We talk constantly about access for students. We almost never talk about access for the people teaching them. Yet the same institution that runs an accessibility office for students is also an employer, and the same laws that protect a disabled student in the classroom protect a disabled employee at the front of it. Most neurodivergent faculty I know have never asked for anything. Many did not know they could.
Start by naming the barriers, not the diagnosis. What in your working conditions makes it harder to teach well? For me the list looks like this. Room noise: a lab next to the mechanical room, or a classroom that shares a thin wall with a lecture hall. Back-to-back teaching, with no transition to recover before the next section walks in. Last-minute changes: a room switch announced the morning of, a policy update sent the night before it takes effect. Fragmented communication, where the same information arrives by email, by Teams, by a hallway remark, and in a meeting, and the versions do not agree.
Notice that none of these require you to say a word about your neurology. They are conditions that make teaching worse for anyone, and several are fixable by a department chair who simply knows you would prefer a fifteen-minute gap between sections and a consistent room. Ask for those first, plainly and early, when schedules are being built. Chairs can only accommodate preferences they know about.
For barriers that need more than a preference, find your college’s employee-support contact. At most colleges this is a human resources office or an ADA coordinator for employees, separate from the student accessibility office. A conversation there is where formal arrangements get discussed: schedule structure, written rather than verbal notice of changes, a quieter room assignment, or communication norms for your department. Formal accommodation usually requires documentation, and the process can feel exposing. Ask about the process before you commit to it. Understanding what is involved is not the same as filing a request.
Contingent faculty face a harder calculation, and I will not pretend otherwise. An adjunct on a semester contract may reasonably fear that asking for anything marks them as difficult. That fear is a barrier in itself, and it belongs on the list of things a college should fix. But even there, preference-level requests carry little risk, and a chair who wants to keep a good instructor usually wants to hear them.
The phrase I keep coming back to is shared responsibility. The instructor’s job is to identify what would help and to ask. The college’s job is to have a process and to take the request seriously. Neither works alone. A faculty member who masks through every barrier will burn out; a college that never hears the request cannot act on it. Access in the classroom has to include the person standing at the front of it.
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