Mitzi and others,
As you suggest, an important part of the issue here may be that some
disabled students are unaware of what their access requirements are and how
they could be met. I am just starting a new 2-year project to work with
disabled adults to increase awareness of individual's own access
requirements and to encourage participation in (university) adult education
by offering support and working to achieve access and to ensure that
individuals experience learning with all their access requirements being met
in full.
We will also be looking at issues such as how do, for example, learners
develop the ability to work with Sign Language Interpreters, Notetakers,
Lipspeakers etc and how can these skills be facilitated. While some disabled
adults do possess these skills, others have to acquire them and this is an
added pressure on disabled students.
If anyone has been involved in a similar project, please get in touch as I
would very much like to share experiences and learn from others.
ATB
Claire
-----Original Message-----
From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Mitzi Waltz
Sent: 31 December 2004 07:47
To:
Subject: Re: Invisibile disabilities and the disability card
The experiences people are reporting of supporting students in a university
setting sound very familiar :-) I'm the
disability support coordinator for my school, an role that I get 1 hour per
week for off from teaching duties. We are
lucky in that the people in our main disability support department, the
folks who aactually do assessments and set
up accomodation plans, are really excellent--they do not see themselves as
gatekeepers but as facilitators. One of
them told me it's because she grew up working class (like most of our
students) and so has always been aware of
class privilege, figures anything that evens the playing field for "our
kids" is fair :-) It may help that our area
(northeast England) has a very high proportion of people with disabilities
compared to other regions, a legacy of
industries like coal mining and shipbuilding, as well as of poverty and
deprivation--you can still see older people
with the effects of rickets here, for example, and poorer people here are
markedly shorter than people elsewhere in
the UK. With so many neighbors and parents on disability benefit, there may
be less stigma attached in some ways.
Despite it all, it's getting students to out themselves that's hard, and not
just those with invisible disabilities. We
had one lad who uses a prosthetic leg and has a withered arm who was
struggling just to get up the stairs between
classes in our old building, but never asked for extra time to get to class
or for his classes to be on one level. One
incident that surprised me just a couple of weeks ago was that a student who
is a wheelchair user and registered
with us, who has seen me several times over his first year, has just now let
me know that he's also dyslexic and
struggling to complete multiple written assignments. When I told him that
completing one or two of these by viva
voce examination might take some of the pressure off, he was gobsmacked that
this could be allowed. I pointed
out that thinking on your feet whilst being questioned by 2 lecturers
actually shows a whole lot more about what
you have learned than cobbling together an essay with the assistance of
books and the internet <grin>, and more
closely mirrors the kinds of skills he is likely to need in his career (we
both hope) as a film director. Another
student who suffered a stroke during the term and obvious (to us) brain
damage did not come forward until he
relapsed. He didn't want anyone to know, and my sense was that he didn't
want to admit to himself that he needed
help. Sadly, he has had another major stroke -- his father called and said
the first thing he said when he started to
regain his speech was "will I still have a place at uni"? Of course he will,
but he didn;t expect that we would just
naturally hold his place for him.
Students with psychiatric disabilities are the least likely to come forward,
in my experience. This is really a serious
issue, as mental health care in our region is not very good and the
university offers a counseling service only. I've
had to do a good bit of convincing students that they need
accomodations--often they will accept accomodations
if I point out that the medications they are taking make them tired, but not
for the effects on memory and stamina
that can be part of the conditions themselves.
Interestingly, I have yet to encounter a single student who appeared to be
"scamming" in any way using a disability
identity.
-- Mitzi
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