This afternoon, we had the second seminar in the “Inclusive Classroom” course, this time on “learning support for students with disabilities at LU”.  Emma Carlsson and Philip Johansson visited us and told us about their work at the Disability Support Services (which are a unit at the Study Support and Learning group within Lund University admin). Here is my summary!

In the Lund University handbook for Accessible Teaching, the stated goal is that

“At Lund University, we welcome students with impairments through a positive and flexible approach and we offer compensatory, targeted learning support. This adaptation is not meant to lower requirements, but the path to achieving learning outcomes may be different and should therefore be designed in such a way as to avoid putting students with impairments at a disadvantage in relation to their fellow students.”

This is of course also required by law: The discrimination act states that students with disability should have the same access to education as those without, and we are required to provide “reasonable” accommodations (reasonable meaning that they need to be practically and economically feasible, whatever that means).

So what does that look like in practice?

The Disability Support Services are the first point of contact for students with disabilities (and that includes all kinds of disability: Neuropsychiatric disorders, dyslexia, mental illness like anxiety, depression, exhaustion; motor/hearing/vision impairment, but also diabetes and more!) who wish to receive the “compensatory, targeted learning support”. Students apply through a website (nais.uhr.se), and then meet a person at Disability Support Services who looks at their certificates (which are issued by doctors, psychologist, speech-language pathologist, …, to confirm a diagnosis of a “long-lasting disability” (6 months or more); exchange students can also use documentation from their home institution) and takes the official decision on what support the student gets.

This process takes about 2 weeks at the beginning of the semester (if the student has all the paperwork in order — otherwise Student Health Centre might help them find a relevant specialist); outside of rush-times it is usually faster.

The next step then depends on the faculty — in some faculties there are central lists of which students gets which accommodations, at my faculty, LTH, students themselves bring the decision letter to teachers when they want to make use of the accommodations. This has the advantage for students that they do not have to disclose disabilities or impairments to every teacher, but the distinct disadvantage for teachers that they have to wait for students to approach them, which might only happen right before the exams, or during an already running course, or whenever it becomes relevant for the student. From a teaching perspective, it would be easier to know what diagnoses are present in the room to be able to accommodate them.

But even if we don’t know what diagnoses are present in our class, from the statistics, we know that at LU there were 1967 students with learning support in 2020, and, 2809 in 2023. This corresponds to approximately 6% of students. In 2023, the primary impairment was 39% dyslexia or other reading and writing difficulties, and another 39% neuropsychiatric disorders. But these statistics only capture students with a decision; of course in any classroom there are likely also students who might be able to get a decision but are too proud to ask for it, or don’t know about it or how to get it; students that just learn in a different way than what we assume is typical, students with different cultural or socioeconomic background, … (Really interesting sidenotes on this: check out the Todd Rose TED talk on the “myth of average” that gives a very convincing argument for “designing for the edges” since there is nobody that is actually exactly average on all the relevant variables, so designing for the average means designing for nobody! And also our work on test anxiety where we find that first generation higher education students do not experience similarly low levels of test anxiety as some part of the continuing generation student population does, and that first-gen students really want assessment that are more in line with what we would consider good assessments, whereas continuing generation students have gotten used to, or grown up into the culture of, how things are done traditionally). So in any case, we should make sure to give differential support so everybody has the same access, but even better, we should be designing our teaching for a diverse student population (shoutout to UDL…)!

But until we have designed all our courses this way, currently common adjustments and supports given or recommended by Disability Support Services include

• for planning/structure/study technique: Students can be granted guidance by special educators, student mentors (who are more academically advanced; matched depending on academic experiences, mentee gets a “veto”, and mentors get access to a peer support network and training!), support via the Academic Support Centre (“Studieverkstaden2) for example for writing skills. One course participant says that the Academic Support Centre should always be mentioned in the beginning of all courses because they do such great work — how nice to hear!
• for lectures: Students can be given note-taking support (paid note-takers don’t know who they take notes for, but the student who gets the notes knows and can contact them if they choose); students can also get permission to record lectures even without needing permission from teacher (but teacher needs to be informed by the student, and the student CANNOT share the recording for legal reasons, e.g. copyright, GDPR). Students can also get the recommendation that it would be good for them to receive teaching materials in advance (oh how teachers love that one…)
• for assessment: Students can get recommend extended time, to take exam in smaller groups or individually, to use a computer with/out text-to-speech or spell-checker, extra supervision for reports, essays, degree projects. Apparently, since 2017, all LU course syllabi state that “the examiner, in consultation with Disability Support Services, may deviate from the regular form of examination in order to provide a permanently disabled student with a form of examination equivalent to that of a student without a disability”. I did not know that!

Those were my notes on Emma & Philip’s presentation, then we launched into a discussion. Topics that I found especially interesting were

• how to find a balance between students’ own responsibility for their learning and the support through the system and community. Often when I head that discussion it seems like the assumption, or maybe experience, is that students do not want to take on the responsibility for their own learning. But I wonder how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy that really is?
• how to help students realize what is a difficulty due to a disability (that they could then get accommodations for) vs what is just difficult in itself and for everybody. Often people report that they weren’t aware of, for example, colorblindness until far into their adult lives (what I find hard to imagine, because I have had to find so many numbers and lines in colored dots for health certificates to be able to go to sea, but maybe that is the only context in which one does those tests? In any case, it seems to be a common experience to not be aware or diagnosed really late), but in any case, how is anyone to know what is difficult for other people?
• whether exams can become “too flexible” in the syllabi if we aim to be really open about what students do in the end to show their learning, so that students don’t actually know what to expect any more?
• whether, since recording requires permission from everyone in the room, automatic transcription for example in Word might be an option to get around the problem, or what other ethical and legal cans of worms that opens?

Thanks for an inspiring afternoon, Emma and Philip!