Meet our Keynote Speaker, Haben Girma
The first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma is an award-winning advocate, author, and keynote speaker. She earned the Helen Keller Achievement Award, reached Forbes 30 under 30, and President Obama named her a White House Champion of Change. She believes disability challenges are opportunities for innovation, sparking new technologies that move society forward. Haben travels the globe teaching organizations how to build stronger, resilient, and more connected communities.
Her bestselling book Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law takes readers on adventures around the world, including training with a guide dog in New Jersey, climbing an iceberg in Alaska, fighting for blind readers at a courthouse in Vermont, and talking with President Biden and President Obama at The White House. Warm, funny, thoughtful, and uplifting, this captivating book shows how we can resist isolation and find the keys to connection. The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, TODAY Show, and Stephen Curry have all praised the book.
Read all about the event and our webinars in the 2025 Disability Summit Report.
Revisit the MSU Disability Summit through our collection of recorded webinars. Each session offers valuable insights, personal experiences, and ideas to help shape a more accessible and inclusive Michigan State University.
Intersections of Disability and Healthcare Environments: Panelists from the College of Human Medicine will explore the complex intersections of disability and healthcare environments. Ariel Cascio will present research at the nexus of disability studies, neurodiversity, and medical education. Karen Stanley-Kime will address the inclusion and belonging of medical students with physical and mental health disabilities. Amy Greenberg will share systematic approaches to designing accessible medical curricula. Heather Laird Fick will examine the lived experiences of students and physicians with disabilities across the continuum of medical education and practice. Together, the panel offers insights into creating more inclusive, equitable environments in medical training and healthcare.
Improving Digital Course Accessibility: Insights from Instructors and Designers: This panel presentation brings together instructors and instructional designers to explore digital course accessibility through institutional data and practical teaching experiences. Participants will examine key findings from the Spartan Ally institutional report to identify common accessibility barriers in digital learning environments. Panelists will share real-world challenges and effective strategies for creating more accessible courses. Attendees will engage in individual reflection to consider how these strategies apply to their own teaching and will be invited to share their ideas with the group. The session supports collective progress toward inclusive learning by highlighting achievable steps that promote access and belonging for all students.
University World Language Instructors' Readiness for Disability Inclusion: Some disabled students incur challenges when learning second or additional languages and report that instructors play a critical role in their inclusion (Scott, et al., 2014) in university language classes. I examined ten university language instructors’ readiness for disability inclusion through a critical disabilities studies framework. Instructors shared they do not feel they are ready to meet the varied needs of their disabled students. They report that degrees of readiness come via either personal exposure to disability (e.g., in their family) or from ad hoc experience trying to meet students’ accommodations needs, rather than from institutional training.
Inclusive Postsecondary Education: "College to Find Jobs": STRIDE participated in the Community Engaged Research Fellowship 2024-2025 cohort. The research project was to co-design an inclusive postsecondary education (IPSE) program at MSU. Students with intellectual disabilities have limited options when applying for college and many students do not know that they can go to college. To address the gap in disability inclusion and belonging for disabled students with intellectual disabilities, STRIDE implemented community engaged research practices to co-design an IPSE program with a high school student with intellectual disabilities. This presentation includes a Photovoice PowerPoint, and plain language pathways created by the STRIDE IPSE intern.
Hybrid/Flexible Teaching for Improving Student Experience: This workshop will introduce attendees to developing blended and hybrid/flexible (hyflex) courses. This workshop will 1) outline the impacts of blended teaching and learning as a means of enhancing students' access to classes, 2) explore methods for integrating online and in-person students through activities and discussions, and 3) offer practical insights into structuring and facilitating hyflex classes across various classrooms and technologies.
Recovery Happens Here: Centering Student Experiences in Building Inclusive Practices: The proposed panel presentation focuses on the lived experiences of students in recovery from substance use disorder on the topic of developing and expanding inclusive practices in higher education that promote a sense of belonging, including a focus on peer support, overcoming barriers and multiple pathways to recovery. Research has found college students in recovery are often isolated, marginalized and underserved (Broman, et al., 2024). A comprehensive approach to recovery supports focuses on reducing barriers and increasing quality of care from a social ecological perspective, including support from peers with lived addiction experience (Xuan, et al., 2021).
Tools with a Purpose: Improve Student Outcomes with Accessible Technologies: MSU IT Educational Technology is excited to present accessibility tools available to faculty, staff, and students. These tools support making digital content more accessible for others and offer support for users with their own access needs. This session will cover accessibility tools like Equatio, Read&Write, OrbitNote, Kurzweil 3000, and D2L’s Alternative Formats.
Showcase on Disability Research in STEM at MSU: We want to showcase ways we center disabled experiences in our work. Our research uses “nothing about us without us” as a guiding principle, as our participants and researchers build on personal experiences with disabilities and give power to disabled students. We specifically highlight our pathways in disability research, so that those interested have a framework for how they could be involved or run similar work that centers disabled perspectives. We value actionable outcomes to this work related to students' and practitioners' specific interests and want to give practitioners access to current research that they could integrate into their courses.
But Wait, There's More!: Teaching Accessibility as a Topic: The accessibility conversation in higher education often centers on how we can support students with disabilities and how to create inclusive learning environments. While this is crucially important, what if we told you that’s not where it ends? In fact, what if we were able to show you how a group of MSU faculty have incorporated accessibility into the content of their courses as well as the pedagogy? That’s right, let’s teach it as a topic to our students! Join us for a great conversation to hear how MSU faculty have done this and how you can, too!
Transforming Theatre Ensemble presents...: Transforming Theatre Ensemble (TTE) is premiering a new short play developed using a variety of collaborative story making approaches including theatre exercises, games, story circles, research, and dialogue. Following the performance, the actors and Artistic Director Lynn Lammers will give a talkback discussing how both our process and product centered accessibility. The audience will be invited to reflect on the themes of the play, try out some theatre games, and brainstorm ideas for disability-centered stories that need to be uplifted at MSU.
Disability Inclusion in Grad School: Breaking Barriers as Students & Employees: Graduate students with disabilities face unique challenges that intensify the already demanding nature of graduate studies. The Graduate Student Accessibility & Support Network (GSASN) will host a panel and community discussion on the unique experiences of disabled graduate and professional students. Hear from panelists representing a diversity of graduate/professional programs on the barriers they face as both disabled students and employees of the university. Attendees will have an opportunity to ask additional questions before a community discussion on how to increase inclusion, belonging, and accessibility for this historically overlooked population of students.
Reimagining Disability Access: Fatigue, Hostility and Intimacy in Higher Education: Disabled students have long faced access fatigue (Konrad, 2021) and access hostility (Samuels, 2021) throughout their college experiences. While recent shifts in higher education have revealed new, innovative ways to implement accessibility, many of these approaches are still denied in favor of maintaining traditional—and often ableist—practices (Campanile, 2020). This session explores how higher education professionals can resist these norms by reimagining accessibility through the lens of access intimacy (Mingus, 2011)—the elusive experience when someone deeply understands and cares about a disabled person’s access needs. Together, the audience and presenters will consider ways to create affirming and accessible campus environments.