Faculty and staff to explore accessible instructional design with College Book Club

Faculty, staff, and administrators of El Camino College are invited to learn about improving accessibility in higher education with the College Book Club this semester.

Anna Brochet, a counselor and co-vice president of the Faculty Development Committee, presented a discussion on the College Book Club and the topic it will explore this semester at the Academic Senate meeting on Tuesday, March 4.

The club will be specifically focusing on approaches from Thomas J. Tobin’s book, “Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning Higher Education,” which focuses on different aspects of accessibility through the classroom.

Linda Cooks, the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility librarian, co-leads the College Book Club alongside librarian Laura Ishizaka, holding three online meetings each semester for the club to discuss the chosen topic.

These topics align with the Faculty Development Committee’s efforts to produce learning opportunities for faculty and staff.

With help from Ryan Martinez, an instructional designer at ECC, digital and online curricula created by professors can be made universal in design and more accessible for all students.

“He’ll help us to be conscious of when we’re using colors and certain fonts against certain backgrounds that can be hard to read,” Cooks said. “There’s a whole science that goes behind what are the best circumstances or environments for teaching.”

In the past, the College Book Club has discussed linguistic justice; collaborated with the Formerly Incarcerated Re-Entry Students Thriving program at ECC, also known as FIRST; and studied “First Gen: A Memoir” by author Alejandra Campoverdi.

“That was a really interesting topic for us because a lot of us are first-gen,” librarian Felicia Martinez said. “A lot of us are the first person of color we know to go to school or the first queer person to go to school.”

The book club aims to help faculty and staff better support students by addressing their specific needs.

Experts like Martinez being available during these discussions allows faculty to ask questions about how they can better serve students.

“It’s a bunch of colleagues that are interested in literature,” Brochet said. “We try to pick topics that are timely and relevant.”

The College Book Club meetings will be held online on Fridays at 11 a.m. on March 28, April 25, and May 30.

Faculty and staff can register for the upcoming events on Cornerstone or email Cooks at [email protected] for the Zoom link.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Wednesday, March 5 at 10:44 p.m. to clarify the headline.