Teaching anti-ableism: A practical guide to creating friendly and flexible courses without compromising rigor

Even as higher education instructors strive to be more inclusive, many still struggle to adapt their courses to include students with disabilities. In this chapter, we discuss ways in which the structures, policies and assessments typically used in college courses may unintentionally disadvantage disabled students. To counter these effects, we provide strategies for communicating with students and designing social psychology classes in a way that allows all students to learn and demonstrate their learning to the best of their ability without compromising rigor. We cover syllabus language, overall course setup, flexible policies for attendance and deadlines, presentation of materials and approaches to assessment, giving practical suggestions and examples for classroom adaptation to benefit all students’ learning. By providing a range of ideas, we hope that instructors will adopt strategies that work best for their courses as we collectively work to dismantle structural barriers to higher education.