As a part of the Education and Social Justice Research Fellowship, I spent three weeks at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama conducting qualitative research on support systems that sustain students throughout their time in college, and how those systems are influenced by Spring Hill’s Jesuit values. My research was guided by the following question:
What characterizes accessibility at Spring Hill College?
In summer 2022, I traveled to Mobile, Alabama to research accessibility culture at Spring Hill College. During my time there, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 students, 4 faculty members, 3 student affairs staff members, and 1 senior administrator.
Upon returning to Washington, D.C., I transcribed my interviews, coded my findings, and created a 4,000 word digital case study report that I presented at the annual Global Social Justice Research Symposium.
As a small college, Spring Hill’s support systems heavily rely on organic interactions between students, staff, and faculty. The abundance of these interactions lay the foundation for a campus community, one that has sustained Spring Hill for years.
While support systems at Spring Hill are very much rooted in relationships between students, staff, and faculty, in 2022, the college had begun to develop new formal resources and to adapt existing ones. There are pre-existing formal resources, such as Residential Life, Public Safety, and the Center for Student Involvement. But within the past three or so years, SHC has developed more specific, formal resources with the goal of creating a more robust support system for students.
As Spring Hill works to formalize more campus resources, it seems that the institution is working to strike a balance between being proactive and responsive. Spring Hill’s efforts at creating more formal resources speaks to the intention of proactivity in supporting students, an intention that is necessary for increasing access on campus.
Disability culture at Spring Hill revolves around an accommodations model, in which students can formally request academic or residential accommodations. Students apply for accommodations through a self-identification form, in which they list the requested services and their diagnosed disability. As a part of this application, students must submit documentation to the Disability Services team that verifies that they have the listed condition.