 Hi, I'm Michelle cook and I'll be just voicing from here on out. I use she her pronouns and as a visual description, I'm a white woman with brown and gray hair shoulder length. I'm wearing a black shirt with patterns on it and a black sweater sitting in my blurred home office. And I'm a professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts. And so I really want to thank the Academy for the putting together this important series of talks, and also for giving space for this this complicated issue of field accessibility. And I'll emphasize as other speakers have in the series that my point of view is mine alone based on my perspective. And I'm very excited that this recorded talk will be adjacent to the talk of Dr. Marshall has done incredible work on making field trip successful. This image that you're seeing here on the left is an artificial intelligence art created using the words of this series the leading practices for improving accessibility and inclusion and field and laboratory science. I thought it was an interesting interpretation of those words. Also, I'll point out, I'm using real time auto caption, which is built into PowerPoint. You can also access the transcriptionist produced captions. If you click the button at the bottom of the screen. I'm including the real time captions, just to show that it's really easy with a quick of a button, you can get real time auto captions for any presentation. So I'll also point out that they are prone to error and more greater error than a human transcriptionist. So if someone ever request caption, you should always honor that by hiring a transcriptionist. And of course, if someone request interpreters, you should hire an interpreter, but for all other presentations why not add real time captions to every presentation. So there's my plug for that. So I wanted to start with why what perspective I have to share. I mentioned that I just one person. And so I wanted to tell you some of what I've done in the past that has led to my current perspective on accessible field trip field work, especially in geosciences. So as an undergrad, I was a teaching assistant who was to work with a blind student who had enrolled in introductory geology class. So I was a senior at the time, and she was in the class, and it was clear that the lab and field trip materials were not going to be accessible to her. So the professors hired me to help her out. I guess he was thinking, put the deaf one with the blind one. I don't know, not sure what his reasoning was there. But in the course of that I didn't have had no structure I had no resources we just kind of work through things together. I learned a lot. I mean, we tried things that didn't work. We change we pivoted. I learned a lot from her about what works. And I recognize now in retrospect, that that was actually a really great experience and opportunity for me because I wasn't the instructor. I didn't really have preconceived notion on what the way that she should learn things. And so it became more of a partnership of working together to learn the context. At the time it was a little overwhelming but I see it now as a great opportunity. Then, when I was in grad school, I was involved in a project to adjust introductory geology field trip to be accessible with folks with mobility impairments. So I was involved with the disabled student group on campus and became friends with folks there's an image here on the left is black and white picture, and it shows four people to are sitting on the ground next to a bin full of rocks. There's one person sitting in a wheelchair, and then there's one person standing leaning over and that's the younger version of myself who standing and leaning over and picking up a rock. And one of my friends who's sitting in the wheelchair in this picture told me at the time, you were talking about what I was studying as a PhD student. And she said you know geology sounds really interesting, but I would never take a class because it's inaccessible to me. And I was like, well, heck, we need to change that. Like, this is ridiculous that you can't take the on the field trip. So, with her guidance and help. And also the guidance and help of two grad students, one of whom is sitting in this picture he's wearing the plaid shirt and sitting next to the bin of rocks. As a grad student, we redesigned all of the introductory field trips to be accessible. And it was successful in that my friend sitting in the wheelchair here, she ended up double majoring in earth science so in that way it was incredibly successful. It was so unsuccessful in some key ways in that once I graduated, and the other grad students graduated, they went right back to the old field trips and abandoned our plans and our new curriculum. But another benefit. So coming back to successes. What another thing I learned through this was how to advocate for change how to advocate for making things accessible because we got a lot of pushback in this project and and seeing how it wasn't sustainable also taught me a lot about access and and these efforts. And I do have a note here under the picture that this was published on paper I think this is the first paper about accessible geology field trips. In geosciences. So, another sort of opportunity I had was once I landed here at UMass and was pre tenure focused on doing my research and building my research record. So all that NSF had this proposal this proposal opportunity called a career proposal which blends both your research and some form of outreach. And while, and it was fantastic timing for me because while I was sort of going with my research, having this opportunity. It allowed me to do some outreach which was to lead three field trips for teachers and students at seven high schools for the deaf around the country they were from all over. And we did field trips in Utah, New England in California. And on the left is a photograph from Arches National Park, and there's two people on the foreground one is younger version of me no gray in my hair there. Students wearing a baseball cap. We have our field notebooks in front of us and colored pencils in my left hand students also holding his pencil, and I'm signing left. I don't remember what I was saying, but I was probably giving the students some feedback on his sketch of the faults that we were catching outside the park. So, that was a really great experience to to work with those students and especially the teachers from those high schools for the deaf, most of whom who were not trained in geosciences so with a great opportunity. And then of course I continue to teach field courses and participate on field trips. I provide this just as a contact where am I coming from. So that's kind of where I am developed. So, we know about universal design and learning, which is a teaching approach that works to accommodate the needs and abilities of all learners and eliminates unnecessary hurdles in the learning process. So, the question here is, what is universal design in field work then a lot of our efforts to make field trips accessible, tend to fit more on the retrofit approach side, rather than the universal design side we aren't necessarily, pre pandemic, especially, we weren't necessarily designing field trips to be accessible and designing that learning that would happen in field trips to be accessible, or the research to be in on field work to be accessible. We were more just retrofitting to try to squeeze people in as best we could. And so, I'm really interested in the discussion we're going to have on how we can universal design for field work. And so, in thinking about this, I assembled five obstacles that I saw for accessible field experiences. Research related or teaching related. And I'm sure there's more, but these are the five that came up with and this talk will kind of work on weakening each of these obstacles. And the first one is we've always done things this way. This was something I saw in redesigning field trips in grad school. There's an outcrop that's perceived as the best outcrop, you have to get your hands on this. There's no way we're going to change our field trip so that that outcrop is not involved that's very strong view in a lot of people's ways or we've always camped. We're going to camp because everybody likes it. We've always camped intense. And that's what we're going to do. The second one is glorification of challenging field conditions. Some geologists like to talk about the time they were in some remote place taking the helicopter, getting dropped off having to climb 4,000 feet to get to the outcrop. This sort of that's part of the culture of field based sciences, which leads to the third one of ableism and the discrimination and harassment of disabled folks, but this becomes amplified in the field where you also got a culture of sort of glorifying ability. The fourth is I put this in quotes as a misconception. I don't have any disabled folks in my group. So I don't need to change anything. I would say you don't think you have any disabled folks in your group, but you probably do. And then the last one is resistance to disclosure which is related to the second one. Why are we not disclosing of course lots of reasons not to disclose but what can we do to make it safer to disclose disability when being involved in field work. So, these are probably not new to you what my this I'm going to sort of go through and, and by the end of this, this short talk, have given tools for how we can approaches for how we can, we can these obstacles. So, we've always done things this way. This one is, there's a lot of great, great ways we can sort of resist this obstacle. This image I'm showing is from a recent paper by Barry that points out how the instead of a leaky pipeline we should be thinking of it as a hostile obstacle course. The image shows a white male presenting person in the business attire on the left, and he's ascending a set of steps, and has to navigate around some safety cones and there are some arrows showing the way to go in his path up the flight of steps. And on the right is a feminine presenting black presenting person in professional attire, ascending ostensibly the same set of steps. At times times the steps have spikes and barbed wire and traps and spears and fire, and some of the steps are damaged, and images conveying this idea of, while it is the same flight of steps. It's a different environment that one is climbing them. And of course, in the context of our conversation, we can be thinking about people at the intersection of disability and other minoritized group, while the person on the right has a very difficult path ahead of her. If she were also mobility impaired and used mobility aids, this path the path would be impossible. So we've always done things this way. We probably shouldn't. You all probably appreciate. The other reason is something that other keynotes have brought up is the underrepresentation of disabilities in STEM, and I'm showing it the same data presented by another keynote. I'm showing it now graphically with circles, representing sort of population and the yellow or yellowish orange circles represent the folks within the population with disabilities at the undergrad level about 11 to 13% of undergrads have disabilities at graduate student level seven to eight. And then when it comes to faculty and staff and stem is down to 4% compared to the 20% of us working age adults so we see it's because we've done things this way. It's no surprise then that we see sharp underrepresentation of people and disabilities within STEM, especially. And I'm also showing in here the sort of laws that support our accommodations so just pointing out as has been before that undergrad benefit from both ADA but more importantly section 504 of the Education Reform Act. To get their accommodations grad students can also use section 504 while faculty and staff and stem don't have that legal support we and ADA accommodations at that level are not consistent between institutions and are less support. Okay, glorification of challenging field condition. So I grabbed these two pictures from the website of one of my alma mater so if you see my CV you can go find which school and and this and it just shows how the department is promoting itself. In these photos and the picture on the left is a picture of a tent on a ridge and in the distance are rugged mountains in the distance. And there's not much vegetation around. And the photo on the left is a group of people walking through a sort of narrow cleft in the rocks with the sea in the distance and it looks like a pretty steep slope down to the sea. What the department intends when they use these as their promotional images is for folks with perspective students to look at the go wow I want to go there I want to be part of that group. But the message that they might be getting is you know when people see this tent they might be thinking, or I might be thinking if I go there how am I going to recharge my assistive listening devices. If I use medication, I might be thinking, where how am I going to keep my medications refrigerated on this trip, or there's no vegetation I might also be thinking how am I going to use restroom on this trip, or I might be thinking how am I even going to get to the to that cleft in the rocks. So, these are the questions that are asked by the people who haven't typically been part of the community. So the community tend to self perpetuate the idea of these images as drawing the people like them to the field, without realizing how mothering it is to the people who haven't been part of the field. And so this, I have another image here. It's an old black and white image with people in sort of clothing from probably 100 years ago or so of a US geologic survey field topographic mapping crew. And my point here is the exclusive nature of field work is perpetuated by leaders who don't recognize their blind spots. Right. If field work is only field leaders are thinking about the struggles they personally have had in the past with field trips, then they're thinking about the folks who need to refrigerate their medications or charge in their services of lessening devices, and other accommodation needs. The next bit is ableism, and I find this definition of academic ableism, particularly helpful on that I haven't showing an image of the front cover of Jay Timothy don't mind just book by that name academic ableism this book. He has made it available for download for free, and it's very readable so highly recommend reading this if you haven't. And here's one of my favorite quotes from the book. The ethics of higher education still encourages teachers and students alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual or physical weakness. While ableism is part of our culture. It's even amplified within higher education because our metrics of success are so based on on norm on able bodied metrics of success. And so this, this definition I think really helped me see just how academia is framed in a way that is harmful to disabled folks. And so this is our charge right how do we, how do we weaken this and how do we make people more aware of the academic ableism all around us. And this is going to come back in another way because ableism also has a manifestation in terms of internalized ableism like when we doubt ourselves when we don't speak up when I don't disclose my disability that's coming from my own resistance to be affiliated with the stigma of disability. I think a little bit of time here to talk about where that stigma comes from because I find that one of the ways to think about reducing that stigma is to put names and see where it's coming from so I can push it further away from me. So the abled gaze Western literature uses physical disability as outward expressions of character flaws. Here's an image captain hook from the Peter Pan movie. And so that's just one example the bad guy. It doesn't have a hand and instead has a hook. And this is both an outward reflection of his character flaws we see this all the time. It's everywhere in our culture. This othering of disability. We also have that Judeo Christian religious text teach that affliction comes from sin or deviation from righteous behavior. And disabled folks like me counter that all the time what's the first question we get if we disclose our disability. What happened to you. How did that happen. And people want to know what do we do wrong who who made the sin where's the deviation from righteousness and maybe not sin and righteousness, but they want to know what happened. Sometimes stuff happens, and there's no reason for it. And people don't recognize that question as a micro aggression. It's really coming from this idea that something somebody must have done something in order for a disability, someone to have a disability. So, both of these promote the stigma of disability. Both of these aspects are around us all the time in the US. So we're not going to change all this but what we can do is just recognize it when it comes up when someone asks us what happened to you. We can say, There you go, you're trying to figure out what what original sin might have cost this kind of helps keep that stigma at a distance. Here's a difficult one this is the charity model of disability and I'm showing a video clip that's repeating. It's when Joe Biden was on the presidential campaign trail, and he encountered a male presenting disabled person who uses a wheelchair. The person is wearing a t shirt that says without communication there is no freedom. And Joe Biden is leaning over and stroking his neck and saying your disability does not define who you are. This is very difficult. Quick to watch. I believe the Joe Biden campaign got a lot of criticism from the disabled community from this and they recognize that it was not a great move. I bring this as an example to show stories of able folks helping the disabled don't center disabled voices right. This man's t shirt has a very important message, but this video clip is not conveying that message the hero of this video clip is is the camera the guy on the campaign trail who's being charitable and benevolent and to the disabled person rather than the important message of the disabled person. All right we're going to stop watching that very difficult clip. So this framing shows up in education all the time, because we have this framing of able bodies instructors accommodating disabled students. And this fuels the charity and benevolence model. When you talk about disabilities in the classroom everybody immediately pictures disabled student able body instructor. If 20% of the working age adults have disabilities, chances are one out of five classrooms, the instructor has a disability. If you're going into the field trip. You've also got occurrences of disability. So, I want to put this there to say, you know we need to be careful that we don't fall into the trap of thinking about disabilities only on the students and the people were providing a service to because that then contributes more to this benevolence model. And also it roads this last point that disabled folks are the experts. If we go into a field trip thinking. Oh, there's a person with a disability and my trip. I need to provide accommodations and service to them and we fall prey to putting on that benevolence role on ourselves of being a good charitable person. We have now not centered the expertise that they bring to this conversation. They're the experts at what they can and can't do. They're the experts on what can work and what might not. And we need to really let go of trying to be the do good or in this in this approach and really see it more as a team teamwork between not just the field trip leader and the disabled person but even the whole field crew. So all of this stigmatization leads to why people don't disclose disability. So reason not to disclose your disability if you have that option I should also point out some people don't have this option with my own disability. People used to pick up on it more, but I find, as I've gotten older, I, they generally don't hear my, my accent in my speech. I don't know. Sometimes they do. So generally, I choose to disclose. But the reason not to disclose are what I pointed out this stigmatism, the internal life ableism not wanting to be associated with that other ring that happens in our society for people with disabilities facing discrimination facing harassment. And so it's not surprising that studies have shown that only 39% of employees with disabilities have disclosed these to their manager. And this would include invisible and invisible and invisible disabilities. So this is from the workplace but there's no reason to think that these numbers would be any different on any field trips that we're leaving. The benefits of disclosing is, well, firstly, you can get access to accommodations. That's the first thing. And then also a secondary one is possible sense of belonging within the community. So there's a lot of empowerment that can be gained from sort of joining with people, other people in the disabled community and recognizing our common lived experiences. So disclosing, even before you get to the point of deciding whether to disclose or not, there's a huge challenge of diagnosis. You can't get accommodation, unless you have diagnosis. And the thing is, having a diagnosis is privileged. Within the US, whites with learning disabilities are far more likely to have a diagnosis than blacks with learning disabilities. Disabilities take time, they take money, and they take advocacy. It can take years sometimes to get a diagnosis. Learning disability, it can take hundreds of dollars for the test. And then once you have a diagnosis, access to resources is far from equitable. Until I got my current job at the University of Massachusetts, hearing aids were never covered by insurance. This is the first time. And they're not 100% covered either. But I got this job. I couldn't believe it. What? You pay part of hearing aid cost? Do I need my hearing aids for my job? Absolutely. Can I do my job without them? No, not at all. But yet it was never covered by insurance. In fact, it's why I was diagnosed in kindergarten. When a kindergarten teacher noticed that when she spoke, I stopped playing and watched her. And I'm really thankful that she was well trained to recognize that as a sign that I was speech reading her. And so she recommended I get tested, but my parents couldn't afford hearing aids at that time. So I went, I had to go till a few years later till I got my first hearing aids, which my audiologist now are shocked that that would happen. I like to think it's better now and that there's financial resources. And mine is just one story, but I just want to say, like, you can't assume that everyone has access to a diagnosis if they need it. You can't assume that they have access to resources, even with that diagnosis. Okay, so another point is spoon theory. And sometimes also called disability tax, sometimes also called deaf tax. And it's the idea that disabled, mad and chronically ill folks spend time and energy navigating their day. The analogy of you have only so many spoons that you start out within a day. Each time you need to spend extra energy navigating your world, you're taking a spoon out. And this is all just, you know, waking up, getting where you need to be getting dressed, getting eating, managing conversation. And this is before you add the significant challenges of fieldwork to the mix. And so the example I have here is the listening fatigue for myself. I noticed a few years back that some days after work, I was just wiped out of really useless in the evening. That's why I started tracking. How many meetings that I have that day. And so I started tracking how many meetings with hearing people listening meetings I had versus how fatigued I was. And through this process. I learned that for myself, I have about three hours of listening each day that I can do. And if I do more than that, I run out of spoons. And so this means that I can need to think about how I manage my day. Now, if I'm in the field, working with a field crew all day, that's more than three hours right there. So by the afternoon, done. But the field trip keeps going into the evening. So what happens is, is just running on fumes and becoming really run down and exhausted is a typical experience for me. This is not unlike what other folks will need to do, who need to manage their own health, and their own accommodations. We're all kind of putting in that extra labor on top of getting to the outcrop and participating and the energy that our able-bodied able-bodied minds folks are participating in the field trip. So this is an interesting thought then. So how do we build into field work, the breaks and the downtime and the recharge that people will need, and that able-bodied folks would benefit from as well. And the accommodation process, when a student has an accommodation in a classroom at the university, they can work with the Disabled Student Services, and often there's a sort of set of accommodations that can be offered for me, it would be things like captioning and maybe using a microphone and things like that. When you go into field work, the situations are really unusual, and the plug-and-play accommodations that work in the classroom don't necessarily work in the field. The disabled person, unless they have experience with field work, they might not even be aware of what is expected of that. So they can't even articulate, they can't always articulate how their needs will be best met. And then there's no transparent process for deciding on and adjusting the accommodation. Once you're out there in the field, the lead of the field crew is the boss, and they're the ones who decide if something comes up, what is reasonable accommodations or not. And so this negotiation in the field about accommodations can be pretty tricky for folks to navigate. And then the last point is that access is situational. So I brought up the example before about how folks might have more spoons in the morning than they do in the evening. And another example, I was on one field trip, and I was using my assistive listening device, so the speaker wears a transmitter, a microphone transmitter, and then I have the receiver, and it allowed me to get the sound to my hearing aids so I'm not hearing the wind and the conversation near me, I can hear the speaker. So this particular field trip was really hot and humid. It was, it was kind of gross out the rocks were lovely. The speaker was sweating profusely. It was kind of gross. He sweated so much that his sweat got into the microphone that he was wearing the transmitter and shorted it out. So even though I had done all due diligence and charged everything and everything was set to go. I hadn't anticipated that he would sweat so much that the transmitter would die in the middle of the field trip. Yeah. And no insurance doesn't cover that repair. So access is situational, you can say that just because someone managed perfectly fine yesterday, they may not manage perfectly fine the next day. And we need to think about the changes that can arise. Okay, so things that you can assume. The field crew will include folks with disability including chronic illness and mental illness. And your field work will be accessible to at least some of the time for some of the participants. And this is what I meant by situational like someone might be have fine access one day but not another day. And another thing to assume is that the first solution you try won't work. And I think that's one of the things that I think is the most important is that the field crew will be able to access all of my work in the field, especially in the field where conditions, conditions can change, but also it's a lot. There's a lot to process on top of the work. There's personal dynamics and a lot of things come into play. There's a lot to process on top of the work. And there's a lot to process on top of the work. So as a field crew supervisor, you might do your best to sort of center the disabled person's voices and their needs and their expertise and the decision making. But maybe you're in a large enough field group that people are often pairs. And if their field partner has strong able attitudes, that's going to get in the way of their access. People disparaging the fitness of their field partners in the classes that I teach. And we as instructors in that scenario need to do our best to make it clear that it's a responsible responsibility of everyone in the group to ensure that each person has access and to sort of dispel that bullying that can happen within a field partnership. Another example I have of the ableist attitudes that I wasn't prepared for was on one of the field trips with the school for the deaf. I combined my hearing college classroom with the deaf high school students and we visited we were to get together on the field trip. And for some of the field stops for for many of them actually I would teach in ASL, rather than speaking as I had with my hearing class for the rest of the term. So it was a different mode than they were used to. And I didn't voice to keep the language clear I would only presenting in one language in ASL, and the interpreter was voicing with me. And my hearing students really didn't like not having direct access to what I was saying, and having to go through the interpreter, and they balked really hard about this. What made it even more awkward is when I would ask questions of the group and sort of you know see where people were going, the deaf high school students, they weren't phenomenal they had this they were hitting all the marks they were getting all the concepts they were putting pieces together, and my hearing students were lost. Keep in mind, these are hearing college students who've already taken three years of geology, compared to high school students who are just learning it right then. So, so they were so embarrassed by that too. And, you know, in retrospect, I see now that they just weren't prepared I didn't prepare my hearing students well enough to be in that position where their language wasn't centered in the teaching. So, but it was also their attitudes were unexpected to me. So I think we all learned something from that experiment. Just a few more points here. I mentioned before that retrofit versus universal design that retrofit is kind of goes against universal design in that with retrofit we're saying oh there's someone who needs me to do something different. Okay. Oh, Jerry rig this solution versus really thinking about how to design a field trip that is by it's the way it's designed has built in flexibility to accommodate the situations that come up being ready to pivot to for other solutions. And so this idea that what accommodations are traditionally provided through the lens of the medical or functional model so with a retrofit you're looking at what's your diagnosis what can you do what can't you do and you're looking at that functional model of disability. So, as if you move more towards universal design and centering disabled voices, you can move more to a cultural and social model where it's not that the person needs fixing, but that the field trip and the way it's built needs to be adjusted to be more accessible. Yeah. And then this last point I wanted to bring about is what I call cripping the lab and and field and classroom to how the medical shift happens and how we learn and research when the classroom lab and field trip are led by people with disabilities and center experiences body minds and movement that are outside of the norm. In the background I'm showing a normal distribution curve. I'll show a sharing example of this. So, on one of the field trips that I led with the deaf students, we were with the high school student, we were measuring the orientation of a particular plane of the rock so the rock surface will be here and we take out a compass. And with the compass we take a series of measurements that then tell us the orientation of that surface is it straight up and down, is it dipping off at an angle, is it pointed to the north is a point to the south so there's measurements we can take to basically define that plane in space. And I teach this to my hearing students college students as well. When I teach it in spoken English to my college students, it takes them a couple hours really to master this technique, we have to explain it, we have to practice it will work on it I coach them. I had an interesting experience where teaching the deaf students in ASL the same technique, I was able to harness with ASL the spatial grammar that's built into ASL I was able to say okay that way north we're going to measure angle clockwise from north and I could with my hand and I could show how compass would then take that measurement and I could talk about measurements from horizontal and demonstrate it in ASL. And they picked it up so quickly. They were taking measurements within a half an hour, actually within 20 minutes they were taking measurements, and then I did a little coaching and by half an hour they were taking reliable measurements. I'm not going to say that those students were exceptional they're all great students there's no difference in in in the way they think the difference was the way it was taught. Right, because I was teaching in a graphic as a spatial based language, and they were receiving it in with that context, they could learn it faster and so are there way of them that I could go to my hearing students and start using. I get obviously they don't know ASL I'm not going to teach them ASL, but can I use gestures, can I get them using gestures as a way to facilitate their learning of the measurement techniques. This is something I'm definitely trying in my own teaching, and I use it as an example of this shift right, why teach it the way it's always been taught if we start to look at other ways to teach. We end up teaching it better. If we look at other ways to field work, we're going to end up with better field work kind of. And the key to that, I think a key to that is to center the experiences of disabled people in the field in the lab in the classroom. I'm going to come back to this slide from the beginning that talked about obstacles to accessible field experiences. I've tried to provide in this talk some way to kind of erode the we've always done things this way, you know, the glorification of challenging field conditions ableism. I don't have any disabled folks in my group so I don't need to change anything. And the resistance of folks to disclose or disability. In this talk, I've tried to provide some approaches and strategies for eroding these obstacles and I look forward to the panel discussion where we can talk about this some more. Thank you.