Spring 2024
Congratulations to our Spring 2024 award recipients!
- Coral Wayland
“I would like to nominate Coral Wayland for the Dubois Award for Accessibility Improvement. Coral brought together a task force of campus partners and community stakeholders to develop a transition program for students with ADHD. Her passion and vision have been the catalyst for change. She provided the time and resources necessary for experts to create Students Honoring Individual Experiences and Learning Differences (SHIELD) which launched in Fall 2023. Thanks to her dedication and support, our first cohort of SHIELD students saw incredible academic outcomes from the Fall 2023 semester. Simultaneously, she has created a new task force to develop an application for a TRIO grant to institutionalize and expand support for students with disabilities. Without her leadership, neither of the initiatives would be underway.”
“Coral was instrumental in conceiving, creating, and leading a new initiative, Shield (a support program for neurodiverse students, specifically, students with ADHD or ADHD-like experiences). The Shield program started Fall 23 and Coral and others with similar interests worked to stand the program up initially. To further this work Coral proposed submitting TRIO grants for further funding and she is currently overseeing the process of getting the grants approved Fall 2025. Coral’s vision made Shield possible and it is this vision that will continue to guide our work with neurodiverse students across campus.”
“In fall of 2023, the Office of Undergraduate Education welcomed the first cohort of new-to-Charlotte students into the SHIELD program. SHIELD was Dr. Wayland’s idea–a set of interventions to help students with ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms to transition to the university environment. Beginning in fall 2022, she convened a planning group to look at the best ways we could address the challenges these students face in their first semester at Charlotte. We came up with the model of a 1-credit mini-fall FIT course, plus a 2-credit fall semester course, both of which use an executive function coaching model. SHIELD seems to have yielded good results for its participants, as demonstrated by higher GPAs, and earned fall semester credits, in comparison to a control group.”
- Jessica Kim
“Jessica Kim serves as an Industry Specialist and key leader of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging (DEIB) initiatives at the University Career Center and handles all DEIB communications for the office (campus, students, alumni, community, etc.). Over the past year, Jessica has increased awareness of DEIB among UNC Charlotte students, alumni, staff, faculty, and employers in a variety of ways including:
- Managing the annual Inclusivity Mixer event in fall semester, which hosts over 40 employers and 200+ students. The event welcomes all applicants and employers and hopes to encourage inclusivity and diversity no matter the ethnicity, citizenship, national origin, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability, socio-economic status, special abilities, political and social philosophy, and religion.
- Leading the creation and implementation of the Niner Diversity Panel, which is an annual event in spring semester. Students are in the spotlight as panelists and the employers are the audience! Students will give their opinions and ideas on recruitment, engagement on campus, and much more.
- Collaborating with the campus community and employers to put on events like the “Transfer Student Alumni Panel, ”Panel for International Students,” and “Asian American Pacific Islander Panel & Networking Event.”
Additionally, Jessica has served on the Green Dot team for a few years, which supports violence prevention on campus, “to mobilize students, faculty, and staff to recognize, react, and intervene during instances of interpersonal violence including sexual assault, dating/domestic violence, and stalking.” She also supervises and partners with the graduate assistant at the Career Center, who specializes in Neurodiversity in the workplace, and between them, they have led many initiatives over the past year that focus on support for these students. Ultimately, Jessica is an amazing, intentional, and dynamic leader of DEIB initiatives at UNC Charlotte, and I would like for you to consider her for the Dubois Award for Accessibility Improvement!”
- Josh Lancaster
“Josh has been part of the Drupal to WordPress migration for our Central Web Hosting Service within OneIT. This migration spans ~500 websites from across campus… including the Main University website.
During all of this work effort, Josh has also taken it upon himself to ensure our new WordPress Service is as Accessible as possible… while keeping the user experience focused on what the SiteManager can actually change. Often Accessibility scans are complicated and very technical, typically scanning an entire site offering a complicated report. Josh built a user interface within the actual Web Service to alert Content editors of any violation in-line while they are submitting content. It guides them on what the violation is and provides them with solutions to resolve the issue to ensure the content meets our standards. It also includes Brand compliance and other lexicon vernacular to ensure content is meeting our brand standards as well. This is a large work effort which Josh improves with each revision.
This is in addition to his operational support, site migrations, and general support for content creators.
He is also part of the campus Web Redesign project which will involve new themes, visual elements, and Information architecture changes to make the websites more efficient and streamlined.”
“Josh Lancaster from OneIT Web Services is a member of the A11y Advocates, a digital accessibility working group facilitated by myself and Katie Montie, Senior Associate Director/Accessibility Consultant with the Office of Disability Services. Since Josh joined, he has shared a wealth of knowledge on digital accessibility and clearly has a passion for making significant contributions to the university through is role with OneIT. Josh’s insight on the importance of considering accessibility when designing content for students is much needed in our digital accessibility working group and appreciated. We look forward to seeing Josh’s work with the Web Redesign project and having him as a valuable member of the group!”
- Debarati Dutta
“Debarati Dutta is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies (WRDS). Beyond her teaching, she is a decolonial writing educator, writing consultant, and community organizer. In her 16 years at Charlotte, Dutta’s name has become synonymous with inclusive excellence and a culture of accessibility. Her work in numerous projects across campus represents her commitment to acknowledging the varying ways disability shapes movement and possibility in our university, but also how each of us might adapt to meet the expectation of accessibility and engagement among faculty, staff, and students. For this reason, we, Wilfredo Flores and Kefaya Diab, are nominating Dutta for the The Dubois Award for Accessibility Improvement based on her exceptionally accessible courses, which foreground ease-of-use, student engagement beyond class time, and honoring students’ multiple ways of learning.
Debarati’s teaching is informed by disability theory (namely, cripistemology); feminist historiography; and antiracist, decolonial, and Indigenous methods of inquiry; but also through her life experiences including communicating in/across Bangla, Hindi, and English/es; travel & migration; chronic illness; invisible disability; and navigating oppressive structures. These aspects of her life appear in her course materials in the multiple ways she foregrounds accessibility through Universal Design, linguistic justice, and inclusive assessment practices so that her students can fully engage with the course even when they cannot show up to class. Moreover, her teacherly ethos is to be commended, as many of Dutta’s students come to her for guidance navigating their disabilities and inaccessibility as it appears across campus and their other courses.
Reviewing Dutta’s materials for her courses this semester, it is clear she has incorporated close attention to social justice in her teaching documents, using elements of Universal Design and accessible formatting to lead students through the semester (a truly inspiring and replicable move that we and other colleagues in the department have and plan to adopt). Indeed, across her student feedback, Dutta’s extremely navigable and accessible course materials (both documents and LMS set-up in Canvas) are lauded, with students frequently highlighting accessibility as one of the main contributors to their success.
Indeed, one of Dutta’s students last semester testified to Dutta’s accessible classes, highlighting her materials and presence: “The class plans were always published for my viewing and she was very accessible if I were to have any questions. The lesson plans were laid out in a way that made everything easier to understand and find what I needed.” Beyond the nitty gritty work of Dutta’s course, this student also remarked on the accessibility of Dutta’s teacherly presence: “I dealt with a lot of personal things this semester and she was very understanding and provided me with support that I was not receiving elsewhere. She is the most understanding and kind professor that I have ever had at this University and will continue to recommend her class to my peers.” Though this student comment comes from Fall 2023, informal comments from Dutta’s current students demonstrate her commitment to an accessible culture and how much time and energy she invests in including the needs of every body and mind. Students also take to Rate My Professor to sing Dutta’s praises: “One of the kindest professors you will ever have. She truly cares about her students’ academic and personal wellbeing. If you ever have the chance to take her class, do it!” Another student commented: “Professor Dutta is honestly one of the best instructors I’ve ever had. She cares so immensely for all her students. She takes so much time making sure that everyone understands, she sets up meetings to be able to ask her questions 1 on 1, and gives extra time for you to succeed if you are sick or struggling with something else. She’s the best.”
For Kefaya, she observed this firsthand on one occasion after inviting Dutta to conduct a lesson to her students around literacy and literacy narratives, one of Dutta’s areas of expertise. Before she came to Kefaya’s class, Dutta asked deep questions about the students, and the lessons preceded and preceded the lesson plan that she was to design. Demonstrating her care for creating an accessible environment of learning, Dutta started the lesson by telling a personal story about her literacy narrative, connecting the theoretical texts that students read for that week with her lived experiences, which provided them with an example to do the same when they were to compose their personal literacy narratives. Noticing that Kefaya assigned long theoretical and challenging readings to her students, Dutta constructed the lesson plan around breaking up the assigned texts to be more accessible by engaging students in group work to analyze one case study from the texts in each group. Technically, Dutta designed usable and accessible Google documents utilizing the readability and accessibility features of headings and bookmarks to help students access the Google document(s) dedicated for each class. Kefaya has personally adapted Dutta’s accessible course design from that lesson plan. Similarly, Wilfredo invited Dutta to speak in his archival class, during which Dutta shared the many histories of disabled folks, immigrant stories, and knowledge of foodways to his students. The talk was exceptionally engaging as numerous students were able to follow along with accessibly-designed materials and clearly marked sections of the talk.
Moreover, when we joined the department as faculty members in Fall 2022, Dutta showed lots of care and support, which made us feel welcomed and integrated in an enabling departmental environment. She shared with us several of her past Canvas courses and inspired the design of ours to be more accessible, such as in providing multiple modalities of texts, and providing the readings as web-based and printable versions of the same texts.
Dutta’s pedagogical practices apply into action decolonial theory, crip, and disability theory, as well as antiracist pedagogy, and her incorporation of these practices into approaches that both shape her classroom and steer her students’ experiences should be lauded. For these reasons, we wholeheartedly recommend Dutta for the The Dubois Award for Accessibility Improvement.”
- Alicia Wells
“Alicia consistently makes time to work with me on her projects to ensure the components are as accessible and universally designed as possible. Despite competing demands for her time and resources, she approaches her projects with an inclusive mindset, and works hard to ensure that everyone, regardless of how they navigate the environment, can benefit from the finished product. Alicia accomplishes this through research, collaboration, and sharing her knowledge base with others in project management. In this way, Alicia exemplifies the mission of our university to promote and respect diversity and inclusion.”