Megan Orth
On Tuesday, April 16th, the lobby of Bessey Hall saw a lot more traffic than usual, but fortunately, it was for a very good reason. The lobby hosted the second annual Disability Awareness Day, created by the Council of Students with Disabilities (CSD), which sought to spread awareness about disabilities and RCPD resources.
President Elliot Zirulnik explained that CSD “wanted students at MSU to gain an understanding of the challenges that their peers may face because a lot of people don’t realize that there is a significant number of students with disabilities at MSU and they don’t necessarily know what those disabilities mean.” Over two hundred students came by throughout the day, enabling CSD to accomplish their goal of reaching many students and fostering understanding around campus.
There were a number of resources for students attending, including information on RCPD and registering a VISA, bike and helmet safety on campus, counseling materials, and some special guests - two service dogs from an organization that provides dogs to students on campus who need them.
The Awareness Day featured disability simulations that “CSD wanted to make relevant to MSU so that the demos would mean something to students at the college level and to help them start to understand what it is like to have a disability” said Zirulnik.
One of the simulations created by CSD dealt with fine motor impairments in which students could choose from a variety of activities. Wearing gardening gloves or having their fingers bound together with rubber bands, students had to attempt to flip through a book, write their name, or tie their shoes, “which was the hardest for people” according to Zirulnik.
Another simulation addressed dyslexia in a way that would show students aspects of the disability that they may not have known about. Many people think dyslexia just forces you to read backward, but it is often more than that, making letters themselves appear distorted rather than just jumbled. Students in CSD rearranged sentences in a variety of ways and format and had people try to read them.
Similarly, there is a misconception that persons who are deaf or hard of hearing cannot hear anything when sometimes they hear a buzzing or certain sounds that block their ability to hear adequately. Knowing this, CSD created a simulation to address deafness and auditory processing where students listened to two dissonant things – heavy metal in one ear and a serious Podcast in the other – and then had to write down what they heard from the Podcast. Not an easy task!
To bring awareness to the realities of visual impairments, students were invited to briefly study the Braille alphabet and then they were blindfolded and given Brailled soda cans to identify what type it was based on the Braille alone. Zirulnik said that most students gave up quickly because of the difficulty. All of the simulations challenged students and forced them to evaluate their understandings of disabilities.
The Braille soda simulation, fortunately, is not going to be just a simulation for long, as it has been an ongoing project for CSD to add Braille to soda vending machines around campus. They have a number of machines that already have the names of sodas Brailled to help students with visual impairments.
This past semester CSD held weekly meetings with a small group of students but they are hoping to grow in future years now that the club is gaining a presence around campus through projects like the Awareness Day. They welcome and encourage students with and without disabilities to join and attend meetings. Next year they hope to get more students with physical disabilities involved in the organization and pursue adaptive sports activities.
At this year’s Annual Awards and Appreciation Reception, CSD was awarded the Student Leadership and Service Award, and it is clear through their commitment to raising awareness and helping students with disabilities around campus, that it was well deserved.