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
Those were my notes on Emma & Philip’s presentation, then we launched into a discussion. Topics that I found especially interesting were
Thanks for an inspiring afternoon, Emma and Philip!
Rethinking student belonging and well-being at universities - Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching says:
[…] (and fear of stigma) they face. This ties in well with what we talked about in today’s “inclusive classroom” seminar, where we heard that only about 6% of the students at LU use the Disability Support […]