My name is Natalia Rivera.
I'm a doctoral student.

And, well, doctoral graduate actually.
And in the Department of Hispanic

Languages and Literature at the
University of Pittsburgh.

I'm also a Spanish Instructor and I
specialize in Latin American and

[inaudible] literature and 
critical disability studies.

So my interests, my academic interests
are intimately tied to my personal

experience as a student and
now instructor with

a learning disability and co-occurring
anxiety.

So, the first memory that I remember,
just on a personal level,

recognizing that there was some access
issues or some degree of

especially in the high school level,
some degree of

a lack of knowledge, really, of
different types of learning styles

and different types of processing speeds
because of my diagnosis of attention

deficit disorder. One of the key 
components of how that,

you know, how ADD affects me is that
I have a slower processing speed.

So, while my reading comprehension is
strong,

my processing speed affects my 
writing speed so I'm not always

able to produce a paragraph in a 
timely manner. So, we often

had problems in English class. This
was in tenth grade and

the expectation was that we would be
able to write a paragraph in half-hour.

And often times I would need double
amount of time. I would need an hour.

And sometimes I wouldn't even be able
to finish one simple paragraph

in an hour.

And I remember my English instructor,
at the time,

after class when I sort of approached her
and said,

"Uhm, hey. Not withstanding the
additional time. I wasn't

really able to finish my paragraph."
And I remember she looked at me

incredulous and said to me, "I mean,
if you can't even write a paragraph,

a simple paragraph in one hour,
I don't know what to tell you."

So, I remember that moment. I
also remember later on

when I was preparing for AP Exams.
This also happened in high school.

This was my junior year. I was taking
an AP World History class

And I remember that I approached my 
instructor, already knowing on my own

because I had already had plenty of
experience advocating for myself since

I was a child. I already knew that
all standardized testing

had a process for requesting 
accommodations.

So, I remember approaching my AP
World History Exam and-

I meant, my AP World History teacher
and explaining to him

that I was registered with disability
resources, that I had a documented

disability and that these were
the particular accommodations I needed

time and a half. It was a very common 
accommodation.

And I remember him telling me, "I don't 
have a problem providing you

classroom accommodations. I'm just not
sure that

that extended time is provided on the
AP Exam." And I was just

flabbergasted that an instructor would
actively misinform me that way

because even I knew at the tender age
of, I don't know, sixteen,

that ATS always provided a process
for requesting

accommodation. So, I was stunned
that an adult felt that he could

just misinform me that way. And I
know

that misinforming me not necessarily
with a negative intent, but he

genuinely had no notion of the
process. And

yeah. So, it's un-willful misinformation, 
but

the effect is similar. Because imagine
had he said something like that

to a student who had no idea how
to request accommodations.

You know, how to attain an 
evaluation needed to substantiate

the need for accommodations. So
it's just a lot of misinformation

enabled with ignorance and not so much
malice.

But, just the complete lack of information
out there just really compromises

student's ability to advocate for
themselves.

In my personal work with the
disability rights

community because I worked two
and a half years at a disability

rights organization called Autistic
Self Advocacy Network

and meeting a lot of people my age

a lot of students don't find out that 
they have a diagnosis until much later

in life. Once they start picking
up on their own symptoms, they seek

out individually supports. So I

certainly, on a personal level, I 
benefited from my

mother's knowledge and from her
experiences as a parent advocate.

I think my awareness of a level
of discrimination

even if it was kind of on the 
level of microaggression,

I think I had more awareness of
discrimination at the high school level

but, my initial exposure to advocacy
really happened when I was young

and I remember going...
There were some days off from school

and I remember going to the office with 
my mom. And I remember meeting

other moms and seeing her work part
time at

this parent advocacy group for parents
with disabilities

so I thank my mother for, you know,
introducing me

to the concept of self advocacy and
for empowering me

to use it in every aspect of my life and
at a professional level

and an academic level, as well.

So, I don't really remember the day of
the Americans with Disabilities Act

'cause I was just a couple of months 
old.

But, the impact on me, basically
I sincerely

doubt had I been born, I don't know,
forty years ago

as opposed to thirty years ago, there's
a possibility that I would not have

attended college. And even if I had
attended college,

I just sort of feel that I would have
never considered doing a

PhD, if it hadn't been for the Americans
with Disabilities Act.

Because graduate school, the level of
support at the undergraduate level,

at least at a liberal arts college,

that tends to be more supportive is 
radically different from graduate school

where the level of support is practically
non-existent, I feel

and I think a lot of graduate students
feel the same way.

So without the ADA, I'm not even sure
I would have been fortunate enough

to attend college so I think that it
offered me

the protections that I needed to go
beyond what my

wildest dreams, right? So I feel like...

I've had a very privileged life and I'm
grateful for my academic

opportunities that I know there are so
many deserving students

who didn't have the opportunities that I
had and I'm not only grateful to my family

for their unyielding dedication

to advocacy and also very

grateful for the ADA as well. I mean,
disabilities definitely run in my family

neuro-developmental disabilities, learning
disabilities. I do have a cousin who

was on the autism spectrum and

I don't think, by no means, benefited

by the protections offered by the
Americans with Disabilities Act in the

same degree that I did. I think
unfortunately because I think there

still cultural stigma

particularly if an autism spectrum
disorder

co-occurs with a intellectual disability,
but he

finished his associate's degree with
minimal supports.

I think because the ADA empowered me,
I feel like

I'm prepared as an instructor to offer
support

to students with other disabilities. I
have

students with documented disabilities
and I feel that because

of my personal experience as a
student

with disability, I feel much more
prepared to work with

a wider range of students who need
different needs and I'm prepared

to be accommodating and I'm prepared
to

at least endeavored to make students
feel like they're valuable members of

my classroom. I'm not a perfect 
instructor. I still have a lot to learn

but, I think that level of

humanity, I think, that speaks to a
lot of students and I think that I'm

better able to connect to connect with
my students. So,

the ADA allowed me to be useful as
an instructor, basically. But, I

remember one interview I did with
a student on the

autism spectrum, who was attending
a

college specifically for students with
learning disabilities.

And she made a very astute observation
about

learning disabilities under colleges and
sort of their

focus on vocational training as opposed to
academic training and

this was a smart girl who wanted to

pursue a degree in the humanities and she
was doing an Interdisciplinary Liberal

Arts degree, but she couldn't take
philosophy, for instance. Or

she couldn't do a major in history.
And I think the way

the classes, the course work, the
curriculum...

just how all the academic options were
structured in this particular college

it sort of reinforced this idea that
traditional academic

disciplines are somehow out of reach
for a student who

reads as having an intellectual disability
or who reads as having

potential learning difficulties and she
lamented and I

wholeheartedly agreed with her appraisal.
She lamented the fact that she couldn't

pursue a traditional discipline she would
have wanted. She wanted to be a historian.

So I think that in a way, people wouldn't 
really read the legislation

very carefully.
I guess in their attempt

to sort of include people, they're
inadvertently limiting the options

for a lot of students because there
are students who may need to

do- There are students who may
want to pursue

physics, right? But they need a longer
timeline to complete

their coursework, but it's just in a
traditional four-year

college. Those mechanisms just
aren't in place to provide

that support system for a student who
needs additional support, but

who wants to pursue a traditional
academic discipline. So, I think in that

regard, even though the spirit of the
ADA, you definitely get the sense

with the wording of the legislation
that it's intended to

sort of correct that kind of

societal exclusion and academic exclusion
of students who want to pursue traditional

disciplines, but I think in that regard,
the level of

enforcement I think is still very
differential. I think another thing

that I do want to add, just for my
personal

observations as an instructor,

the regular enforcement of the
2009 Amendment -

which was critical in the sense that it
broadened the category of disability

to include vary proteins.
And by "protein", I mean,

very inconsistent disabilities.
For instance,

something like cancer or a auto-
immune disorder

finally was incorporated into this broader
category of disabilities, so it wasn't

just- So, that 2009 Amendment was
critical because

it rendered clear that disability
did not have to be

"stable". It did not have to be
a "consistent"

you know, "putatively consistent"
physical disability to qualify

as a disability under the legislation.
So, this included

disabilities, whether somatic or
cognitive disabilities

that were either inconsistent in 
nature or went through periods of

remission. So, something like bipolar
disorder, right?

So, the 2008 Amendment, what was great
about it was that it made clear that

not withstanding the point through which
you're sort of going

sort of like thinking something like
bipolar disorder where you're going

through sort of a manic depressive episode
that at a institutional

level there was still a responsibility to
provide out of supports to that person

who was experiencing cyclical changes.
And what I've noticed

at the university level, especially with
science programs,

that they include a tidbit that actually
seems very almost

unlawful to me.
You look at the

graduate handbooks and the
undergraduate handbooks as well

they have this very strange policy
that you're supposed to

let your professors know about your
disability. That you

must tell your professors within the
first two weeks of the semester

that you have documented disability.
The problem is that a lot of

disabilities don't work that way.
There are moments where you're

"functional". You know, relatively
functional and there are moments where

you are not functional in socially 
understood terms, right?

And especially for students, this is not
unusual for students who

receive a diagnosis later in life when
they're just commencing college

which is a transitional period, so it
makes sense that certain symptoms

that were not disabling in other 
contexts, suddenly become disabling

when you enter college. And that policy

basically

basically misinforms students into

thinking that they are not able

to request supports when they've
reached a point where their

condition has become so disabling that
they can't necessarily meet

requirements at the expected time frame.
So, it's almost as if there's like a

mechanism in place to give the

false impression that you're not able
to receive supports

later in the semester.
So, I think in that sense it's more like

even if there are protections in place,
institutional ignorance

and the regular enforcement continue to be
a problem. So, if I could pick one

thing that needs to change in terms of
access...

I'm gonna start a little bit abstract and
then I'm gonna try to clarify what I mean

I think we sort of overcome this concept
of

autonomy. What do I mean by that?
And I think a lot of

disability rights activists, when we think
about advocacy, they do think about

in terms of no collective grassroots
movement, so there is an

emphasis on relationality, there's an
emphasis on mutual support.

And I think traditionally in

Occidental culture, in Western culture,

the responsibility for seeking social
accommodations for disabilities,

largely incumbent upon the individual
and not society.

I think the ADA certainly

gives the impression that social

accommodation is in fact, what the terms
or the phrase suggests,

"a social responsibility", but in practice
it's not treated like a

collective responsibility and I see this a
lot in the university in administration

level.
So when a student begins

college, not only are you responsible
for time management,

for learning how to live independently
for the first time, if that's the case,

learning to live with roommates, which
may not actually be accessible for you

if you're a student with a disability. You
are also responsible for coordinating your

own accommodations and depending on the
kinds of

accommodations that you need, I think at
the undergraduate level - in my case -

it wasn't so overwhelming, I could still
manage it, but at the graduate level

to try to request new accommodations,
based on the new needs that you

develop because of the shifting levels
of work and

sort of in the overall. It's just your
coursework is just more demanding

at the graduate level.

There needs to be a way for social
accommodation,

academic accommodations to be-

it needs to be re-thought of as a
collective responsibility, but at the

administrative level there is a
responsibility at the administrative level

for the student to succeed and that it
is not merely

an autonomous burden, it is
a collective responsibility.

It is a collective duty.

I do think that we as community
members can take on the

responsibility to sort of identify those
disabilities rights organizations that

are actively working towards providing

supports and services

and not focusing on the cure aspect
because the cure aspect is not

allowing us to address the immediate
societal needs.

So, I think organizations
like the

Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the one
that I worked for,

they have these wonderful advocacy center
programs. They really work on

providing cognitively accessible resources
for political

advocacy, for instance.
And they empower

students to think of ways

for advocating for supports on
college campuses.

So, looking at organizations that

empower people to advocate for themselves
with the skills that they

have to feel that their lives are worth

living as they are.