supporting disabled students in higher education 2 nd march 2008 supporting disabled students in...

Supporting disabled students in Higher Education 2nd March 2008

Supporting Disabled Students in Higher Education

Hazel Roberts

Phil Gravestock


Theme 1

• Is Higher Education enabling or disabling for disabled students? Think of examples from your own experience.

Theme 1: Responses



Theme 2

• What types of staff attitudes are positive for student learning? Think of examples from your own experience

Theme 2: Responses



Theme 3

• Think of examples of the extra ‘work’ that disabled students do compared to their peers

Theme 3: Responses



The project

• ‘Enhancing the Quality and Outcomes of Disabled Students’ Learning in Higher Education’

• ESRC/TLRP funded project• Longitudinal study:

– following 31 students – across four institutions in England and

Scotland– for 3 or 4 years of full time study


Support: Project key findings

• HE environment may be disabling or enabling for individual students

• Key role of staff: – in ensuring a positive learning experience– in providing access to support

• Additional work associated with being a disabled student (organisational, emotional)


HE: A disabling or enabling environment?

• Students could feel ‘disabled’ or ‘enabled’ within the Higher Education environment, e.g. through the use of labels, experiences of support, subject choice

• Providing information to students about the support available to them was key. – Several students accessed support late or not at all– Common need for students to be proactive in order to

access support• Importance of responding to individual students’

needs rather than ‘blanket’ provision based solely on impairment


• Duncan only describes himself as a disabled student within university:

• ‘I do describe myself as a disabled student, when my mates and stuff ask, it’s like, how did you get this and how do you get the extra time and stuff, that’s how I describe myself, but that’s not how I describe myself out of university’ (Duncan, computing, dyslexia)


Using the label of ‘disabled student’ to get support:

• ‘It does give you access to all sorts of things because if you don’t say ‘I’m disabled’ you don’t get the support. You have to understand that you need the support in order to get where you want to be. Otherwise, if you don’t have any support then you would find it impossible to do anything, like uni wise, because there would be nobody to check your work, nobody to say this is how you do it. If you’d given up with the notes, there’d be nobody to support the notes. So, yeah, you need the label to get the help definitely.’ (Daisy, visual impairment, dyslexia, dyspraxia)


The role of information about support:

• ‘You actually have to know what you want to ask for, so if you’re not sure, because I suppose I don’t really know what I can get and what I can’t get so I don’t really use the disability office that much.’ (Cassie, dyslexia)


Responding to individual student needs

• ‘In the first year one of the lecturers who was sitting in on my [exam] took it upon himself to read the entire maths exam test out […] nice enough guy – but he’s read this entire A plus 2 to the power of…and I said, ‘well I can see that!’ and it just really pissed me off and I said ‘no, I’ll ask you when I need you to read something’. And he’s ‘no, no, I’d better read it all out’, and this is eating into my time and I was just enraged and I was nearly on the point of walking out. […] The thing is, it’s lack of knowledge, they just don’t know’ (Brendan, dyslexia)


Individual student needs

• ‘I self-referred myself to [assessment centre name], which is the local assessment thing, who will assess what you need. But they said, you’ve got to have a [company name] assessment… you don’t have to agree to anything. So, I had the assessment and they said, we think you need this chair and this desk adaption, this, that and the other. Ok, you can think it away because I don’t! (both laugh) However, he then put the recommendation into [the assessment centre], who ordered the stuff and now I’m in a big argument because I don’t actually want this stuff, kind of argument. And they’re like ‘but you need it!’ and I’m like ‘no, I don’t!’ … I’ve got on perfectly well for a year without needing it’ (Dalia, wheelchair user)

Individual student needs

• I was offered a seven day extension and it was like, hang on, wheelchair does not affect my ability to hand things in on time! (Dalia, wheelchair user)


Role of staff

• Positive staff attributes identified by students:

– Helpfulness– Availability– Approachableness– Being supportive


• Andrew on telling staff about his impairment:

• ‘It depends on the lecturer. The likes of [name] in language I would have no problem telling her anything about that because she is the type of lecturer who would understand fully. Whereas you have got the other ones and you think no, they actually think you are just stalling or looking for something for nothing … there are certain lecturers I would definitely tell and certain ones I wouldn’t […] I don’t want them to look at me differently in any way’ (Andrew, cerebral palsy)


• Andrew had very different experiences when contacting disability advisors in years 1 and 2:

• ‘I think obviously because you don’t always see my impairment you are thinking ‘is there actually anything wrong with you?’ And I think that’s maybe where the disability advisor [in first year] and I got off on the wrong foot because she couldn’t see and she thought I must kidding here … I got that feeling but I never ever challenged her on it, maybe I should have done’

• ‘I have spoken to a different person this year who has given me all the help in the world that I needed to get what I wanted and what I needed to help with the course. So that negative experience last year in the first instance is very positive this year. … That does confuse me’ (Andrew, cerebral palsy)


• Daisy found her support worker invaluable:

• I couldn’t do without my support worker, let’s put it that way … support, proof reading, drafting, I go to her. Note takers, in some cases yes, in some cases I could have passed the module without. But if she didn’t read my work then there’s no way I’d pass anything (Daisy, visual impairment dyslexia, dyscalculia)).


Additional work

• Students often did significant extra work compared to their non disabled peers– Organisational – associated with nature of

impairment or arranging support– Emotional - managing the perceptions of staff

and students, choices about positioning disability as part of their identity


Organisational work I• ‘In the first year there was a lot of things I needed

to be put in place like my glasses with a prism in, the dark tint, the dyslexia training, the computer training for the software they give us. The first year was quite time consuming because I had to find spaces for all this in between lectures, but when I conquered that and I did in the first year I was pretty chuffed with myself then because I’d filled in so much around my course when a normal mainstream student would just have to do the course.’ (Barry, dyslexia and undisclosed visual impairment)


Organisational work II

• ‘You have to be double organised really and I honestly think being a disabled student actually makes your life harder and taking the support makes your life harder because you have to be more organised the whole time. There’s no point me doing an assignment the night before when my support tutor needs to see it.’ (Daisy, visual impairment, dyslexia, dyspraxia)


Emotional work I• ‘It’s a disability of sorts but I don’t regard it as a

disability. I prefer to regard it as some horrible part of my life that I don’t like very much. I think it’s the best way of explaining it … Something I have realised is that it can affect my life a lot more than I realised. But that is just something that you have to deal with and deal with in the best way possible and I think in terms of university it can affect me but it doesn’t … it is only sometimes if I let it affect me and you have to think about how you let it affect you … It is difficult to keep everything in balance.’ (Kathryn, diabetes)


Emotional work II

• ‘Oh, god there is such a stigma. If I ever said to someone ‘I am disabled’ they would think ‘well you’re not in a wheelchair, what’s going on?’ Also a learning difficulty, I don’t like that either cause it kind of sounds like I need a minder or something. It is terrible and awful. … there is such a stigma. So I don’t describe myself as disabled’ (Anne, dyslexia)


Emotional work III • ‘I’m taking a psychological burden with me, all

way through my life, since leaving school…It was just constantly going through my mind all the time. I know other students go through that, but it was just constantly all negative, negative, negative, and so it was like a little gremlin saying, you can’t do this, you can’t do this, you can’t… and it was just a throwback to school … the psychological effect is, it’s so detrimental and it still is. If I … didn’t have that burden of that, I’d be a lot freer and maybe the work would come a lot easier to me’ (Barry, dyslexia).


The PhD

• ‘The Role of Support Workers in the Learning of Disabled Students in Higher Education’

• Qualitative interviews with notetakers and disabled students (who use notetakers) at the University of Gloucestershire

• Potential to develop to comparisons with other HEIs


Findings to date

• Importance placed on interpersonal relationships by notetakers and students

• Key role of staff in ensuring system works and that notetakers can work effectively in teaching sessions

• Notetakers and students are involved in additional organisational ‘work’ not accounted for in DSA system

supporting disabled students in higher education 2 nd march 2008 supporting disabled students in...

Documents

outcomes of disabled

higher education environment

higher education esrctlrp

label of disabled student

experience slide

impairment slide

dyspraxia slide

emotional slide