Step 5: Guide Students
Students with disabilities rightfully question why exercises requiring skills and abilities they might not possess are required in some courses. Consider any visual composition exercise from the perspective of a blind or vision-impaired student. The valuable assignment of asking students to design websites has been explored by writing scholars (Kalmbach 2004; Selfe 2004). Immediately, however, a visually impaired student might feel excluded from such a task, illustrating the important role of the composition instructor as a guide. We should take such assignments as an opportunity to discuss inclusive design theories and how we need to test all media to ensure the greatest number of people receive a message. A disabled student might discover that he or she offers unique perspectives as part of a design team.
Other scholars have examined audio, video, and other multimodal forms of expression (Wysocki et al. 2004). Consider how including these activities affects students with visual, auditory, or other sensory limitations. If any aspects of an activity will exclude students, facilitate discussions on the reasons for that exclusion and what it might represent. As Garrison and Vaughan (2008) suggested:
Teaching presence in terms of design and facilitation is necessary to ensure that communities come together in a productive manner. Communities of inquiry do not automatically or quickly move to integration and application phases of inquiry unless that is the objective and a teaching presence creates and maintains cohesion. … Familiarity developed through sustained purposeful discourse creates the cohesion necessary for participants to progress through the phases of inquiry. (44)
We also need to remind students that activities such as peer review and peer editing are not the same online as in traditional settings (Breuch 2005). We might serve as guides by introducing peer exercises to students with explanations of how collaborating online presents unique challenges.