“This is What We Do”
Vice President of Student Affairs — and wheelchair user — Amanda Kraus talks about the importance of accessibility and universal design in study abroad.
Kraus and students at the Arco de Tito on the Via Sacra, Rome
Last summer, University of Arizona Vice President of Student Affairs and Associate Professor of Practice in Higher Education Amanda Kraus ʼ03 ʼ08 traveled with a group of 11 students from the W.A. Franke Honors College to Rome, Italy, and Barcelona, Spain, to conduct a class on universal design. The concept, coined by architect and accessibility advocate Ronald Mace, originally referred only to architecture and the built environment (think of the curb cut made to accommodate wheelchair users or a no-step entryway to a house) but has since been incorporated into everything from public-school pedagogy to flexible drinking straws: Essentially, the goal of designing everything to be accessible to all users, regardless of age or ability.
Kraus, a wheelchair user who had never taught abroad, saw the class as both an opportunity and an experiment. “I designed an experience to use universal design as an academic concept,” she says, “but also the lens through which we would experience travel.” She chose the locations in part to create contrast: Ancient Rome and modern Barcelona; a city (Barcelona) that has made broad institutional efforts to keep pace with the project of accessibility and universal design, and a city (Rome) whose efforts have been more piecemeal and privatized. (Kraus notes, for example, that the Colosseum didn’t have an elevator when she visited in 2013, and when they did build one, the project was sponsored by the Orchestra Italiana del Cinema.)
The group participated in one or two events a day, ranging from traditional tours (the Roman Forum) to meetings with design firms, hospital administrators, government officials and others whose localized purview helped bring conceptual abstraction into everyday focus. The students got it. “Going through their assignments, it was clear to me that they were really starting to appreciate how intentional design choices manifest in the experience, and how there were a number of inequities that we encountered that could have been designed out had inclusion been prioritized,” Kraus says.
But Kraus lingers on the lessons that transpired after and between scheduled programming, the day-to-day aspects of the experience that — in retrospect — may have brought the concept most vividly to life. Sometimes, Kraus and the disabled students in the group — there was a mix — would take an Uber not because the subway was inaccessible but because it would have made an already long day that much longer. Or the McDonald’s in Rome where you couldn’t order on the first floor. Or the simple persistence of cobblestones on old European streets. “They could see the impact,” Kraus says of the nondisabled students in the group. “I got there on time; I bought the same ticket. I was having the same experience as them — until I wasn’t.”
Europe also provided political and legal contrast to the environments most students were familiar with. “Europe is old, but New York is old, too,” she says. “We in the United States benefit from 50-plus years of federally mandated disability access, and other countries around the world do not. And that history has shaped a lot of the design choices both disabled and nondisabled people have in the present day — it has really laid the groundwork, no pun intended, for a more inclusive experience in society.”
Kraus doesn’t plan to host the class again anytime soon, but she does think there’s something essential about studying a subject abroad that can’t be replicated in the comfort and familiarity of home. “When we’re traveling and when we’re out of our element — when we’re not familiar with the norms, the language, the culture, the customs — we’re all a little bit more sensitive to design,” she says. “A little bit more vulnerable.” You look up for direction and see an unfamiliar language. You fumble through a custom. You learn to rely on cues that may or may not be reliable — a level of productive disorientation that can’t be captured in Tucson.
Kraus, who spent 16 years with the U of A’s Disability Resource Center before taking her current position, says it’s all part of the broader goal of making study abroad accessible to students regardless of status, whether financial, disabled or nondisabled, or otherwise. Then, a caveat: “I wouldn’t want anyone to say, ‘Oh, the U of A is doing such special work,’” she says. “This is what we do.”
