What am I reading in ScholarWorks? January 2024

For this month’s What Am I Reading in ScholarWorks? I wanted to share this excellent student-created report, Smith College Campus ADA Accessibility Report from Environmental Science and Policy professor, Heather Rosenfeld’s class. This report, which focuses on physically accessible pathways on campus, highlights, for me, the power of a pedagogy that asks students to apply what they are learning to their own community and/or environment. The result of this type of research is threefold: The first obvious function is that this report is simply useful to find the most accessible pathways around campus. Wondering how to avoid stairs? Do you need to know where there is railing? This is a useful document. The second is that it surfaces problem areas that need to be addressed to make the many pathways of our campus ADA compliant. This is important information for maintenance and planning. And the third is the way in which scholarship merely, but importantly, raises awareness—after reading this report you will not walk along the pathways in quite the same way—your sense of the ways and means of quotidian travel and how those ways and means impact different bodies differently is expanded.

To read this work in Smith ScholarWorks, visit: https://scholarworks.smith.edu/other_projects/230/