The Ontario Public Research Interest Group (OPIRG) Carleton and the Carleton Disability Awareness Centre are developing “Take Note,” a campaign aimed at addressing improvements needed in the Paul Menton Centre’s (PMC) note-taking operations.
Oliver Debney, a third-year social work placement student, is one of the students responsible for spearheading the campaign.
“I have always had a passion for breaking down systemic barriers,” they said in an email. “Part of the reason I wanted to come to Carleton was because of the university’s commitment to being barrier-free to all students.”
“During my time at Carleton, I had heard some folks complaining about the nature of acquiring accommodations and how sometimes they feel as though the services offered are too general to work for them in the way they need,” they added.
Debney said the way that current academic accomodation services are structured presents students is “an exhaustive process” that presents students with “barrier after barrier.”
Brad Evoy, OPIRG Carleton’s volunteer, outreach and programming coordinator, said in an email that the campaign’s “end goal is to radically alter the ways in which academia functions.”
He added that the campaign “seeks to break down institutionally reinforced barriers that hinder access to tools that have been proven to increase likelihood of academic success for all students.”
Evoy said the idea for the campaign came about after a third-year student who met all PMC requirements to receive notetaking accommodations received an email from the notetaking team that said “there is no guarantee that a volunteer notetaker will be found.”
The email suggested that the student approach students in the course and let them know their disability status in an attempt to obtain a consistent notetaker.
“Since we’ve even started talking about this campaign though, other students have mentioned similar, common experiences, and we expect more to come in our initial survey,” he added.
Evoy said the campaign is still in its planning phase.
“We’re currently drafting a survey for students to have a chance to let us know if they, too, have been facing similar roadblocks to receiving appropriate notes,” he said. “We want to make sure the notes students are receiving are not simply copies of the PowerPoint presentations uploaded by their professors.”
Erik Humphrey, a second-year computer science student, said he faced similar problems with the note-taking services offered by the PMC after taking three weeks off due to undergoing a surgery.
“To access notes for your courses, PMC requires that you submit lengthy medical documentation for a chronic disability,” he said in an email. “I’m not the type that likes emailing every student when I’m missing course materials, so I’ve tried asking the professors directly.”
“I don’t think people without disabilities would abuse these services and stop going to class the way they use them to defer tests and get extra time to write them. Nothing beats one’s own notes,” Humphrey added.
“There are also a lot of very minor chronic disabilities—judging a disability by whether it’s acute or chronic (as they currently do) is just as unfair as subjectively quantifying the severity of a disease,” he said. “If one has medical documentation for an illness, is that not enough?”
Evoy said the group plans on making sure to work with current accessibility services available to ensure improvements.
“We really want to make sure we are working with the services, like the PMC, that are available to students to be more useful during the short term while we push for the long-term plan of making the classroom an equitable and accessible space,” Evoy said.
Photo by Graham Swaney
