Written by Madison Bigelow with support from the DAC team.
Recently, the DAC blog sat down with Professor Holly Fitch, the third and last 2023 CLAS Accessibility Fellow at the University of Connecticut, to discuss her work. Like Professor Bergendahl and Professor Scanlon, who we’ve been lucky enough to interview about their research, Professor Fitch has been examining issues pertaining to pedagogy, existing structures on campus, culture, and academic affairs as they relate to access, inclusion, and justice on campus.
Who is Professor Holly Fitch?
Dr. Holly Fitch is a Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses on physiological psychology, neurodevelopment, and plasticity. Within her academic research, she is particularly interested in examining developmental disability and neonatal brain injury in her lab. In her own words, she “started out with a focus on specific language impairment and language related problems and […] expanded [her] work since then to cover a variety of types of developmental cognitive disability, so [her lab has] done some work with autism models, and other types of models.”
However, Professor Fitch’s interests in disability spans beyond her academic work. Her youngest daughter was born clinically deaf due to a peripheral issue in her middle ear. As Professor Fitch shared with us in our interview, her daughter has faced accessibility challenges while in college:
She had a really unfortunate incident where– she turns her hearing aids off when she’s taking an exam to avoid distraction, and the instructor had made a clarification about one of the questions mid exam. Which she did not hear. And she realized that she answered the question wrong because she didn’t understand, she didn’t have the information he provided. And she went to him afterwards and she explained what happened. And he said, “Well, basically, that’s too bad. Maybe you shouldn’t turn your hearing aids off next time.”
In addition to Professor Fitch’s own experiences with trying to support her students’ accommodations, especially over the last three years with the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the barriers she faced in terms of accurately captioning video lectures, this prompted her to apply for the Accessibility Fellowship. She “realize[d] that this issue continues to be a problem. And so when [she] saw the advertisement for the Faculty Funds program, what [she] wanted to do was get involved in it from the perspective of how can we better educate our faculty about how to provide services” for their students in the classroom.
What are Professor Fitch’s plans as a CLAS Accessibility Fellow?
Professor Fitch is primarily concerned with bolstering faculty resources and bridging the gap between CSD and the classroom. When we asked her about the work she’d been doing this year as a fellow, she said:
What I had originally intended to do, which was specifically to develop resources pertinent to the, to the hearing impaired population to some degree. I shifted my approach actually to just providing faculty, better education about how to teach because a lot of the practices involved are actually just good practices and instead of saying, “Here’s how to approach or to better teach hearing impaired individuals in your class.” The approach is now how to be a better instructor by implementing certain practices which will be benefit hearing impaired individuals, but also by the way, will it will benefit a whole lot, of other students, in the class who benefit from things like capital, and having flexibility, and so forth, having lectures recorded, instead of just simply live in person and the technology to do that is there. It’s really not that difficult.
We’d like to thank Professor Holly Fitch for sitting down to discuss her research with us. If you’re interested in our extended interview, you can access the transcript here and the video/audio here.
Disability & Access Collective 