Academic Advising Council Newsletter
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- Foster two-way communication between academic advisors and the Office of the Provost
- Offer feedback on issues and needs of advisors
- Improve networking among advisors
- Promote leadership, training and professional development opportunities for advisors
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All members of the executive committee are excited to take on this mission as we work to make NIU a better place for our students and constituents.
If you have feedback about this newsletter or would like to contribute, please let us know!
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Communication and Feedback
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While the Academic Advising Council is not an official voting body within University governance, our goal is to help serve as a direct voice on advising issues to both the Office of the Provost and the advising directors. We will be reaching out to the NIU advising community once per semester through this newsletter, and periodically when events and opportunities arise throughout the year.
Current Academic Advising Council representatives:
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- Megan Woodruff: College of Business (Chair)
- Rebekah Kohli: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Vice Chair)
- Julia Broome-Robinson: Academic Advising Center (Secretary)
- Alex Blake: College of Health and Human Sciences
- Alex Owens: College of Education
- Rachel Lower: College of Engineering and Engineering Technology
- Bethany Geiseman: College of Visual and Performing Arts
- Virginia Naples: faculty academic advisors
- Tracy Ash: program advisors
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- Mark your calendars and join us for a Holiday Advisor Appreciation Event from 10-11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 10 at Peters Campus Life Building, Room 100!
- We’re planning an off-campus advising meet-up! This is an opportunity to relax and network with other NIU advisors. Join us at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 20 at Fatty’s Pub.
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NACADA Region 5 Conference
The 2025 NACADA Region 5 Conference, “Building Skyscrapers: The Architecture of Advising” will be held from April 22-24, 2025 in Chicago. The Academic Advising Council is offering $1,000 sponsorships for three NIU academic advisors, to be used toward the cost of attending this event. Please fill out this application for consideration.
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Accessibility in Advising: A presentation from the 2024 NACADA Region 5 Conference
Submitted by Julia Broome-Robinson, Academic Advising Center
Attending the 2024 NACADA Regional Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was a fantastic opportunity, and very personally illuminating for me. One of the sessions that has stayed with me since the conference was a session on advising and supporting students with disabilities, presented by Amelia-Marie Altstadt, a doctoral student in Disability Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The session was a masterclass in accessibility before even taking the content into consideration: The lights in the room were dimmed, live captions and image descriptions were provided throughout the presentation, and a QR code was offered for anonymous questions, to name a few of the many elements. Altstadt shared a candid, and often unsettling look into the challenges that students with disabilities can face in higher education.
She also shared an extensive resource document that includes books, podcasts, suggested apps, email templates and much more. One element I appreciated was their list of tips for improving accessibility in our advising practice, organized by the amount of time we have to implement a given strategy.
Here is a snippet from the document:
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- Add Alt Text to all images posted to social media!
- Use the language someone prefers but lead with identity-first language.
- Check that your fonts are accessible, for dyslexic readability and other disabilities.
- Continue, or start, offering virtual meetings.
- Enable captions on all web conferencing platforms for virtual meetings (set up may take longer).
- Correcting the orientation of scanned documents.
- Creating reminders or meeting invites that automatically add dates to calendars.
- Educate yourself on legal work accommodations for disability through the Job Accommodation Network, pick a different disability daily. How could you support someone with that disability, without that accommodation?
- Email goals of meeting ahead of time, if organizing meetings.
- Email summary of meeting, using a developed template.
- Make sure spaces can accommodate a wheelchair (at least 30 inches of clearance).
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- Create and share email templates to model different kinds of email, save on energy spent writing, and more.
- Connect people who share disabilities, or behaviors (ex. I need to study in a noisy area), with their permission.
- Educate yourself on legal work accommodations for disability through the Job Accommodation Network.
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- Advocate for prompt snow removal.
- Choose a piece of media to engage with and learn about disability justice.
- Encourage multicultural centers to add disability culture programming to their offerings.
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Continuous practice needed, or don’t expect to change overnight:
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- Removing ableist language from your vocabulary and replacing it with other terminology.
- Replacing “crazy” with “wild”.
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There is so much more included in Altstadt’s document that is worth diving into.
Even if we can’t implement every accessibility strategy at once, this session offered ways to improve inclusivity for disabled students that we can start using right away. One additional tip that Altstadt shared verbally was to alter our email communication to students by trading paragraphs for bulleted lists whenever possible – this improves clarity and can make the information we’re sharing with students easier for them to digest. Simple ideas like this highlighted just how easy it can be to improve accessibility even slightly, and offered a look into the potentially overwhelming experience that students with disabilities might face in higher education, where ideas like this are sometimes overlooked in favor of more urgent priorities.
Hopefully, this and similar sessions can inspire us to take small steps toward a more accessible, inclusive advising experience for all our students.
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NIU’s Employee Well-being website includes helpful guidance for dealing with stress, anxiety and depression. One of their support handouts, “Tips for Coping with Stress” offers these ideas:
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- Find something that makes you laugh or start smiling and think of something funny. A deep belly laugh is a great way to relieve stress. Smiling, even when you don’t feel like it, increases your immune system. Your body does not care if your smile is genuine. Keep funny jokes where you can look at them and stop, read them and let yourself really laugh.
- Know your limits and when you need to let go. Some problems are beyond our control. If something cannot be changed, work at accepting it for what it is. Resist the urge to fix the unfixable or try to control the uncontrollable. Sometimes a mantra helps: “It is what it is; I can accept it.” For things within your control, remember change takes time. If you are holding on and need to let go, journal about it.
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