Rate My Professor Jon Arakaki

Jon Arakaki is a faculty member in the Communication Studies and Journalism department at Portland Community College. He plays a significant role in improving instructional practices within these fields, particularly through his leadership in accessibility initiatives for diverse learners. In October 2015, Arakaki presented an opportunity to the Communication Studies and Journalism Subject Area Committee (SAC) to conduct a research survey and study focused on best practices for adapting course content to accommodate students with disabilities. Collaborating with fellow faculty Chris Kernion and Stacie Williams as part of the Communication and Journalism Subject Area Accessibility Study Group, he co-authored the comprehensive 'Best Practices for Communication Final Report.' This report addresses the unique challenges in Communication Studies and Journalism courses, which often rely on highly visual or auditory materials such as commercials, static images, movies, television shows, and nonverbal behaviors.

The study emphasizes enabling all students to identify and perceive essential communication elements, including eye behavior, gestures, spatial representations, verbal messages, and auditory or vocal components like pitch, inflection, rate, and pauses. Recommendations include fostering faculty-student interaction to facilitate respectful and inclusive accommodations, incorporating learning units on deaf and blind culture to combat stereotypes and ableism, distinguishing factual descriptions from interpretations to preserve critical thinking, developing alternative assignments such as audio clips for video-based tasks, utilizing alt text and clear descriptions for images in both face-to-face and online settings, and incorporating multisensory elements like tone, speech rate, temperature, acoustics, and olfactics in nonverbal analyses. The group advocated for an SAC repository of accessible assignments and proactive testing of interactive content. Outcomes were shared with the SAC, presented at the Rock Creek Teaching and Learning Center, and Arakaki delivered the methodology at the Instructional Technology Council annual conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, contributing to broader advancements in accessible education.