Accessibility, Part V – Lauri Hughes [read the transcript]
Accessibility is a big topic with many parts, but at the center there are people. People who need to know we care. People who may indeed require accommodations, but perhaps more importantly require an acknowledgement of and belief in their abilities to succeed. I’m wrapping up this series on Accessibility with Lauri Hughes who reminds us of the power we have to believe in our students even when they struggle to believe in themselves. And while this wraps up this series, I hope it’s just the beginning of the conversation.
If you missed any of the previous Accessibility Episodes they can all be found here (I, II, III, IV) and on Kirkwood’s iTunes U page.
TRANSCRIPT for ACCESSIBILITY, PART V – LAURI HUGHES
ALAN PETERKA
Hi, my name is Alan Peterka and this is the Education Is Podcast, a show about people engaged in teaching and learning. Today, I’m feeling lots of positivity because my guest exudes it everywhere she goes and it’s filling this entire studio. Of course, I’m very pleased to welcome Lauri Hughes to the program. Well, Lauri …
LAURI HUGHES
Thank you so much.
ALAN PETERKA
Lauri, your current position here is Department Coordinator of Nursing.
LAURI HUGHES
Correct.
ALAN PETERKA
You have a lot of experiences here at Kirkwood.
LAURI HUGHES
I do.
ALAN PETERKA
I wonder if you could just walk us through some of those experiences.
LAURI HUGHES
You bet, absolutely. I’ve actually been really fortunate. Actually, I tell people I’ve been at the college for a really long time, because on my desk I have a picture of me in a little pink dress when I was seven in front of Linn Hall. I started here really young and that photo actually was taken when my mother was taking the culinary program here back in 1975. She graduated in ’76 and then sadly passed away in ’77, but I cherish that picture because I feel as if I’d always known I belonged here, like this is my home away from home, this is where I should be. Then I started at Kirkwood as a student in ’95, but as my journey progressed I had a couple of internships originally in the continuing ed department. Then my first full-time position landed me in the industrial tech department and I was there for four years. Then received a call and was asked if I would consider moving into the arts and humanity side of the world. I did that for about a year and then the Vice President asked me if I would come work for her and help start a new teaching and learning center.
ALAN PETERKA
Why are people reaching out to you? Why are you getting pulled in so many different directions or in so many different ways?
LAURI HUGHES
Well, I would think part of it probably is just what you have said, that I try to see everything in a positive way, I try to be extremely supportive and encouraging to people. I have a pretty solid work ethic, so I tend to be really, really passionate and I don’t have a problem with putting in long hours, I guess. I don’t know, but …
ALAN PETERKA
They see something, they see that in you.
LAURI HUGHES
They see something.
ALAN PETERKA
They see that positivity, yeah.
LAURI HUGHES
They see those things in me and they want to have a piece of it maybe, or they think I can make a difference. Yeah, so I was in the teaching and learning center. After seven years of doing that, I just felt led to go to nursing. It’s a pretty challenging program and there’s a lot of students and I just felt the need to make a difference there.
ALAN PETERKA
You mentioned a life changing event. Can you talk about that?
LAURI HUGHES
Yeah, absolutely.
ALAN PETERKA
Was it just this one event, or is it a singular point in time, or was it something that spanned awhile?
LAURI HUGHES
It was really several things that really changed for me as far as being a student at Kirkwood. I had graduated from high school over at Prairie in ’85. At that time when I had graduated I knew I did not want to go to college. I just knew I never wanted to do that. Now, granted I came from a really nontraditional family life, because my mother had died when I was nine, my father was an alcoholic and we had nothing. When I was ten I would tease my girlfriends about, “Why learn to make gravy with no lumps when I was ten,” and I was babysitting when I was ten, because I was the oldest of three kids, and I had a younger sister and brother. I would save my babysitting money, if my dad didn’t find my little stash in my little sock drawer and take it to go to the bar. I would use that money to buy them their school supplies, or their new tennis shoes for the new school year and things like that.
Every year for children K through 12, have to go to a school registration each year. Parents go and fill out all the paperwork and my dad never ever stepped foot in a school, he refused to. He had an eighth grade education and he was a farm kid. You can still go back to Prairie, all of the old archive’s stuff on microfiche and you’ll still see my handwriting on the free and reduced lunch forms and anything they kept. It was always me that filled out the paperwork. In doing that, I had to grow up and mature really young and I found that kids my own age were very immature and very petty, and because of my visual limitations teachers often would treat me as if the problem with my eye effected my brain, and they would treat me as if I was mentally disabled. It was always this challenge to just try to prove that I was just an average kid.
When I was … I don’t remember how old I was, maybe eighth grade or ninth grade, but my dad was sitting at the table one night drunk and he had said to me, “You want to know why I hate education so much? I’ll tell you why.” I was listening. He said, “Because those educated people, Lauri, will judge you, discriminate against you, and treat you like crap for variables that you have absolutely no control over. They can’t treat you like the rich kid. No, they never will. You know what? Every single thing that they judge you for are things that you absolutely positively cannot control. You had no control over your mother committing suicide, but they treat you like dirt because you don’t have a mom at home. You were born with visual challenges, you didn’t choose that. We’ve done everything we can to help you, but they’ll judge you for it. They treat you like you’re a retard.”
He said, “Your dad’s a drunk. I’m sitting here tonight drunk and they’ll judge you for that, but you have no control over how much I consume.” He said to me, “So those highly educated people that think they’re so bright are a bunch of dumb asses in my book, Lauri. Until they can get over that, I don’t have any desire to be part of any of that.” That’s always stuck with me, and so when I work with students I think, I hear that lecture from my dad and I think, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be that person. I need to give them hope.” When students come into my office with some of the most difficult barriers to overcome and they share their stories with me, when they walk out of my office I tell them, “I believe in you and I want you to go out there and make me proud.” A couple of times the student has turned around and said, “Nobody’s ever said that to me, Lauri.” I said, “Well, that new change happens right here.”
ALAN PETERKA
When your dad was telling you that story, you were actually really feeling him and it was … I mean, you were agreeing at that point.
LAURI HUGHES
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
ALAN PETERKA
You’re like, “You’re right dad.”
LAURI HUGHES
Yeah.
ALAN PETERKA
“They are judging me.”
LAURI HUGHES
Yeah.
ALAN PETERKA
“They are judging us.”
LAURI HUGHES
Right. I think a lot of people are just guilty of doing that, right? We have these boxes in society and everybody has to be in a box, right?
ALAN PETERKA
Right.
LAURI HUGHES
I just, at that time that just resonated with me. Kids can be cruel. We’ve all heard that before. There’s a lot of push today about, no bullying, and treating everybody fairly, and equitably, and equally, but when I was a kid going to school and teachers would want to push me into lower level reading, or writing classes, or whatever, or kids would make comments about, “Well, Lauri’s a blind girl, the blind girl.” Teachers would turn a blind eye to that stuff. They wouldn’t step in and advocate for me, right? When I didn’t have anybody advocating at the school for me, and my father tells me this, and explains this to me, it seems like it makes a lot of sense to me, right? Yeah, sadly it took me a long time to see the bigger picture, right?
ALAN PETERKA
That it wasn’t just limited to the elite, the educated, and that this was more of a societal issue.
LAURI HUGHES
Right.
ALAN PETERKA
That kind of picture.
LAURI HUGHES
Exactly, yeah. I ventured into Kirkwood. I didn’t know anything. Actually, how it all started Alan … I don’t know if we were going to talk about this, but actually how it all started was I knew as a young girl my mother had advocated for me when I was six and seven years old, and I was exposed to the Iowa Department for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Because, when I took my first couple of years of Iowa Test of Basic Skills, they had brought … Instead of having your standard 8 1/2 by 11 bubble sheet to fill in, they had given me really big legal sheets, they were pink with real big ovals for me to fill in. That was my only minute connection to somebody who would want to help me. Ten years after high school when I decide I’m going to go to Kirkwood and get a two-year degree, I reached out to them first. I’ll never forget it, because this gentleman came to my home, my apartment and he was going to be assigned to be my case worker. He came to meet with me to talk to me to see what I wanted to do.
I’ll never forget it, because that day we had talked about a lot of stuff and the decision was that he would bring me to Kirkwood and allow me to make those first initial steps to get registered in a class or two and begin the journey, but he was going to help me do this. I’ll never forget that day, because he stood up in my kitchen and he closed up his big old briefcase that he had brought with him and he said, “Lauri Hughes, there is absolutely nothing you cannot do. The only thing you lack is self-confidence and once we build that in you, the opportunities will be endless.” I thought, “Yeah, he don’t know me.” I’m like, “No way. He’s crazy,” when he left.
ALAN PETERKA
Sure thing, guy.
LAURI HUGHES
He really was right. I was really nervous about coming into a classroom environment, getting treated differently, being disrespected, and I was shocked that students actually would talk to me. I couldn’t believe it. I was really, really surprised, because I had accommodation paperwork, because I could not read the board even from the front row and so I would have accommodations that I would have to speak with the instructor after class and have them sign forms for me so they understood that if you’re going to write something on the board, you have to state it as you write it so I know what you’re writing. The teachers were more than willing to do whatever it took to help me and it was a very new, very new experience for me.
ALAN PETERKA
It was really out of the gate here at Kirkwood for you?
LAURI HUGHES
It really was.
ALAN PETERKA
People were being supportive in a way that you had never experienced before.
LAURI HUGHES
Yeah.
ALAN PETERKA
Advocating for you, or teaching you how to advocate for yourself.
LAURI HUGHES
Right. There were glimpses of not-so-good moments either. There were still pockets of uncertainty maybe with people, right? Because some people are a little bit quicker to grasp the concept of supporting all than others. I remember going to take my compass test and there was a gal at the test center and she … After I finished my testing, she gave me my results page and was going to circle like, “Did I need a reading class, or a writing class, or a math class?” Back in those days, that was before my eye operation in 2005, so my right eye was very enlarged and had a glaucoma in it, so it was a deformed eye and it looked different, so people judged me. The gal at the test center when she looked at my results, so she had the paper and she had it turned towards me, and then she was going to circle what I needed to take. Then she looked at it and she picked up the paper and looked, “Oh, you tested into composition one,” as if that was a big deal, right? I thought, “Is that good?” “Oh yeah, that’s good.” I could just tell there was this surprise.
ALAN PETERKA
Talk to me a little bit about asking for the support. Was that a hard thing to do?
LAURI HUGHES
Going to speak with those instructors, for the most part most of them were okay with it. Most of them wanted to help me, most of them wanted to know, “What else can I do to help you?” Which was really surprising to me, but there’s always a few throughout your journey who when it comes to accommodations have more of the mindset that, “Well, if you can’t do based upon what I give everybody, then that’s just too bad,” right? “Everybody should be treated equally and I shouldn’t have to give you additional notes, or the opportunity to have a copy of the page that I did on the Elmo,” or back in the day it was the overhead projectors, right? When I took a math class and the instructor wrote on them, and then my accommodations was that I could get a copy of that in case I didn’t … Especially when it comes to math, right? The instructor’s rattling off the numbers and doing the equation and the process, or the problem … I can’t see and listen and watch it all and get it all correct.
Every once in a while there’d be an instructor who hesitantly did, or reluctantly did the minimum. Then I remember when I had went to Mount Mercy as a student and I took a statistics course and the instructor was a brand new graduate. I’d went in and I had all my accommodations. Because by now, I think I have this well oiled machine, right? Now I have confidence, I know what I need to succeed, and I can succeed. When I go into meet with her and I tell her this, she’s absolutely positively wanting to put her feet down and say, “Absolutely not. I don’t give students notes. I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to do that.” I went to speak with the gal who works in the learning services office about her response to me and she said, “Lauri, sometimes you have instructors who are very accommodating and want to help you succeed, and sometimes you’re given the opportunity to educate them on how, if you give me a little bit, I will be able to perform very well for you.” She said, “Some of them have to be taught that.” She said … That’s when I knew. She’s a new instructor and you’re going to have to help her through this process, because you’re her first individual.
When that happened, that was also very helpful because when I went onto Iowa for my MBA … At that time still, I hadn’t had the vision corrected that I recently had had, so I couldn’t see the board. There were a few instructors who were very, very difficult and didn’t want to make any kind of accommodations. It was actually my second semester of my program at Iowa and I had a stats class. The first night of course I go in, I have my accommodations paperwork, I go in early to talk with the instructor, explain what I need and I could just tell he wasn’t interested, he didn’t really want to help me. He was going to be one of those bare minimum people. Then in the latter part of February I found out that I was going to have to have my eye removed. I was going in for surgery on Monday, I’d be discharged on Tuesday, and my class was Tuesday night. I said to him the week before, I said, “I just want you to know that next Tuesday night when I come to class I will have a white pressure bandage all across this half of my face because they’re taking my eye out next Monday.”
He said, “What?” I told him. “All right,” and that was it. That Tuesday night I came to class, so I was discharged from the university at like 11:45 in the morning, I was sitting in class at 6pm. Of course my family said, “Don’t go to school.” I’m like, “Nope, this man needs to learn a lesson,” right? “I’m here to help him learn.” I went to class and I’d taken pain medication and I took my little tape recorder to record the lecture and I just laid with my head down and I could still see of course, and I’m just laying there. We took our first break and he’d come over and he knelt down by me and he said, “Lauri, you can go home. You look very uncomfortable and I absolutely don’t want you to feel like you need to sit here through this.” I said, “No, I’ve got my tape recorder, so if I’m not getting the lecture, I’ll listen to it again later.”
I didn’t leave Alan. I stayed until 10:00 and the rest of the semester that gentleman was just more than accommodating, but sometimes we all have to learn, right? Sometimes our lessons are easy and sometimes they’re hard, but my hope was with him if somebody else walks in there in a future semester and has some kind of accommodations, that he’s going to be more supportive because he has experienced somebody who was very dedicated and committed and succeeded through his course, even with a little bit of accommodations. There have been those. I’ve learned a lot. I hope other people have learned a lot, but it all goes back to I strive each and every day to be that beacon of hope so that everybody can be given those opportunities.
ALAN PETERKA
What would you like students with disabilities to know? You’ve mentioned you want to serve as a beacon of hope. What would you like them to know as a beacon of hope?
LAURI HUGHES
First of all, I think it’s important that those individuals with disabilities know that other people care and as an individual who’s been down that road, I know it’s possible and I believe that they can do it and I want to be one of those people where if they’re having a bad day, if they’re struggling, they know that somebody’s there to listen, they know that there’s somebody there who believes in them, and that we have all kinds of resources to help them. Whatever those stumbling blocks are, or those challenges that they believe at this time are big mountains, I want them after a visit with me, or after a conversation, or being introduced to some resources, can realize that that’s really not a mountain, it’s just a minor bump in the road and that you can continue.
ALAN PETERKA
What advice would you have for instructors?
LAURI HUGHES
For instructors I would state that each and every individual has a story, each of us do, right? Some of us have had more challenges, some of us have witnessed more challenges within and observing other people, but everybody has their own unique story and you have to find it in your heart to allow each individual to be individual. Not always put them in little boxes of, “Well, this person is on financial aid, or this person is a single parent,” or whatever those little boxes are that we want to kind of sometimes judge people by, but just treat each and every single individual as a very special and a unique person and believe in them. Believe that each one of your students can do it. Maybe not this semester. We may have some of those students where you think, “All right Tim, I’ve been doing all I can to help you buddy and you’re just not making your end of the bargain,” right?
In those cases, we can have conversations with the students about our concerns with their ability to be successful at this time. Not their ability to be successful, but just at this time, “Are there other things that are pulling you away from this? Because it seems to me that there are and maybe we could look at a do-over attempt on this kind of a situation,” and just believing in them. The big thing is, is they don’t know that you believe in them unless you tell them. Unless you take the time to communicate that with them. I think that kind of an environment has to be said day one in the classroom. I’ve taught college 101 for many semesters and I’ve always made that a point my first class period. I want to get to know those students, I want to know what’s special and unique about them, and so I ask them that. Then of course, I make little cards and I study them like flashcards, like I have an exam, right? Because, it’s nice when you walk into the bank and it’s a Friday afternoon … You don’t see this as much anymore, right? Because nobody goes to the bank to cash their check on Fridays.
ALAN PETERKA
It’s all online these days.
LAURI HUGHES
It’s all online these days.
ALAN PETERKA
Back in the day.
LAURI HUGHES
Back in the day when everybody would line up on Friday afternoon to cash their check and there are three or four bank tellers and they’re all busy and they’re working and, “Next, next,” right? Or, you walk into the bank and the teller said, “Lauri, come on over here. How are the grandkids?” I mean, that just speaks volumes to who they know and how they care. That’s what I think is important for instructors. As an educator, I mean I try really, really hard for those individuals who I’ve had the opportunity to spend a little more time in my office with, with students visiting with me and sharing some of their story with me. I’ve had students who’ve had to drop because their mom had cancer, or they’ve had to drop because they were diagnosed with a rare form of cancer down at the U, or I had a gal who had to stop coming to classes because her husband was diagnosed with cancer and then he died the next semester. Alan, I make notes of that and then I send them cards and I let them know that they’re not forgotten, right? That when … When they know when they’re ready to come back … Granted, that all takes time and I know everybody is limited on that, but by golly you just have to believe in the student.
ALAN PETERKA
Lauri, I like to finish up these shows with a recommendation from a guest. I wonder if you have any recommendations for me, for our listeners. It could be anything in life, a great recipe, love, something, a book you’ve read, a documentary, anything in life that you feel compelled to recommend today.
LAURI HUGHES
Well, I will leave with one of my favorite quotes from one of the individuals that I have admired since the day I started to learn about her, and that was Helen Keller. Because, when you talk about disabilities, she of course could not see, or could not hear, but went on to do amazing things, which is a good example for all of us that anything is possible when we just give a little bit of ourselves to help other people. One of her quotes that I cherish and I have in my office and I share it whenever possible is just this, “The most beautiful things in life cannot be seen, nor heard, but only felt with the heart.” I think that the things that move each and every one of us each and every single day are not always the things we see or the things we hear, but how we felt going through that experience. When something hits you with a core, it can change your life and make the impossible possible. Each and every day I try to connect with people here to their heart, because that’s where the change is going to happen.
ALAN PETERKA
Lauri, I wanted to say thank you again. Thanks for all the positivity and all the connections to our hearts. This is Education Is. You can find the podcast at EducationIs.us and thanks so much, it’s been great.
LAURI HUGHES
Thank you. It was a pleasure.