Student Spotlight: A Collaborative Project Between Access Office and Graphic Communications

Each semester, teams of students in St. Louis Community College’s Art 236 Typography class compete to create a poster that illustrates and celebrates a student with a disability and creates awareness of campus services available. One poster is chosen for display on campus. This creative collaboration between Learning/Teaching and Student Services provides students in the class an opportunity to learn about the challenges and successes of students with disabilities, apply their skills to the artistic process, and work with a client. It gives the Spotlight student an opportunity to tell their story, educate others, and be involved in an artistic process. The goals of this diversity project are to illustrate that students with disabilities are people with dreams, goals, skills, and accomplishments; to use the curriculum to connect students with and without disabilities in a common cause of awareness; to create on-campus awareness of support available to students with disabilities; and to engage Graphic Communications students in empathic/human-centered design practices.

Innovators: Theresa Smythe, Michael Swoboda