Inclusion around the Holidays | AV for Access
Well, folks, it’s December. Holidays, travel, winding down of another semester, and winding up of another new variant of COVID-19 and the winter break in college hockey. But with that comes another way to look at accessibility and inclusion, one which in AV we should be paying more attention to: inclusion around the holidays. I know, it’s a hot button topic but I want to address it both from an AV perspective and a generally cultural one.
In addition to taking disabilities into account, universal design is about a holistic view of inclusion, taking the entire person into consideration including cultural needs. If we are going to develop universally accessible classrooms we can’t ignore the cultural backgrounds of the student body. While it may not be AV’s role to set the cultural standards in the classroom, we do have a responsibility when considering accessibility when it comes to how we take student’s backgrounds into account.
In an article in the Jewish Daily Forward this week, a parent related her experience with asking her daughter’s preschool to make sure that her daughter wasn’t left out of the holiday party by incorporating Jewish traditions as well, and the school’s response of isolating the student in a separate room and sending her home early so she didn’t have to “interact with Santa.” The parent said she wished the school had found a way to include a wider range of holiday traditions into their celebration, rather than singling their daughter out and kicking her out of class. I grew up in a very Jewish town, my elementary school was next door to the synagogue that I went to as a kid and down the street was the local Kosher supermarket, so it wasn’t until college that I first encountered instructors who didn’t take into account Jewish holidays when they planned the semester. By the same token, working in higher ed means every few years (this one included) I have to awkwardly tell my boss that “sorry, I’m going to be off the first week of classes because of the holiday” and hope that won’t cause me problems down the road.
So, I hear you asking, how does this apply in AV? Well, there’s a few different ways. First, and most obvious, is asking ourselves what assumptions we make as staff and managers when it comes to our colleagues and our clients. Higher Ed is somewhere that we should never assume will be a homogeneous environment, and designs should follow that. So how do we do that? Generally speaking avoiding holiday specific imagery in public signage is a good way to make sure we are inclusive. I’m not saying don’t have holiday imagery, but generic winter images are inherently more inclusive while simultaneously evoking the same spirit of the holidays for which they are often used anyhow. If, however, a choice is made to include some holiday symbology, then it should be inclusive (and this goes without saying, I hope, but don’t just go with random images you find that “meet” what you’re looking for. The city of Medford, Mass learned that one this year!)
The other way to take our universal design practice into the holiday season is to consider the way you discuss holidays. I’m not saying don’t wish people a merry Christmas, literally no one cares about that. What I’m saying is thinking about the range of ways people choose to celebrate is paramount. Not everyone will be, or can be, gathering with their families around the holidays. Some is due to distance, some due to the pandemic, some because of estrangement and some because they don’t have any living family. Additionally many have built a network of close friends, a chosen family, and so we must be careful how we address holiday plans too. Instead of “what is your family doing to celebrate?” a more sensitive question, with the same end result is “what are you doing to celebrate.” It may seem less personal, but it gives the respondent the opportunity to define how much they want to put forward in terms of their family status during the holidays.
Finally, I want to thank every one of you who read my column this last year. I put it out because I really believe in what I’m talking about and what can be done to make education more inclusive. If there is something you’d like to see addressed, please feel free to DM me on twitter (@avforaccess) because I’d love to know what opportunities to make education inclusive you’re working on, too. I hope you all have a happy, safe holiday. I look forward to seeing you all, even if its just virtual, in the coming year.