Link to syllabus document: DST 604 Syllabus

DST 604: Access Activations: Building Disability-Centred Access Plans (A Workplace-Integrated Course)

 School of Disability Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University

Please note: This syllabus is a companion document to the course Press Book. This document collects course descriptions, polices, and schedules, many of which are outlined in more detail in the Press Book.

September 2nd – December 1, 2025

Fall Study Week: October 12th – 18th, 2025

Course Content Delivery: This is a hybrid course. If you’d like to join us in person, we will be at 99 Gerrard Street E, 5th floor, room 576. We request that everyone wear a high quality, high-filtration mask (N95 or better, which can be provided. We have red-strap 3M Auras and duckbills). We will also have a HEPA air filter in the space. If you’d like to join online, here is our Zoom link: https://torontomu.zoom.us/j/98456768380?pwd=1Shbj0npYspN8hypv7efwG3MtttM1M.1

You are welcome to switch between in-person and online attendance.

Joining our discord server here: https://discord.gg/e7vbz4NF

For in an introduction to discord: Discord 101

Course coordinator: Eliza Chandler (eliza.chandler@torontomu.ca)

Course instructors:

Sama Nemat Allah (sama.nematallah@torontomu.ca)

Finn Stanners (fstanners@torontomu.ca)

Eliza Chandler (eliza.chandler@torontomu.ca)

Relationship to Land

Our engagements, exchanges, knowledge makership, and mobilizations within this course reflect the intercorporeal and inextricable entanglements between land, spirit, mind, and bodies (this includes beings and non-beings, humans and non-humans alike). We understand land as kin (Simpson, 2017) and come to our political labours from new and old learnings, grounded in insights of Indigenous onto-epistemology and worldviews.

TMU is a settlement in Tkarontoa—a Mohawk word and the original denomination of what is colonially known now as Toronto, meaning “the place in the water where the trees are standing”—on the unceded, expropriated, and stolen lands of the Mississauga’s of the Credit, the Haudenasaune, the Anishinaabe and the Chippewa. Tkaronto is in the ‘Dish With One Spoon Territory’. The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee that bound them to share the territory and protect the land.

We also name that the computers and technology that allow us to traverse space, to exchange time and temperatures virtually is fed and fueled by Congolese blood in the DRC and the exploited labour of our Third World siblings.

In this space, we ask how our disability justice access activationist work changes in its actional, praxistical iterations when we understand the disablement of al-ard, or the Earth, as bound to the disablement of the earth’s peoples and bodyminds. We refuse to merely name Indigenous sovereignty. We choose instead to orient ourselves and the architectures of care we build towards it, both here on Turtle Island and across Indigenous lands this world over. As disabled Palestinian and Southern justice poet Rasha Abdilhadi reminds us: “What happens here and there are one.” We are all but a hologram of (land) struggle everywhere.

All our work towards Otherwise is rendered null and void unless and until the land makes a safe return to the stewardships of its original caretakers: our moments and movements and makings and meetings with madness and its outcroppings should act accordingly

Landback, first, foremost and forevermore.

Access Commitments and Political Orientations

We interdependently take up the past, present, and promissory futures of both disability and accessibility through the oft-obscured and oft-uncited genealogies, stories, imaginations, and realities of transnational disability onto-epistemologies. Our access praxis is made wholly, relational, and decolonially generative when it dethrones and defamiliarizes itself with whiteness settler knowledge-power as both its axis and nucleus. We task ourselves with, in the words of Jasbir Puar (2023), a refusal to “reify Global North/South divides” and instead foreground “the intermeshed matrices of settle-colonialism, empire, and infrastructures of disablement that cut across otherwise self-apparent geographies.”

We ask (knowing that there is no one answer and that our answers might fall short, need to be amended, nourished, repaired) as Laura Jaffee and Lara Sheehi (2024) do, “What does it mean to do disability justice transnationally while avoiding imposing epistemologies of the north on southern contexts?” How do we imagine our struggles  as doubly rooted in and indebted to an internationalist and cross-movement coalition of decolonial assemblages? We thusly read, theorize, and engage with disability (justice) not as an identity to be claimed, but as a felt methodology that breathes against a ribcage of relationality and power. How is power wielded, weaponized, honed, disrupted, re-serviced for and against the grain of our decolonial futurities?

We name this common as a politically noisy one first and foremost in order to turn askew the oft-depoliticized arena of disability (studies), which materially and ideologically inheres a political and liberationist orientation. We dually commit to this way of being and engaging in order to reject the propensity for political spaces that elide criphood, madness, eldership, debility, illness and disability, erroneously deeming them as unnecessary to (or even more violently, incongruent with) intercommunal projects of liberation.

Finally, we take guidance from Dean Spade’s organizing rubric to forge a “leaderless/leaderfull” space grounded in/with collective stewardship: “We work upon the world and we ourselves are changed by doing so. We experiment with strategies that intervene in our material reality and find communion…a purpose to our work greater than the sum of its parts, an intergenerational commitment for building a future unlike our present, a future worthy of us and our love.” (Rosenthal & Vilchis, 2024).

This course is grounded in a justice-oriented understanding of access, recognizing access as a collective and creative practice rather than only an individual responsibility. We will work together to imagine, practice, and sustain access in ways that reflect disability justice and decolonial approaches. We recognize that access needs extend beyond formal accommodations, though we will of course work with formal accommodation requests that come through TMU’s Academic Accommodation Services. Together, we will create and return to a collective access commitment that reflects how we want to learn, teach, and care for one another in this space. We have already begun shaping this commitment through the survey responses you shared before the course began, and we will continue to revisit and revise it throughout the term as our needs and circumstances shift.

Course Delivery

This will be a small class with a cohort of only 14 people. In place of a singular instructor, students will work together with three course leads: Sama Nemat Allah, Finn Stanners, and Eliza Chandler. Who have been thinking about, planning for, and creating material for this course over the past year. These leads, as well as community experts, are here to work alongside you, support you, work through challenges with you, and have conversations with you throughout the course. Though you will be leading the access plans, we all bear a collective responsibility for them.

This is a hybrid course. If you’d like to join us in person, we will be at 99 Gerrard Street E, 5th floor, room 576. We request that everyone wear an N65 mask and we will have a HEPA air filter. If you’d like to join online, here is our Zoom link. You are welcome to switch between in-person and online attendance.

On a more material note, the first half of this course will be run as a seminar. We will animate topics through brief lectures, conversations, engaging the readings and materials, and participate in activities that will allow us to apply what we are learning to thinking about and practicing access. In these first six weeks, we will cover topics such as crip wisdom, political frameworks for understanding and practicing access, intersectionality and intersectional justice, as well as understanding what access texts are and how they communicate political orientations to community and pre-figure particular approaches to access. These will be two hour classes, and if we don’t cover all of the material during these two hours, we will record the content that we didn’t get to and post the videos on the Press Book. After study week, this course will shift into a studio course: you will be working with your small groups, community mentors, and organizations to create access plans and implementation strategies. We will continue to meet informally and offer collective support for these developing outputs as well as have discussions about specific access practices, such as relaxed performances and fragrant-free policies.  We will come back together in December to present the final plans.

A note on visiting Tangled Art + Disability: On September 26th, we will be visiting Tangled Art + Disability, Canada’s leading disability art gallery that is dedicated to advancing disability art, disability justice, and cultural accessibility. Importantly, Tangled is disability-led. Our visit to Tangled will show us what cultural accessibility led by crip wisdom, disability justice, and decoloniality feels like. You are welcome to join this visit in person following these directions or virtually (joining virtually will give you the chance to experience a virtual tour, an important cultural accessibility practice) through this link. Please note that like our classroom, Tangled is a masked space with a HEPA air filter.

Course Description and What you will be doing

The Access Activator course/workshops offers a unique opportunity to learn and engage with cultural accessibility practices informed by critical access, decolonial, and disability justice frameworks both in the arts and culture sector and in community. Over 12 weeks, you will be trained in critical access frameworks, focusing on access practices designed by and for disabled people. These practices are rooted in an anti-assimilationist approach, prioritizing disability justice and decolonial principles rather than traditional inclusion models. You will explore how to analyze and rewrite organizational access texts, such as access statements and policies, that reflect a disability-led and justice-based approach to access and create access practices that reflect justice, equity, and transformation and that are tailored for individual organizations.

Throughout the training, you will apply these new skills in a practiced-based project, working in pairs or groups of three with an arts organization in Toronto to co-develop a tailored access plan with them. This plan will include re-written access texts and adjoining cultural accessibility practices. You will also create an  implementation strategy to help the organization adopt these texts and practices within 6 months in order to better serve disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent communities.

At the beginning of this course/workshop, we will give you an access report for your organization. This report will summarize the organization’s current practices, based on interviews, focus groups, and surveys we held with the organizations’ staff and community stakeholders. By collaborating with mentors and community experts, you will deepen your understanding of cultural accessibility and learn how to create real, systemic change using a critical access, disability justice, and decolonial framework.

Learning Objectives

• To think critically and reflectively about our position in relation to the land we are on, the online space we occupy, and the digital tools we use or choose not to use, to disability studies and disability justice, and to access work;
• To engage with disability studies, crip care, crip practice, and cultural accessibility through a decolonial framework;
• To develop a deep knowledge of cultural accessibility as informed by individual and collective experiential knowledge / crip wisdom and communities of practice;
• To develop an understanding of the relationship between how organizations write about and practice access texts;
• To learn how to write and refine access texts that prefigure transformative, disability-led, and justice-based access practices;
• To work together to develop individualized access plans for specific organizations that centre cultural accessibility and respond to organizational need and community feedback;
• To critically reflect on access as a political, collective, and justice-based transformative practice.

Cultural Organizations

We are working with four organizations: The Theatre Centre, the Onsite Gallery, the Reel Asian Film Festival, and the IOTA Institute.

Theatre Centre

The Theatre Centre is a live arts hub in Toronto dedicated to supporting innovative, experimental, and socially engaged performance. It provides space and resources for artists to take creative risks, develop new work, and connect with diverse communities through theatre, dance, music, and interdisciplinary projects.

Onsite Gallery

Onsite Gallery is the flagship professional gallery of OCAD University. Located in downtown Toronto, it presents contemporary art, design, and new media exhibitions that highlight issues of social and cultural importance, often centering equity, diversity, and community dialogue.

Reel Asian Film Festival

The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival is Canada’s largest pan-Asian film festival. It showcases contemporary Asian cinema and work by Asian Canadian artists, creating a platform for underrepresented voices in film and fostering dialogue across cultures and communities.

IOTA Institute

IOTA Institute is a Canadian arts organization that commissions and presents projects at the intersections of contemporary art, science, and technology. It works with artists across disciplines to produce exhibitions, publications, and digital projects that engage with environmental, social, and cultural questions.

If you have a preference for which organization you would like to work with, please let us know by emailing Eliza by September 10th. Otherwise, we will create groups based on the preferences you expressed in your survey responses.

Access Reports

The primary outputs of this course will be an access plan and an implementation strategy, both of which are designed to reflect and promote meaningful, justice-based transformation within the partnered cultural organizations.

1. Access Plan:
   You are to create an access plan that is tailored to the organization you are working with. This plan will be consistent with the organization’s mandate and/or mission and support their activities and approach to community engagement as articulated in your access report and gleaned through your conversations with the organization. The plan should respond to the access needs  as articulated in your access report and gleaned through your conversations with the organization.
   Working together, your team will create a comprehensive document that outlines the specific accessibility needs and recommendations for the organization. The access plan will include re-written access texts (e.g., access statements, policies) and tailored cultural accessibility practices that prioritize disability-led and justice-based approaches. The goal of this plan is to ensure that the organization is able to meet the needs of disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent communities in a way that leads with disabled people’s experiential knowledge or crip wisdom (including your own!) and allow the organization to communicate and practice accessibility in ways that move beyond inclusion towards justice-based cultural transformation.
2. Implementation Strategy:
   The implementation strategy will provide a clear, actionable roadmap for how the organization can adopt and integrate the recommendations and access practices outlined in your access plan. This strategy will include practical steps, timelines, and resources needed to implement the changes within the organization. It will also outline how the organization can communicate these changes to their community and monitor and evaluate the impact of these changes over time. The implementation strategy will ensure that the organization has the tools and support necessary to sustain and build on the progress made toward cultural accessibility and building meaningful and reciprocal relationships with community after the course and this project concludes.

Together, the access plan and implementation strategy will serve as foundational tools for the organization’s ongoing work toward creating more accessible cultural spaces rooted in justice-based, decolonial, and critical access approaches and building and sustaining meaningful relationships with community. They will reflect the students’ deep engagement with critical access frameworks, disability justice, and decolonial practices.

Access Activations Research Project

This course is part of the Access Activations project, a research project that aims to catalyze justice-based transformation in the Toronto arts and culture sector by designing disability-led access plans that mobilize cultural accessibility practices and are rooted in crip wisdom, disability justice, and critical access and decolonial approaches that are unique to particular cultural organizations. This initiative combines institutional ethnography with participatory action research to engage directly with cultural organizations and the lived experiences of disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people.

We will work with 12 students from Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and two community members who identify as disabled, Deaf, mad, or neurodivergent. Working with community mentors, these students will be trained as “access activators” and will collaborate with four cultural organizations in Toronto to co-create access texts and access plans. The project will unfold in four key phases:

1. Assessment of Existing Accessibility Practices: We are working with each organization to understand how they currently understand, communicate about (through writing), and practice access. We are doing this by analyzing their access texts (e.g., access statements) and workplace documents (e.g., employee handbooks), interviewing staff, holding focus groups with community stakeholders, and sending out surveys to their broader networks. We will synthesize these findings in access reports that will summarize the organization as a whole, how they understand and practice access, and recommendations for improving access. These access reports will be given to students at the beginning of their training to inform the development of the access plans they create.
2. Access Activator Training: Over 12 weeks, students will collaborate with course instructors, cultural accessibility leaders, and each other to bolster their practice-based knowledge in critical access approaches and cultural accessibility practices grounded in disability justice and decolonial frameworks. These workshops will emphasize the connection between how organizations write about access in “access texts” and how they practice access. Access activators will apply these skills in partnership with a Toronto arts organization to create an access plan, including re-written access texts, cultural accessibility practices, and an implementation plan, informed by an access report that details the organization’s current practices and areas for transformation.
3. Evaluation of Impact: We will assess the effectiveness of these access texts and plans by exploring their impact on the ways disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people interact with and experience the cultural organizations. We will do these by conducting another set of interviews and focus groups, and sending out another round of surveys in order to assess whether or how the plans encourage real, justice-based change in the organizational structures and practices. This final assessment will focus on how the development and implementation of these access plans inspire cultural organizations to engage in broader systemic changes that address issues of justice, equity, and intersectional access.

The Access Activations project is committed to reimagining access within cultural institutions, focusing on transformative justice that goes beyond inclusion to address the deeper systemic issues that affect disabled, Deaf, mad, and neurodivergent people. Through this work, we seek to challenge and reshape the arts and culture sector in Toronto to create meaningful, lasting change.

Invitations, expectations, and evaluation

experimentation and critical reflection over completion and success. Throughout the course, you are invited to prioritize building relationships with your small group, your mentor, and the organization you will be working with; stretching your understanding of access and how it can contribute to organizations’ commitment to enacting justice-based transformational change; experimenting with innovating new access practices to meet unique organizational needs; documenting the access practices you develop; and reflecting on the activist potential of cultural accessibility and your learning throughout the course. To create a supportive learning environment for experimentation, risk taking, reflection, and self-directed learning, you will not be graded in this class. Engagement throughout the class will guarantee you an A as your final grade. Course instructors will give you consistent feedback throughout the class and if you are not meeting expectations for engagement (e.g., you are absent from the course) we will come to you to discuss how we can make the course more invitational such that you can engage.

A note on experimentation versus completion: This is an experimental course. We invite and support you to be creative, innovative, and to take risks when building your access plans. We recognize (and even expect) that being inventive and taking risks may result in an unfinished access plan at the end of the course. And that’s okay. If you do not feel your access plan is complete, course instructors will work to finish it after the course.

A note on engagement and attendance: You will not be graded for attendance or expected to perform participation in ways that don’t actually feel possible or meaningful to you. We challenge the notion that there is only one way to demonstrate meaningful involvement in learning, or that involvement is something that can be cumulatively measured according to normative standards. We’ll talk about this more in class and brainstorm some ways to participate, but for now here are some ideas:

• Contributing to class discussions verbally, non-verbally, or on the Discord channel
• Writing, drawing, expressing yourself in a learning journal
• Discussions with instructors during office hours
• Taking in the lecture while doing something else (bring your gaming, crochet, beading, etc.)

Let’s continually experiment with ways of participating that honour the dimensions of our body/minds as they are, attending to moments of access friction, possibility, and transformation. We’ll talk about this in class and hope to learn from your wisdom continually throughout the class.

A note on un-grading

In this course, our primary goal is to foster meaningful engagement with the process of creating transformative access plans, rather than focusing solely on the end result. We recognize that this type of work – building relationships, understanding organizational needs, and developing innovative access practices – requires time, relationship building, reflection, and sometimes risk-taking. Innovation often involves experimentation and, at times, failure, which is often a feature of this kind of community-engaged work.

This course will prioritize value relationship building, reflection, and risk-taking to support a meaningful engagement in the process of access building. We want students to feel empowered to develop creative solutions without the pressure of traditional grading. Building strong connections with your group, peers, mentors, and the organizations you work with is essential to this process. Additionally, as this course is connected to a broader research project, there will be opportunities to continue refining and completing access plans after the course concludes (with your consent).

Given all of this, we will not assign individual grades in this course. Instead, every student who completes the course and engages meaningfully in the work will receive an A as their final grade. We believe this approach encourages thoughtful reflection, supports personal and professional growth, and allows space for innovation, risk-taking, and collaboration.

A note on AI use in this class

In engendering a pedagogical and praxistical terrain that refuses systems, methods, ontologies, and modalities which run counter to life and disability justice grammars, we hope to create a no-AI commons. Generative AI—whether it be used to translate, respond, write, create, or even to “accessabilize” —comes at a human and environmental cost that is wholly incompatible with our labours and drives as disability justice activators. From diverting water away from communities to power ecologically-pernicious data centres, to making deadly decisions that criminalize, maim, or kill overwhelmingly Black, Indigenous, migrant communities en masse in both the Global South and North, AI puts our collective presents and futurities in a state of irreconcilable peril. While some in (settler-white) disability spaces feel that generative AI acts as an individual accessibility aid, this space calls on us to a) question what individuated access is worth if it comes at the cost of life b) re-currency every gravitational pull we feel towards AI as an invitation for communal alterity. Said differently, what if we sacrificed comfort and facility and replaced it with interdependent forms of access-making?

Schedule of Workshops and Readings

Class One – Introduction and Crip Peripheries

Monday, Sept. 8, 5-7PM

Objectives/Outline:

• Introduction to the course and syllabus overview
• Introduction to the political orientation of this course, “crip peripheries”

Material

Class Two – Beginning with Crip Wisdom and Lived Experience

Friday, September 19th, 1-3PM

Objectives/Outline:

• Defining crip wisdom
• Thinking about access as intersectional access wisdom
• Introduction to access frameworks
• Artmaking as worldmaking (Ismatu Gwendolyn)
• Introduction to the Cultural Accessibility Landing Page

Material

Class Three – Access Texts: Communication, Reciprocity, and Building Community

Objectives/Outline:

• Introduction to access texts as political practice
• Introduction to the AODA as an access framework
• Introduction to the access reports for this class with Yoonmee Han

Materials

Class Four – Class Visit to Tangled Art + Disability

Friday, September 26th, 1-3PM

Objectives/Outline:

• We will visit Tangled Art + Disability and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s exhibit to experience disability justice and cultural accessibility in action.

Materials:

• Piepzna-Samarasinha, L.L. (2021). Tiny Disabled Moment #1 Small Moments of Disabled Knowing. The Future is Disabled, 71-74

Class Five – Community, Accountability, and Covid-19

Monday, October 6th, 5-7PM

Objectives/Outline:

• Introduction to community-being and community-making through Haudensaunee, Southern, and crip guidances
• Appeals to collectivity: mutual aid and cross-movement co-consipiratorship as futurity
• Rejecting isolation, individualism, and singularities (i.e individuated access)
• Introduction to affirming pandemic ongoingness and access + covid-consicous practices as mutual aid
• COVID-19, Palestine, and the collectivization of disability, life-making, access, and risk

Materials

Class Six – Disability Justice

Friday, October 10th, 1-3PM

Objectives/Outline:

• Attending to intersectionality, intercorporeality, and inter-movement praxis within disability justice and movement work
• Crip time as intersectional justice/Un- and Re-learning temporality and how we engage with pace
• Reflecting deference vs constructive politics and standpoint epistemology (Táíwò, 2022)
• Transnational, mad crip of colour critiques

Materials

During weeks 6-9, you will be developing your access plans. Here are some topics we will cover. At the end of this phase, you will share your access plan with the organization you are working with for feedback

During weeks 10-12, you will be refining your access plans based on the feedback you receive for the organizations

Access plans showcase

The time for this showcase will be TBA. We will choose a time during the exam period that works for everyone.

Engagement Options

There are a variety of ways that you can engage with the course and the community around it. Because we aren’t offering grades in this course, we will not be grading your work. However, we encourage collective and reciprocal engagement. These options for engagement are focused on reflection. If there are other ways that you would like to engage and receive feedback in the course, please let us know. We welcome all forms of engagement (in our workshops, on the Discord channel, in office hours or scheduled chats, in emails, etc) and we commit to giving ample feedback.

Learning plans and learning journals

At the beginning of the course, we invite you to create a learning plan for yourself to help guide your learning throughout the course. This plan – which could be around 4 pages – is a place for you to identify your main personal, academic, and professional goals commensurate with the course’s learning objectives, the access work you will be doing with your groups and the organizations, and the materials we will be engaging throughout the course (readings, recorded videos, blog posts, etc.). Once you identify your learning goals, you can map out how you will achieve them, again, reflecting on the work we will be doing in this course. For example, you might want to strengthen your skills in writing access texts so that you can do future work with galleries as a paid consultant to write and refine their access texts. The map you create for meeting this goal could include reading the segment of Hamraie’s work that talks about access texts in module 4; watch Finn and Lisa’s interview about how access texts can inform practice, and, in your group work, take a leading role in helping to re-write your organization’s access texts to represent their relaxed performance gallery hours that another group member is developing. You can submit these goals to the instructor team for our feedback anytime, though we recommend this activity might be most effective if done in the first couple of weeks of the course. Understanding your learning goals will also help us ensure that we support them as best we can.

Once you’ve established your learning goals and plan, your learning journal will be a place where you can reflect on them and track your progress throughout the course. You can reflect on your work successes and challenges, your group work dynamic, and your progress in achieving your learning goals, including how the curriculum or our teaching could adapt to help you meet these goals. Your learning journal entries can also include critical reflections on materials, class discussions, and your relationship building and consultative work with your organizations as well as questions you have for the instructor team. Your entries can be as long or as short as they need to be, but if you are looking for a guideline, you can aim for 3 to 4 pages a week. You can submit your journals to the instructor every two to three weeks or whenever you would like feedback.

Learning journal – Final submission

For the final entry of your journal entry, we invite you to reflect on your learning journey throughout the course in relation to how you met your learning goals. You will not be evaluated on whether you achieved them or not given that learning happens in many, unpredictable, and unexpected ways and you are not solely responsible for your learning, rather, it is a collective responsibility. Feel free to use this as a place to reflect on what supported your learning, what challenged your learning, unexpected learnings and challenges, and what might have better supported your learning along the way. Of course, we are also interested in your learning successes and what you are most proud of!

Access showcase

We are engaging in rich, process-based, collective, and innovative learning throughout the class. We are excited to learn from and celebrate your work! We will highlight the work you’ve achieved throughout the semester in an access showcase. Your project team will give a 20 minute presentation (not everyone needs to present). Presentations should offer an overview of your access plan, how it responded to your organization’s access report, and what you learned about access along the way. You can also discuss how you worked together as a group, what challenged you, what surprised you, what you feel proud of, as well as your learning outcomes and how you might apply them to future access work in the arts and culture sector. This will also be a time for others to learn about the work you’ve done, and so you will facilitate a 10 minute Q + A at the end of your presentation.

TORONTO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY COURSE MANAGEMENT POLICY 166 (TMU stuff)

The central purpose of the course management policy is to provide a framework of common understanding for students and faculty concerning the structures, processes, objectives, and requirements pertaining to the delivery of undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education (CE) courses at Toronto Metropolitan University (the “University”).

Academic Integrity

For detailed information concerning academic misconduct and the relevant penalties, see TMU’s Student Code of Academic Conduct at www.ryerson.ca/senate/policies/pol60.pdf. See also TMU’s Academic Integrity Website: www.ryerson.ca/academicintegrity/.

TMU’s Policy 60 (the Academic Integrity policy) applies to all students at the University. Forms of academic misconduct include plagiarism, cheating, supplying false information to the University, and other acts.  The most common form of academic misconduct is plagiarism – a serious academic offence, with potentially severe penalties and other consequences.  It is expected, therefore, that all examinations and work submitted for evaluation and course credit will be the product of each student’s individual effort (or an authorized group of students). Submitting the same work for credit to more than one course, without instructor approval, can also be considered a form of plagiarism.

Other important TMU policies can be found here:

Academic Consideration (Health): https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/academic-consideration-health-policy-134-152/

Accommodation of Student Religious, Aboriginal, and Spiritual Observation: https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/accommodation-of-student-religious-aboriginal-spiritual-observance/

Appeals Policy: https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/appeals-policies-134-152/

Grade Reassessment and Grade Recalculation: https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/grade-reassessment-and-grade-recalculation-policy-162/

Grading Evaluation and Academic Standing: https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/grading-evaluation-academic-standing-46-164/

Ryerson Email Accounts: https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/ryerson-email-accounts-policy-157/

Student code of non-academic conduct: https://www.ryerson.ca/senate/course-outline-policies/student-code-of-non-academic-conduct-policy-61/