Design,Disability,and Critical Pedagogy in STS

Introduction

Broken elevators and craptions ¹ are not just urgent infrastructure problems for disability access on university campuses. They also provide pathways to employ critical STS pedagogy against the grain of institutional challenges and to move beyond maintaining compliance-based approaches to the design of buildings, classes, and curricula. The effects of laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and movements like Universal Design for Learning (UDL) on higher education—from both critical and practitioner standpoints—are well documented (e.g., Guffey 2018, 2023; Hamraie 2017; Williamson 2019). In this article, we show how “crip” pedagogy can build upon and move beyond these educational approaches in two registers: as a critique of the compliance and “universal” approaches to architecture and accommodations that have dominated campus design and access, and as constructive curriculum-building that draws attention to and improves upon these approaches.

We write as a group of disabled and nondisabled instructors and students based in a liberal arts college within a technical institute, the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Roughly a quarter of United States undergraduates attend private universities and RIT is one of the largest private universities in the US. ² An estimated 20 percent of undergraduate students use access services or formal accommodations on RIT's campus, including the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID, one of RIT's eleven colleges). ³ All undergraduate students are required to take so-called “general education” courses and, as a result, we often find ourselves “doing STS in STEM spaces” (York 2018).

We present vignettes from our teaching, experience, and research that address disability, design, and pedagogy at four different scales: campus buildings, classrooms, curriculum, and course assignments. The first vignette provides historical context, juxtaposing the design of NTID on RIT's campus in the 1960s with contemporary buildings and classroom spaces. The second explores classroom communication and approaches to mis- and dis-information in a context where access services may introduce absences and biases. The third vignette, representing a student-faculty research collaboration, describes collaborative, ethnographic fieldwork in engineering courses focused on medical device design and how ability, disability, and access become operative in the design process. The final vignette delves into praxis, describing STS course assignments that make students into access partners, teaching anti-ableism through exercises that address information accessibility—but that push beyond simple compliance-based notions of access.

The nested scales of these vignettes allow us to crip STS pedagogy in different ways. At the scale of building and classroom design, as well as access and communication choices made within them, a critical eye shows that these spaces have been designed for specific bodyminds ⁴ and ways of being—and in the process, excluding and constraining possibilities and people. As Tanya Titchkosky (2011, 32) writes, “typical use presupposes a typical user,” and notions of the typical and “universal” in classroom design have historically failed large segments of people in higher education. In our case, this means RIT's large d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) population. ⁵ At the scale of curricula and individual assignments, the same critical approach can move beyond critiques taught to students about the spaces they occupy, to co-designing and co-learning STS with students. This allows us to push back against engineering-focused educational spaces where technoableism, “a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing” (Shew 2023, 8; emphasis in original), and ableism generally are rampant (Cech 2023).

Critical STS pedagogy means examining and critiquing not just the content of one's teaching but also the design of the classrooms and buildings in which students are taught—and the people who made the decisions about those spaces. It also means adapting classroom content and media to meet our students’ lived experiences, interests, and intersectional identities. Importantly, critical pedagogy can also shape and expand STS. We develop “crip” STS pedagogies to call on the field to incorporate more crip sensibilities into theoretical contributions of disability studies and its practice in and around the classroom (McRuer 2006; Kafer 2013; Hamraie and Fritsch 2019). Furthermore, disability studies and STS are natural partners due to their shared concern with multi-scalar design (of campuses, buildings, learning spaces, curricula, and assignments) as a way of thinking about process and the iterative quality of knowledge—crip STS pedagogy should change both what we do and how we know, and extends beyond simplistic notions of compliance and access (Hamraie 2017).

Designing Campuses

At the broadest spatial and temporal scales, pedagogical spaces—campuses, buildings, and classrooms—tell us something about design and disability. As geographer Rob Kitchin (1998, 343) has succinctly argued, “disability is spatially, as well as socially, constructed.” This section juxtaposes two construction projects on the campus of RIT: the creation of NTID and its specialized classroom space, and, nearly fifty years later, the construction of the donor-driven Student Hall for Exploration and Development (SHED) in 2023.

NTID was created by an Act of Congress—Public Law 89-36, the “National Technical Institute for the Deaf Act”—and signed into law in 1965 by US President Lyndon B. Johnson. NTID is one of only two federally funded postsecondary institutions for DHH people in the US. The Act was to “provide for the establishment and operation of a coeducational, postsecondary institute for technical education of persons who are deaf or hard of hearing.” RIT's campus in Rochester, upstate New York, was selected as the site for NTID in 1966; the first technical programs were offered through the college in 1969; ground was broken for an NTID campus in 1971; and the newly built NTID campus was dedicated in 1975 (Lang and Conner 2001). Today, NTID enrolls over 1,100 students and boasts over 10,000 alumni. ⁶

The main NTID academic building is named after Johnson and is known around campus as LBJ. In the late 1960s, the design of LBJ was meant to draw upon the latest thinking in deaf education with a form of accessibility tailored to users of the space: students with hearing loss. The so-called “clustered classrooms” were a particular point of pride for LBJ's designers. These rooms incorporated a list of criteria generated to cater to DHH students. They were semi-circular and tiered for clear sight lines to the front of the room, insulated with acoustic controls to minimize background noise, and outfitted with electronics—including a central room from which images and film could be projected into each of four classrooms. The school was so proud of these classrooms, in fact, that they made the silhouette of the floor plan in the four colors chosen for the interior of the building, into the logo for the building dedication ceremony in 1975.

Half a century later, RIT's campus has undergone radical expansions. One of the most recent campus additions, the SHED, stands in sharp contrast to the creation of LBJ and its specialized classroom space. Initiated by an entrepreneurial alumnus, the SHED was built as a “makerspace” that would create “flexible spaces that foster and stimulate creativity, collaboration, and discovery.” ⁷ As such, several of the SHED classrooms are large spaces incorporating “cutting edge video technology and flexible furniture,” meaning that students sit around moveable tables in small groups surrounded by elevated screens that can project the instructor and their visuals without needing to create a central focal point in the room—classroom design for so-called “active learning” (Rands and Gansemer-Topf 2017).

Despite being designed with “clear sight-lines” and “flexible seating arrangements…with a focus on inclusion and accessibility,” ⁸ difficulties accommodating the campus population of American Sign Language (ASL) users quickly became apparent. To allow an ASL interpreter to appear on the room-wide SHED monitors, a camera was set up that required the interpreter to sign to the camera rather than the students (lest the interpreter appear on the screens sideways). Importantly, this retrofit was implemented after it became apparent that these large “collaborative” spaces were not conducive to interpreting to large numbers of deaf and hard-of-hearing students. RIT's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) noted that “some interpreters are hesitant to use the camera,” ⁹ in part because “interpreter and student interaction patterns were established before cameras were implemented, resulting in low usage of these cameras.” ¹⁰

In classroom space designed for maximum flexibility, then, use of that space for DHH students and ASL interpreters became increasingly rigid. As the CTL advised: “There is a spot marked on the floor for where the interpreter should stand…The position of the camera (zooming, angle, etc.) or the choice of which camera is being used in the room cannot be changed.” ¹¹ In other words, interpreters had to choose between signing directly to students (the historical norm) or into a camera, and students had to decide whether to sit with sightlines to the interpreter or to a screen (where the interpreter may appear from the front or the side). None of these “solutions” facilitated the interpreter “voicing” for students sitting in groups around these expansive classrooms. In short, deaf and hard of hearing students are denied the new space's promised flexibility.

The top-down process of NTID's design by largely hearing educators and professionals may have played a role in the need to retrofit the cluster classrooms in subsequent years. Decades later, the lesson to design buildings with deaf peers and students as opposed to for them went unlearned. The design of the SHED within the last decade was meant to foster creativity, flexibility, and collaboration, yet seems to have addressed the needs of ASL users post hoc, in a largely inflexible manner. In neither case has building and classroom design lived up to the ideals of DeafSpace, meaning going “beyond adapting buildings to meet the needs of deaf people to creating an aesthetic and meaning that emerge out of the ways deaf people inhabit and construct their spaces” (Bauman 2014). This despite the fact that DeafSpace guidelines have been developed at Gallaudet University over the past two decades and incorporated into RIT's Campus Plan. ¹² The history of our own campus shows that, without deaf/disabled users as designers, ableism can be built into even the most specialized, “flexible,” or “universal” pedagogical space. In short, these buildings show the shortcomings of noncritical approaches like universal design, and are case studies in how not to approach crip design for pedagogy. The following sections relate how we have approached pedagogy, disability, and design at increasingly nested scales.

Communication in the Classroom

Even if students can physically access campus and make it to class, all of the classrooms they encounter are designed for hearing faculty standing and lecturing to hearing students, all presumed to be non-disabled. ¹³ Classroom communication, in turn, is designed for talking and listening. These design choices show up in a variety of ways, such as auditorium-style classrooms and recent renovations focusing on assessing noise levels and optimizing acoustics. ¹⁴ But classrooms don’t only have hearing and talking people. Mixed groups of hearing, hard of hearing, deaf, and/or disabled students with a mix of languages and modalities mean classroom communication is necessarily different. To enable and facilitate communication between us all, there are often also access staff, including interpreters (ASL/English) and real-time captioners (“Communication Access Real-Time Translation,” CART ¹⁵ ) present.

Simply adding staff does not necessarily make classrooms and courses accessible though. US universities are required to provide interpretation or captioning as a reasonable accommodation based on individual requests. ¹⁶ However, moving between and across languages can result in miscommunication and misinformation. As one example, several years ago, a non-deaf interpreter in an RIT environmental course heard the term “biodiversity hotspot” spoken by an instructor and erroneously interpreted this concept as related to temperature. This mistake was not noticed until the instructor distributed an exam and only the DHH students who had received the incorrect explanation of the term answered the question incorrectly. A quiz where the error was noticed may seem small, but not all such situations are perceived, fixed or unimportant. In a now-infamous off-campus example, the live TV captions on screen for a COVID-19 briefing early in the pandemic erroneously said most deaths were in vaccinated people (Lang 2021, 148). This resulted in TV viewers reading the captions receiving inaccurate and dangerous misinformation. A “checklistification” (Dolmage 2017, 145) approach to accessible communication is not sufficient. College students acquire less lecture material in the classroom when accessed via interpreter (Marschark et al. 2005) and DHH students report that using interpreters does not provide them full access in educational settings (Napier and Barker 2004). Classroom communication design and dynamics illustrate how “access as envisioned and practiced in the contemporary university actually worsens inequity rather than mitigates it” (Price 2024, 5).

In turn, the STS classroom may reproduce these harms, if not attuned to crip pedagogy. Academic environments are actively hostile to DHH and disabled academics (Chua et al. 2022), demanding “performative hearingness” (Henner and Robinson 2021, 104), with its emphasis on written English and speaking. DHH students and scholars experience stigma and marginalization for using signed languages or assistive technologies. Henner and Robinson (2023, 11) name this “modality chauvinism,” the privilege and prioritization of speech over other forms of communication. These biases shape who is perceived as competent in the classroom. Non-deaf interpreters, rather than DHH academics, are often perceived by hearing people to be experts, as a result of these dynamics and broader social systems (Sheneman and Robinson 2024). Interpreters themselves reflect on being encouraged, from the onset of their language and professional training, “to see myself as ‘the professional’ and Deaf people as the beneficiaries of my work” (Brace 2021). Classes also operate within a broader and dominant “hearing culture” (Cue 2024). Hearing culture is so pervasive as to often be invisible and unnamed by hearing people, yet hearing people's lack of understanding of their power, privilege and cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings and conflict (Cue 2024).

STS faculty should lean into their desire to name and study power and expertise to use their classrooms to consider how to also interrogate and teach against modality chauvinism and hearing culture, and potentially reduce harm. This requires acknowledging and attending to the design and default assumptions of classroom communication. Take for example classroom activities about evaluating arguments, media literacy, and mis/dis-information. Many of the common strategies for teaching students to be reflexive media consumers and to evaluate sources and fight misinformation (e.g., the CRAAP test ¹⁷ ) are designed for written language—and specifically written English. Most mainstream US news and media companies do not make content in signed languages. There are a few Deaf-led grassroots media networks that serve ASL-signing communities in ASL, including The Daily Moth, ¹⁸ which produces a weekday news highlights show, and DPAN.TV. ¹⁹ These networks often also cover stories that network and legacy English-language media do not. As such, media literacy strategies designed for written and spoken English—such as telling students to triangulate accuracy by finding multiple sources—may not fit. So strategies, sources, processes for considering arguments and expertise may look different. As Jay Dolmage (2017, 114) writes, “Students must have the right to their own literacies, learning styles, and modes of expression.” Making space for more languages and modalities while recognizing the opportunities for possible misinformation, means being reflexive about classroom communication.

Intervening in, and teaching against, our classrooms and our campuses with crip STS pedagogy can point out the ableist shortcomings often designed into our buildings and our institutions’ disability accommodations. Pointing out these shortcomings—including the shortcomings of “access” built into compliance-minded or “universal” designs—to students simultaneously exposes them to the critical edge of STS and expands STS to include more perspectives from disabled communities and studies. We acknowledge, however, that at the scale of campuses, buildings, and classrooms, we are mostly limited to critique and consciousness-raising, and have little control over buildings already built or access services. In the concluding two vignettes we turn to scales within instructors’ control: opportunities to crip STS curricula and lessons to explicitly teach about and against technoableism.

Ableism in the Curriculum

When students come to the critical disability and anthropological design class “Designing for Humans” most are frustrated. They are game designers, engineers, medical illustrators, industrial designers—almost entirely STEAM students—frustrated by a sensed gap in their education regarding how to understand humans beyond “user” frameworks (Barab et al. 2008; Hale 2018). They are eager to learn more about how to critically understand ability, race, gender, and myriad forms of human difference that influence their designs. Inspired by their frustrations, we developed an ethnographic project about how students imagine their users and how professors teach about humans.

Historically, engineering education emphasized identifying known principles, applying them, and creating solutions. In contrast, contemporary approaches focus on developing inquiry skills, particularly the ability to ask iterative questions in real time (Dym et al. 2013, 102). However, we found a tension within engineering education: epistemological inquiry-based methods often confine “users” to early brainstorming stages, neglecting to integrate them throughout the design process. Human/user research is limited to initial project definition, with little instruction on imaginative and qualitative methods. As students move from context to use, they focus on designing discrete objects meant to encapsulate early brainstormed complexities, creating a static understanding of context. While students are taught that placing things in context is valuable, they are ill-prepared to address the critical question of “what context is” (Seaver 2015, 1105; italics in the original). Consequently, students reduce context to “user specifications,” packaging it into a stable, unproblematic box that is easy to compartmentalize and is not contextually dependent (Latour 1987, 3).

When engineering pedagogy contains humans into discrete objects, students learn that decontextualization is part of “good design,” in turn depoliticizing inequalities and reproducing known essentialisms about race, gender, and ability (Seron et al. 2018; Cech 2023). Students can tick the box and move forward with the design process that they value—prototyping, revising, and problem-solving. The underlying assumption, that engaging with users is obvious and easily performed by students, is a dangerous assumption that underlies many of the decisions to abstain from teaching students how to talk with or learn about diverse others. Learning to understand others is not a natural skill but one that requires careful and critical pedagogy to guide students not only through the task of contextualizing others, but understanding their own, often ableist, presumptions.

Disability Studies scholars and activists have long argued that disabled people are often positioned solely as recipients rather than contributors to technology, a perspective reinforced by entrenched ableist structures that shape our worlds (Jackson, Haagaard and Williams 2022; Linton 1998). In this framework, disabled individuals are frequently reduced to mere users, their diversity flattened, and their role confined to passive consumers of technology. Scholars in Disability Studies advocate for a more relational and politically informed approach to design, advocating for “crip-knowing-making” as a way to move beyond mere technological fixes (Hamraie and Fritsch 2019, 22). These critiques highlight the limitations of current design practices that restrict human engagement to early phases of problem definition, privileging epistemological inquiry while neglecting ongoing dialogue and collaboration (Suchman 2018). This perpetuates a modernist belief in technological innovation as a panacea for societal challenges (Tunstall 2023), reinforcing ableist assumptions in design by dictating who can participate in and influence the design process, and what outcomes are valued (Shew 2020, 40; Cech 2023).

At a “tech” university like RIT, enfolding crip sensibilities into classrooms means identifying the ways that knowledge gaps are produced and authorized by curricular design and values, inquiring about “who and what is (un)recognized and in what configurations” (Kerschbaum 2022, 7). While an obvious strategy for integrating crip sensibilities into the curriculum would be through co-teaching and assessment design, perhaps a more critical step would be to consciously develop a relational approach to the academy and our work as colleagues and teachers. Given that disability and ableism are co-constructed in specific social, historical, and material contexts, working with faculty and staff unversed in Disability Studies could help to situate crip knowledge so that systemic change might spark at the level of course assignments.

Accessibility and Anti-Ableism in Course Assignments

In addition to incorporating Disability Studies into entire curricula and courses through reflexivity and co-instruction, our final section brings the same critical disability perspective and practice to bear on classroom exercises. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, course assignments can empower students to actively engage in accessibility work while deepening their understanding of the structural barriers that shape technological design. In the process, students can also be challenged to think about “access” beyond legal compliance. They are generally not taught digital accessibility practices, but soon they will be responsible for access and inclusion in the workplace. At an institution with Deaf staff and students, they must also make coursework accessible to classmates and instructors. How can we integrate accessibility training into the curriculum to prepare students for this responsibility, while highlighting the affordances, challenges, and impacts of digital accessibility and anti-ableism? What frameworks can extend access beyond compliance? This assignment for a Science, Technology, and Society course integrates STS content and accessibility training within a Design Justice framework. By teaching students accessibility practices, we prepare them for life beyond the classroom and engage them as partners in making higher education more accessible and just.

Critical STS approaches reject the medical model, which frames disabled individuals as passive outliers needing retroactive fixes. ²⁰ Instead, critical STS pedagogies reveal access as a systemic issue, shaped by design choices that privilege certain bodyminds. Rather than seeing accessibility failures as technical oversights, students learn that exclusion is actively constructed through sociotechnical systems. This perspective shifts accessibility from a compliance task to a matter of justice and participation, emphasizing the need for proactive, inclusive design rather than reactive accommodations.

In the introductory course “science, technology, and values” (STV), students consider how technologies shape human interactions. Through case studies and STS approaches, they analyze the dual-edged nature of digital communities, recognizing their potential to both connect and divide. Students consider the pernicious effects of cyberbullying and disinformation campaigns, for example, as well as the ability of digital spaces to foster communities among marginalized and geographically distanced groups. But even the most welcoming online communities exclude individuals when not designed with digital accessibility in mind. In the STV course, students learn accessibility practices and consider their impact on users; they must move beyond technical skills and compliance measures to emphasize critical engagement with diversity, agency, and social responsibility (Greco 2020; Jones, Collins and Zbitnew 2021).

In an early assignment, “Using Social Media for Good,” students practice captioning videos using the volunteer-based platform Amara. ²¹ They also learn to write alternative (alt) text to describe visuals. Embedded in code, alt text is invisible; screen reader software voices such image descriptions aloud to blind and low-vision users or display them on a braille display. Writing alt text is technically easy; quality alt text that actually provides equitable understanding to blind users, however, requires intentionality and practice. For instance, there are debates around prioritizing full visual descriptions of people, which may include assumptions about race and gender that accidentally misidentify individuals (Bennett et al. 2021).

In a cumulative assignment, STV students practice and apply various digital accessibility skills by conducting an accessibility audit of RIT's public-facing website and social media sites and writing an op-ed for the RIT Reporter with their findings. We situate discussions within a Design Justice framework, which emphasizes the need for inclusive, equitable design practices—particularly for marginalized communities—which originated from the work of activists and scholars like Sasha Costanza-Chock. We prioritize Principle 2: “We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process,” which echoes the disability justice mantra of “Nothing about us without us” (Charlton 1998). Students, who are the website's target audience—15.3 percent of whom identify as d/Deaf and/or disabled—are the users most impacted by the accessibility, usability, and design of their university's website. ²² Additionally, we apply Design Justice Principle 3: “We prioritize design's impact on the community over the intentions of the designer,” which reflects STS themes of technologies’ embedded politics and unintended consequences. ²³

With these guiding principles, students consider the following questions:

What is your overall assessment of RIT's web presence in terms of accessibility, usability, and inclusivity?

Through this practical application exercise and reflection, students explore the incentives and consequences of digital accessibility. By making their own digital spaces more accessible, they are rewarded with greater visibility through search engine optimization. If they do not prioritize accessibility, they open themselves up to legal liability. This is especially salient given the Department of Justice's final rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates adherence to web accessibility standards. ²⁴ This applies to both instructors and the university itself, which must ensure that instructional spaces and materials are accessible to students. Through this assignment, however, students learn to go beyond legally mandated accessibility and embrace a fuller understanding of access as design shaped by sociotechnical systems and institutional decisions. Crip STS pedagogy requires robust forms of design for disability.

Conclusions

STS as a field has a long history of critical research and scholarship. To live up to that tradition in all of our academic activities, we can and should attend to design and disability in teaching and learning as well, even with individual assignments. While such a micro-scale intervention may seem small, it can model cultural shifts that are possible in higher education, reflecting the possibilities for nested degrees of change toward accessibility. We can co-create possibilities with our classmates and colleagues. Indeed, the very act of co-creating new possibilities, operationalizing crip STS pedagogy in league with students, especially, begins to upend the classroom power dynamics implicated in technoableism. And while we have framed the macro-scale vignettes as objects of critique rather than action, we do believe that institution-level change—present and future—begins with teaching students, faculty, and staff to think and design differently.

This conversation is a starting point and an invitation to continually remake the STS classroom, even and especially in courses not “about” disability. Universities generally and STS classrooms specifically “should expect both more ways to be disabled and more people existing with disabilities” (Shew 2023, 114). Further, disability in higher education classrooms disrupts the “taken-for-granted sense of who normally belongs” (Titchkosky 2011, 33). We acknowledge, however, that access, as J. Logan Smilges (2023, 7) warns, “does not by itself fix ableism” and that the “call for expanded access” (to racist, heteronormative, and otherwise harmful institutions and systems including higher education) should not be the goal. Multiply marginalized academics face the greatest harms in the academy (Price 2024), and ableism's roots in “eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism” (Lewis 2022) require expansive, intersectional approaches oriented toward justice (Grzanka, Brian and Bhatia 2023). Yet higher education institutions have also long been the site of disabled student activism, critical to affecting change on-campus and beyond, such as the Deaf President Now protests at Gallaudet University in 1988, leading both to changes in college leadership and to federal law by influencing discussion and passage of the ADA. ²⁵ This continues to this day, with college students pushing for institutional action beyond legal minimums, such as the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee at Syracuse University ²⁶ and the recent Communication Access Now movement here at NTID. ²⁷ We suggest that critical, crip STS pedagogies can support and complement these efforts toward a meaningfully more inclusive academia. Teaching against our institutional contexts and against technoableism can do more than foster simplistic and problematic notions of access, but rather can give students tools to interrogate ideas of disability, health, wellness, and accommodations—and collaborate to translate these ideas into action.