Contribution to Book
Opening the Doorway: Disability Accommodation Letters as Entry to Critical Mutual Mentorship
Mentoring in Intercultural and International Contexts
(2023)
Abstract
The authors know that discussing disability accommodations with students can be a challenge and that sometimes those meetings are awkward to navigate for both the student and the instructor. The authors appreciate and honor the additional labor disabled students do beyond the labor required of their nondisabled peers. We also believe that these conversations, even if they are only one-time interactions, are opportunities for mentorship. In the spirit of critical mentorship, we offer our insights to make these important dialogic opportunities to learn with and from students meaningful for all stakeholders and that these moments of learning and care can and do last beyond the conversational moment. In this chapter, we utilize the Critical Communication Mentoring Model as a tool to reflect upon the receipt of a disabled student’s accommodation letter as a doorway to a collaborative, multidirectional, a mutually inclusive and accessible mentoring process. In an attempt to also mentor our readers, the authors share their practices in meeting with disabled students to discuss unique learning needs and how those meetings lead to mentoring the student and other community stakeholders.
Keywords
- Disability studies,
- mentoring,
- higher education,
- critical communication mutual mentoring,
- culturural sustaining pedagogies,
- students with disabilities,
- disability literacy,
- Accommodation letters,
- critical communication pedagogy
Disciplines
Publication Date
2023
Editor
Ahmet Atay and Diana Trebing
Publisher
Peter Lang
Series
Edited Collection
ISBN
9781433198861
DOI
10.3726/b15762
Citation Information
Allison D Brenneise and Mark J. Congdon. "Opening the Doorway: Disability Accommodation Letters as Entry to Critical Mutual Mentorship" New YorkMentoring in Intercultural and International Contexts Vol. VIII (2023) p. 179 - 202 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/mark-congdon/36/