. Otherwise we'll keep going with Slido. There's great questions on here. Oh, there is a hand up. Okay, Laura, please go ahead. Good morning, my name's Laura. I go by she and her. I'm a white woman sitting in an office. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming to share this morning. So some of my involvement in teaching and learning here at UBC is that I work with health professional students who are disabled folks, folks with disabilities, and chronic physical and mental health conditions at the Center for Accessibility. So I guess, well, for one thing, I wanted to have someone speak because sometimes it just takes one person to break that ice. And my question to you is, I would love to just hear a little bit more about how you navigated kind of some of the hidden curriculum in medicine around what a physician or what a health professional looks like is like. And yeah, kind of some of those challenging hidden curriculum pieces and some of that stigma. Yeah, some of those I find for a lot of the health professional students as well as health professionals I work with and as a blind person myself. Some of the most challenging hurdles are those ones that are microaggressions, et cetera, et cetera that are very hard to pinpoint. Yeah. Yeah, so just curious what your experience is. Sure, sure. And it's Yaswini, I wish they were all microaggressions. So. He says like aggression, aggression. Yeah. So, well the first thing is at the University of Wisconsin, I had a very good experience and on the whole the institution was really supportive. And I think that makes a difference if there's, if that's there. So one of our first tasks as a medical student in the hospital is to go in and interview a patient. So these patients, they're in the hospital for various reasons. Someone comes around in the morning and says, hey, there's a med student who wants to talk to you. Would you mind talking with Johnny? So they did that and my friend Dan and I went to the hospital and said, hey, let's go do it. So I walk in to the room with my short white coat and my German shepherd. And the patient promptly says, I never said I could have a med student. You know, what are you doing here? And so it was like, I have a feeling that was not a pout. So those things happen and the best, sometimes the best you can do is shrug it off and just keep moving ahead. Cause there are folks like that. I'll tell you this though. I moved in, my wife and I bought a house and it turns out across the street from us is a physician who was on the admission panel when I came to the University of Wisconsin. He's become a friend of mine, but he said, when you got in, I didn't think you could make it but I was wrong, you know? And so you sort of have to leave room for people to recalibrate and say face too. So I think that's part of it. I think you try to walk the walk, you model and copy what you can. You shrug off what you can. And those are sort of my general strategies. Thank you. Sure. Thanks, Laura for speaking up. Jillian, go to the next slide or question. This is a question about, I guess, system structures and mental health. Do you think COVID-19 mental health issues overpower and strain a disability system that has not matured yet? Those with physical or other physical disabilities still don't have access to software such as the IMML. Can you guys help me out with the IMML? I'm not sure with the news. Is anyone? Was it the, is it the one that you were describing to? I'm assuming they mean the Timmel. Oh, a Timmel, yeah. Probably, that's my guess. Yeah, well, so as far as Timmel goes, I published on it and have the source code. So if anybody wants to work with it, like that's freely available, it runs in Perl, which is kind of an older language, but it is workable. So yeah, I think COVID-19 strained a lot of systems and I think those that help folks with disabilities, to me, matured implies like the job's done. And I think it's gonna be a long time before the job's done. And so I think they're maturing. And yeah, I agree. I think there's a lot of strain on the resources and folks, they're certainly places where people don't have what they need yet. And that's why we talk about this stuff and put it front and center in Celebrate Learning Week as a place to reorient focus and start. Go to the next question, Dylan. This is a question about your own experience, Timm. What inner resources and external resources have you tapped into through your and early career to develop your inspiring possibilities mindset? Oh my goodness. I'll write a book someday. But it started out, my parents were wonderful, were wonderful, they were wonderful to me growing up. My father, engineer, get the job done, Timm. Let's solve the problem. And my mother was a social worker when I was very young and had the emotional, social emotional support. I had those two. And then I had my older sisters who wouldn't let me slack off, who wouldn't let me get out of chores because I couldn't see, for example, when they were mowing the lawn, I was hand clipping around the house, the weeds, because they wouldn't let me slack off. So I think those things mattered a lot. I've had the good fortune to run into a lot of wonderful people, make some good friends along the way and couldn't have done a lot of this without them. Luck, Pasteur says, chance favors the prepared mind. And I've certainly had a lot of lucky chances and hopefully I've been prepared enough to take advantage of some of them. So I think that's sort of my general. I do acknowledge that I've been very lucky too, so. Just another invitation for anyone who wants to raise their hand and speak, barring that we have some more excellent questions on the Slido. And the next question that's bubbled to the top. Writing effective alternative text for images is something I find challenging. Do you have any advice for approaching writing alt text in an effective way or is there a resource that you can recommend? Oh man, that's a good question. So I don't have a good resource off hand. I think, so there was a, clerk who had worked in our front desk and he would send out pictures of his, cats or animals or doing fun things. And it turns out he was alt text captioning for me, specifically, I think because he knew I was the only person who had read these emails among the mass audience. And he was so good at it. And I think the thing that made him good at it was that he tried to say to himself, what would I wanna know? Or it's like the begin with the goal in mind. What's the core thing that people ought to take from this and then working backwards? Or it's maybe like writing a news article. You put the headline first. So I think it's kind of that idea. I know there is better and better automated attempts to do alt text or image descriptions, which can be a backup, but yeah, it's a challenge and I appreciate folks to do it. It's really neat. Thank you. I see a hand up from Wei Chao. Hi, my name's Wei Chao. You should hear her pronouns. I'm actually Dr. Portis, this co-worker. I'm really grateful that he allowed me to join his talk. And this is, Tim and I had conversation often at clinical settings. So we talk about cases, but this is more of a personal question for you. And then for me, I guess, big question. Have you ever had doubt, self-doubt about what you could achieve or what you want to achieve? And I ask that question because when I'm thinking about students that we're working with, I'm a mental health provider. Students have a lot of self-doubt and sometimes we could do our best and I used to be a special education teacher. So we could have all the good intention. We could try very hard to hope that we could support students to succeed and really reach their potential. And yet there's students self-doubt and versus sometimes there are so many barriers in the systems that teachers or mental health providers ourselves have doubt. Are we, I don't know if I'm always confident and to be able to say, hey, hanging there, you'll be able to make it someday. And so I guess, the question of, how do you manage that? But what keeps you going? That's a great question. So I'll give you a story. So I was applying to medical schools. I applied to, I don't know what doesn't. I went on interviews, got a lot of rejections. There was actually one school, we talk about microaggressions or whatever. I finished the whole interview day for various reasons. I probably should have been a shoe in for this school and they brought me in a back room with a couple other faculty and said, regardless of how good your application is you're not gonna be a med student here. And so those things were all piling up and I think I had maybe one application out left to the University of Wisconsin. And I was actually going, I just said, well, if I can't do this, I'm going to be a DJ in Alaska. So I was reading my demo tape, preparing that in my friend's room when the call came in for the University of Wisconsin to say, hey, why don't you come and join our program? So things could have gone differently and I could have been a DJ in Alaska because, yeah, these things happen and we're human beings moving forward, times proceeding. Sometimes, when do we change course? And that's a tough one. So like my failing is sticking too long at things and maybe when I should have changed course sooner and we all have to walk that balance and it's really hard to know for somebody else. So when I get in that position, I give folks the benefit of the doubt because I say what I've wanted somebody, say no to me, what I want. And so I sort of flip it that way. So yeah, sure, I've had my shared doubts but I do think that it's a real challenge and you're right, sometimes it's worth hanging in there and sometimes you need to change course. My friend had a poster of Albert Einstein playing basketball and it said, if it weren't for a tragic ankle injury, we never would have had the physics genius, we appreciate it. And so I think it's really interesting to think along those lines. Thank you. I wanted to note that there are a couple of resources being shared in the chat. So thanks to folks who are sharing those resources with our moderators. So one is from Harvard about Harvard University Digital Accessibility about writing good alt text to describe images. Another one is from the Diagram Center, diagramcenter.org, also image description dialogue, guidelines, image description guidelines. So we've got a couple of things being shared in the chat. So thank you very much for those. This is awesome, right? This is what happens when you bring people together, right? Exactly, so keep them in the comments. So if people want to share information, please send it to either Jillian Gerhardt or Sue Hampton, both with the Q&A after their participants or put it into slide-up. That works too. Jillian, next question. We have just a comment first, which is just the quote, nobody sees the protein structure end quote is a prompt that will stay with me. Thanks. Sure. And then we have a question from a student who's asking you, what advice would you give to prospective grad students with one or more Fs on their transcripts resulting from under-supported mental health crisis dream? Previous academicity. So the student says, I have the supports I need now, but I have Fs on record. That is, that's challenging. Sometimes if you could make a connection with somebody in the field or the topic that the F was in that says, I'm aware of this student's challenges and now it seems like they're able to do organic chemistry or like you certainly could go that route. Sometimes input from mental health providers, we can at our university help folks withdraw from a course or that sort of thing. But yeah, it's a real challenge. Sometimes people go on to master's programs or things to sort of whip up their grades to boost qualifications, but I'm glad things are better now, but that is a real challenge. Thank you. There's something in the chat I'm going to look up and then I'll talk about it in a moment. So, Jillian, if you wanna go ahead with the next question. Certainly. One of our other students has also, I just messaged that for that, you may be able to apply for special consideration on disability-related grounds if you're applying to UBC grad studies. Oh, cool. And thank you, Laura, for that comment. So the next question is, you talk about the importance for educators of doing the work on our own biases. Do you have any suggestions for addressing ableism in the classroom? I'm sure that students with a visible and invisible disabilities experience a safe and supportive learning environment during group work, et cetera. So helping students to address their own biases. That's a good one. So one exercise I've done in other talks, which just as an example, I've taught about the photonically dependent folks is a way that blind people can think of folks who are sighted and just sort of thinking of all the things in the world that are built for that use case, computer monitors, light bulbs, colored clothing, and just sort of potentially from any given perspective think about what's, think of barriers or challenges or how that person might conceive things differently. Certainly you could direct towards resources about people with disabilities to sort of give them a ways to look at that angle. But I think it's really just that ability to start to take a step back and see your own lens. And it's not just disability. It's gender, it's ethnicity, it's all those things. And that's work we're all doing in various levels. So there was a suggestion in the chat, which I looked up to look at VocalEye, which is a local Vancouver organization. And I put the website into the chat. It's simply www.VocalEye.ca. And it's a nonprofit society. They do live description of arts for blind people in Canada. So they provide greater access to theater, arts and cultural events for people of all ages who are blind and partially sighted. And so it's, I haven't had to necessarily look through it carefully, but it sounds like they provide auditory descriptions of arts events. So thank you. I went to our local theater like this past year and the guy at the counter was like, oh, you know, we have, if you call us ahead of time for certain plays, we have a describer who will sit in the back and tell you what's going on. And it's just amazing, that kind of stuff. Yeah, that sounds like that's what they do. Yeah. So it's great. Thank you to whoever shared that. No hands up, so let's keep going with the Slido. Hi, this is a question from Jennifer Gagnon who said, I'm a disabled instructor. What are your thoughts about bringing your disabled identity to classroom? I disclosed to my students, most reactions are positive, but some are negative. How can being open about disabled identity enhance learning and what are the risks in doing so? Oh, that's a great question. So I face this a little differently. You know, as a psychiatrist, if I'm bringing my identity in, I'm asking myself, what is this doing in my case for the patient? So I think in the classroom, it would be what is this doing potentially for the learning experience of the students? So I think first of all, being able to answer that question, I think is helpful. What are the risks that you're putting yourself out there? You just look at Twitter, right? Someone has a good idea, and 15% of people think it's terrible, right? So it takes a lot, it takes a lot of courage. So I give you credit for that, but it does. So I think what are the risks? The risks are that you're gonna have to deal with stuff that maybe people shouldn't have to deal with or you're gonna get pushed back. And so you have to decide, is it worth it? And then it circles back to, how is this helping the learning? And are you able to ride that wave? And I think if you think it's helping the learning and you could ride the wave, then there's probably significant value in it. Because I think I've transitioned from being the student who squeaked in to medical school to training people. I actually have a fellow this year who rotated with me back in the day as a medical student. And so he's seen, hey, there's blind folks doing medicine, there's teaching, training. So I think the more people can see disability out there, that this is just how we are, this is our story. Like I think ultimately that has value, but I also know that it does, it can certainly have costs too. Thank you so much. Anyone else want to raise a hand to speak? If not, I'm gonna keep going, Jillian, with the Q and A's. We have a question, Sarah Netter, who's the co-director of the Center for Accessibility at UBC has asked, can you describe some other ways you engage in clinical rotations like the intubation example? Oh, okay. So another challenging task is interpreting x-rays. So in that case, I used an old device. It's called an octacon. The one I use is actually older than me. So what it has is a postage stamp size camera that you slide across the page and it's connected to a vibrating pin display. And so you can sort of feel, the original intent was to have people read print with it and there are people who can do that pretty well. I'm not super efficient at that. But what I used it for is I could adjust the threshold and then feel the ribs and the space, you don't want to say a chest x-ray and see if there's extra space or a mass or a broken bone. So I would use it in things like that. Most of the physical exam can be modified to be done with touch, the testing, the cranial nerves, which I commonly do. Heart lugs, no big deal. Watching gait, you could sort of put your hands on somebody and feel them move. Those sort of things, there were for very specific things. I would work with a nurse and say, could you describe what you see in the throat? And I would interpret the information, but they would help gather it. Likewise with rashes, often you can feel the rash as well. So those were sort of the kinds of things that I would do in the clinical space. So much. Wonderful. I've got someone raising their hand. Alexa, please go ahead. Hi, sorry, my voice is a little off. I think I might have to get a COVID test. Anyway, I'm a grad student working in a physical lab and I'm kind of always thinking like, wow, this is not very accessible to people who don't have sight or hearing or have mobility impairments and stuff like that. And I'm just wondering, I don't know if there's been, worked out or like solutions. Like I often think like in tissue culture, like if I was in a wheelchair and if I had to move and then I had to touch my dirty wheelchair with my sterile gloves and like then having to, you know, yeah, or like if I was visually impaired, like how I would be able to manipulate this stuff precisely to prevent contamination and just like, yeah, just like how everything is kind of not really built. I mean, like it hasn't really changed in decades, right? Like how labs are. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure where he's at right now, but Cary Sopala, I think the last I saw he was at either an Illinois university or maybe Purdue, but he had this thing called the iLab project. And it was a project, it was also at the high school and college level, but modifying lab equipment to be helpful. And I think as a start for folks with visual disabilities. So, you know, talking, you know, spectrometers and, you know, scales and things like that, which was a really, you know, a good start and approach. So I think that, yeah, there's a lot of issues in the physical lab that are challenging. You know, back in the day, I think I hooked up, was it like a serial port on our scale to a computer to see if I could, you know, read the scale. And I had a pipette, a 1000 mil pipette that you could dial in the amount or you could, you know, you could spin up just exactly halfway between top and bottom on a P20 or something. And so, you know, there are various things, but it is challenging and this is the other space where people who do it don't always know to share what they've learned. And so building these informal networks of people who are doing these things are helpful because I'm aware of, you know, other blind folks who are doing, you know, say cell biology and things like that. So, yeah, absolutely. And I think like, you know, being able to share what we know is super helpful too. Thank you so much, Alexa. That's so helpful to hear, you know, the things that I don't work in a lab. So it just wasn't crossing my mind, but that's really helpful to know. Yeah. I'm seeing in the chat a resource being shared by a participant called, it's from accessiblecampus.ca, accessiblecampus.ca. And it's called creating an accessible science laboratory environment for students with disabilities. So it's a PDF from 2014. So there's that being shared. There's also Docs with Disabilities podcast. Stories from various health professionals with disabilities docswithdisabilities.org. Oh, and they're coming quick now as another one. Coalition for Disability Access in Health Science Education. That's hsmcoalition.org. Coalition for Disability Access in Health Science Education. Fantastic resources being shared. Thank you. I've also just posted in the chat a question from a PhD student to the UBC community. So if people have responses, and I'll post them back. This question is, is there an active support group for students on campus? The student began their PhD prior to the pandemic and wasn't able to connect with other students and would like to learn about opportunities for ways to do that. So if anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to send them to me and I'll post them back into the chat for the student. And then for the next Slido question, if you wanna take one more, I know we're running close to our end of time, but let me know Christina. Yep, go ahead. As an employer supporting staff, I find it challenging to find a balance between flexibility and accountability. I found accountability to be powerful way to support staff in finding quote the highway. Do you have any thoughts to share on this? Yeah, I run a team right now and I agree. I think as an employer or a lead, I think if you build the culture of accountability central and then allow the flexing around that to achieve the goal, that's sort of how I approach it. For example, right now our university and we're still working on, do we need to work from the office when we're seeing folks virtually, things like that. And so what we say is the accountability of the core is you need to be a provider who sees patients and then we work with flexing around that to help people with their individual circumstances. So I think it's once again sort of focusing on the core and then building the flexibility in as ways to support people in meeting that core accountability, but I agree accountability is critical too. So there's also something in the chat from Sarah Knitter from the Center for Accessibility at UBC Vancouver who says regarding accessible labs, we will try to get an adjustable height desk, hire lab assistants, rent a standing wheelchair for an anatomy lab, dot, dot, dot, but yes, there is definitely a need for more physical accessibility in labs. That's from our Center for Accessibility. There's also, I'm hearing grad student support group starting up soon, getting through grad school with Grace and grit online support group Tuesdays, May 17th to July 26th, 2.30 to 3.45 p.m. So there's a link in the chat for a signup to register for the grad student support group. Actually, no, it's not there yet. Sorry, that's just to me. I will put it into the chat, my apologies. I'll just post it right now. Oh, do you have it too? Yeah. Okay, excellent. And we have a hand up by AJ. Please go ahead. Hi there, my name's AJ and I'm one of the advisors of the Center for Accessibility and I work a lot with the built environment in the last year. I was just gonna add just in case it's of interest for folks is that for the provincial building codes, they're really particular to certain types of buildings that didn't really cover labs very well, but the Rick Hansen Foundation has actually come up with guidance documents on how to make labs more accessible. They kind of did a scope of across the Canadian landscape seeing those happening with labs. And so that's been passed on to facilities, campus planning and folks for thinking about retrofitting labs or new labs. Thanks so much, AJ. That's really good to know. Couple of more things in the chat. So I did post information about the grad student support group Tuesdays starting May 17th. So there's a very long URL in the chat, which I won't read out. It is very hard to read if you're interested in registering for the grad student support group. And then from Jennifer Gagnon, there's the disabled grad students group as well as the disability affinity group. And Jennifer is the chair of the disability affinity group and would be happy to connect anyone with these groups. And she provides her email address, Jennifer with two ends, Gagnon, G-A-G-N-O-N at ubc.ca. So I think we may have time for one more and then probably should close out the session. I'm gonna go ahead, Jillian. Oh, you are muted. Thank you. Oh. Another question, hybrid learning. What are ways that the hybrid learning environments can be best leveraged for engaging equitably with students with disabilities, diverse needs and identities? For example, identifying as a person, disabilities who is also a wound of color? Yeah, that's, man, that's evolving so much. I don't, I think it's, you know, hybrid learning is challenging because, you know, we're starting to understand that, you know, Zoom and seeing yourself and everything on the screen, you know, can impact how people, you know, people's emotions and all that. And certainly I can see where, you know, certain identities and things could be, could also be impacted there. So I think, you know, we're gonna learn this hybrid learning. I think it's, you know, just taking in as much as we can, as teachers taking an equitable approach, you know, maybe even if possible, you know, seeing what works for folks. Well, you know, what do you think in giving options? I think those are, you know, choices are powerful. And I think sort of sitting those landscapes are probably the things, the places where I would start, but I would also, you know, I've got myself a set of Google alerts and how these things are evolving and, you know, staying abreast of what, once again, you know, we have such a community, well, you guys have such a community there, of folks who have ideas and knowledge. And I think just sharing what's working, I think it's so powerful, especially as things are evolving. So I've just learned that we do actually have a bit of extra time. If you're okay, Tim, to take a couple more questions, okay, I thought we were ending at 11.30, but we do have a bit of extra time. So yeah, Julian, there's been a couple of upvotes in a few of these lately, so. Hi. How can institutions move towards creating that highway that you talked about through policy in my construction ways? Yeah, that's a great question. I tend to be a tactical guy more than a strategic guy, so I don't, you know, I think just having a policy and, you know, getting the right stakeholders and in the room to sort of, to craft something that says, you know, and it might even be simpler than that than just a mission statement. What do we believe and where do we start from? So I guess I would say if you're going to craft a policy, it's you wanna make sure all the stakeholders are involved and begin crafting it collaboratively because it isn't gonna work if it's not done collaboratively. And when you do that, you wanna make sure if you can, you have the resources and, you know, whether that's time or support available to folks who are building the highway. Yeah, thanks. Just a quick follow-up on that. Very recently in British Columbia, well, there was an Accessible British Columbia Act that was passed a year or so ago, but very recently there's a new regulation that's applying it to post-secondary institutions. And one of the parts of that is to develop a disability committee. I think they're calling it our Accessibility Committee, where at least half of the folks and ideally more should be people with disabilities. So that you are involving the community if they're in whatever plans you make towards improving accessibility of the institution. And I think the other thing that does is it offloads, you know, like you're letting the people with the expertise chime in so that the educator doesn't have to be the expert in accessibility. And I think that collaboration is just like so powerful. Thanks, I see a hand up from Mike. Good afternoon. Hi. Your comment about the BC Accessibility Act, is UBC establishing such a committee? Do you know? Because I'm a person with a disability, I'm learning disabled and I have fought all my life just to get accepted in any institution. UBC is not the best place for us. If I want support, I have to go to the Accessibility Center with my documentation and I have to go begging an instructor to support me in some way. So I would really like to know is there some way of connecting with that? Is there this group going on? Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm angry. Oh, that is perfectly fine. Thank you so much for your comment. It sounds very frustrating. This regulation just came into effect was just publicized a couple of weeks ago. So as far as I know, there is no such committee yet, but I believe that post-secondary institutions will be required to have one. And I can't remember exactly by when. So that doesn't help you right now, but something will be happening in the future. So thanks for your comment. I apologize that it's been a difficult situation for you. So shall we do one more, Jillian? Certainly. Before we do, there was a question, a person who'd sent a direct message, I think to Alyssa perhaps about some employment opportunities. If you could just direct me, DM me directly, I'll connect you up with Sarah Nitter. And we can, or you can just email Sarah Nitter directly. And she's more than happy to chat. So next question that's come up is, could you speak a bit about the different ways people treat slash respond to persons with physical slash physical, visible disabilities versus mental invisible disabilities? More judgment and blame towards those with invisible disabilities as if they should just try harder to overcome or that they're just weak. Yeah, yeah, that's, it's a big, it's a big difference. You know, with physical disabilities, I, you know, people, people do do, you know, they're interesting things. They, I think they fall into that, you know, could I do that a blank bias? You know, one of the ones that always cracks me up is as a blind person when I'm walking along, a sighted person might think they're helpful by stopping and being quiet, which renders them invisible, you know? And so people just do this kind of stuff automatically for folks with physical disabilities. With the more invisible disabilities, I think it's just, it's harder for people to wrap their head around. And I think it's so commingled with their own personal experience. You know, folks can, for example, close our eyes and have some transient idea of what it's like not to see, but it doesn't, you know, give you the sense of what it's like for that to be chronic, for example. But I think it's, you know, it's really hard to, to understand a bipolar disorder or, you know, learning, learning disability in that internal same way. So I do think you're right. I think there's, you know, the, well, just, you know, buckle down, push through with the, the more invisible disabilities. And that's, it's a real challenge. And I, like I say, I think it, I don't necessarily think it's intentional, but I think it taps into our own biases and where we've come from and what we've struggled with or people in our lives have struggled with. And so I agree. People do approach it differently and when people are comfortable to make the, you know, the invisible visible by sharing, you know, if they can handle that, I think that also, that helps us, helps us all. So that's kind of my thoughts. Wow, thank you so much. There's, there's been some things happening in the chat, including someone thankfully pointing me to a link to the accessible BC legislation, which I've just posted into the chat, as well as there's a new FAQ frequently asked questions related to accessible BC. And this, this particular regulation for organizations, including post-secondary institutions to create disability committees and plans. So I've just added that link. So that's the link to the FAQ to talk about that. So I've also got a question, one last question from direct message. Someone says they, their career ended prematurely and could not get back into their job. How would you approach it if you were in a similar position? Oh, that's a great question. Who's also a disabled person? Yeah, I think it really, it really comes down to, you know, what, what do you want to do? What resources, where's your, you know, where's your heart, where's your purpose? And, and really, you know, what's, you know, what is available resource wise? And, you know, can you, can you do something career adjacent? Can you, you know, is it, there's a lot to unpack there. But I think it, you know, it, it comes down to those sort of core, core questions. Okay, I see Bean is getting a hand in quickly right here at the end. So if you've got a quick thought, Bean, please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Christina. I just had a comment. I attended a session yesterday where students were sharing their feelings and their experiences as disabled students at UBC. And one student really stuck with me that they talked about how they had suffered, they suffer from PTSD and anxiety. And their instructor was just met with them for an hour just to talk. And that one hour of being able to talk with the instructor was, was just life changing for them. And they really felt that that made a huge difference. It, you know, it took time on the instructor's part. And especially right now with COVID, all the instructors are overwhelmed. But this made a huge difference to them and they've had more, much more successes because of that one conversation. So I just wanted to share that with other people to realize that, that taking an hour just to talk and it doesn't even have to be about the disability or the instance just to get to know their instructor really can make an incredible change in their whole career at UBC. Great, thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You know, we can over, you know, policy and systematize things, but you're right, that human one-to-one contact, like, you know, we're made to connect. Like, you know, that's how we, how we work. So that's really awesome and powerful. And, you know, we shouldn't shy away from just being validating kind people, you know. And so I think that's great. Well, thank you so much to everybody for your thoughts, your comments, the resources you've shared, your questions. Thank you to Tim for patiently answering questions and having a conversation. Was there anything else you wanted to end with, Tim? No, I just thank you all for taking the time to participate in this and the work that, you know, there is and supporting each other. And yeah, no, I just thank you so much for this opportunity. Enjoy your week. Thank you so much for joining us. So just a little bit more housekeeping and an announcement or two. So a follow-up email will be sent to all of you at the end of the week, which will include a feedback survey, as well as a link to the Celebrate Learning Week wiki, which is where we're posting resources, such as slides, videos, and other kinds of resources for the sessions. So we've got a couple of other, oh, well, we've got many other events coming up in Celebrate Learning Week. We're just in day two. So there are many more things happening throughout the week. So tomorrow, May 11th, and these are all being put into the chat. There's an equity and inclusion scholars program panel, Interventions Towards Inclusive Teaching, that's tomorrow at 10.30. We have a faculty and staff panel, Teaching and Learning Accessible Practices and Support, that's tomorrow at 1.30. And a leadership panel with multiple leaders at the institution, Promoting Access and Inclusion for Learners of All Backgrounds at UBC, that's May 12th, Thursday, from 10 to 11.30. And if you want to see all of the Celebrate Learning Week events, please go to celebratelearning.ubc.ca, and you can click on the events portion of the site. So thank you very much. Thank you again to Tim. Thank you for your comments and your thoughts. Thank you to our live captioner and our ASL interpreters. Thank you to our moderators and to our event staff who made this run very smoothly. So I hope you have an excellent rest of your morning until it becomes afternoon very soon. Thanks so much, everyone. Have a good rest of your week.