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How individual accommodation creates barriers to the inclusion of students with disabilities

by Pascal Angerhausen and Shweta Mishra

The inclusion of students with disability in higher education

Individual assessment accommodation is a widely used instrument for inclusion of students with disabilities. It aims at reducing barriers and promoting equal participation, by taking into account the individual needs of a person. However, our research in the project SuccessInclusive (ErfolgInklusiv) has shown that it can also create barriers and lead to new forms of exclusion. It shifts the responsibility to the individual and creates an additional bureaucratic burden for students and university staff. Further, there are issues of legitimacy associated with individual accommodation. If some students are treated differently from others, this raises issues of fairness and equality. Lastly, individual accommodation makes students dependent on those who provide it. We therefore urge universities and policy makers to rethink their focus on individual accommodation and prioritize universal design measures.

Individual accommodation and universal design in German higher education

Universities can choose between two different strategies to promote inclusion in higher education. Universal design and individual accommodation. Universal design aims to reduce or eliminate barriers for all, a priori, whereas individual accommodation consists of solutions that meet the individual needs of specific students. Both approaches have their own benefits and problems. Usually, a combination of the two is used to promote inclusion. If we look at German higher education, universal design plays a minor role. Even though universities are obliged to implement universal design measures, these are mostly limited to physical accessibility. Instead, inclusion in German higher education relies heavily on individual accommodation (Gattermann-Kasper/Schütt, 2022; Steinkühler et al, 2023).

Individual responsibility and bureaucratic burden

If students want to use individual accommodation in German higher education, they need to know about their rights. For many students, this is the biggest obstacle to using Disadvantage Compensation, as they either do not know about their rights or see themselves as entitled to it (Steinkühler et al, 2023). Once these barriers have been overcome, they need to apply on the basis of a medically certificated impairment. The application process can cost time, energy and sometimes even money. Students reported a lack of information, long waiting times and unclear bureaucratic processes. Some of them talked of having to travel long distances to see specific doctors who would issue the necessary medical certificates. In some cases, students also had to pay for these certificates themselves. If these students must renew their application every year – as some faculties require – applying for individual accommodation means a great deal of effort to the students and can in itself be a barrier. 

Additionally, individual accommodation involves a great deal of effort not only for the students but also for the university staff. At the German university where we conducted our interviews, each faculty accepts and handles applications on its own. The staff and the responsible professors review the applications, check them for form and plausibility, and must decide, if and to what extent students can be granted individual accommodation. These decisions are often based on previous decisions and experiences, rather than on official guidelines or laws. The small number of cases handled by individual faculties makes it difficult to build up experience and develop best practice. Thus, staff reported of uncertainty in dealing with individual accommodation requests.

The question of legitimacy

The lack of guidelines on the appropriate form and scope of individual accommodation creates uncertainties that undermine its legitimacy. Students who used individual accommodation reported that both, students and lecturers questioned the fairness of their accommodations. For example, fellow students asked them about their “advantage” and asked for advice on how they could get access to it so that their studies would be “easier”. Thus, students with disabilities who use individual accommodation often doubt its fairness and necessity, while simultaneously lacking an objective perspective. Social networks and previous experiences of accommodation can help in legitimizing accommodation and supporting the experience of studying as an equal.

Individual accommodation creates individual dependencies

Students also emphasized that individual accommodation strengthens the influence of individual people. To receive individual accommodation, students become dependent on doctors, university staff, lecturers and professors. While all of these can be helpful – and many students reported of positive and supportive encounters – this dependency can create impossible barriers. Students, whether they experienced negative or positive situations, highlighted this dependency as problematic. At every step, individuals can act as gatekeepers and prevent them from receiving the accommodations they need to rightfully study. For example, a student reported that he has to write several emails before every exam just to make sure the lecturers organize the accommodations that he is entitled to – and still does not always receive them. Another student was told by the university staff that the accommodation they requested would not be necessary, even though they provided a medical certificate. Many students shared stories of just being ignored by their lecturers, or of lecturers telling them that they did not have the resources to provide appropriate accommodations. Thus, individual accommodation was often experienced as creating an additional work load for the lecturers. In the worst case, these experiences can lead to students dropping out and missing the chance to pursue an academic degree; which is directly linked to the opportunity for students with disabilities to live a decent and independent life.

Accessing individual accommodation requires individual resources

Lastly, our interviews showed that the process of accessing individual accommodation requires resources that are unequally distributed. Students from academic backgrounds, with extensive financial resources or extended social networks are better equipped to access individual accommodations. They can get a second opinion from another doctor, receive information on how to formulate applications, how to appeal or even legal advice. Further, dealing with the problems of gatekeeping also appears to be a gendered issue. Women in particular reported being doubted by others. For some, this went as far as medical gaslighting, the experience of being systematically doubted by medical professionals. Some of those who experienced these doubts resigned themselves when they encountered someone who did not want to believe or support them, rather than fight for their rights. Thus, not all students have equal access to individual accommodation. For some, receiving information about their rights, attaining a medical certificate, applying for individual accommodation,or dealing with gatekeepers is more problematic than for others. So, while other researchers have highlighted differences between students with obvious and stable disabilities and those with invisible and variable disabilities (Goldberg, 2016), our research showed that social networks, academic background, and gender of the students play an important role in the use of individual accommodation.

Concluding remarks

While we have focussed on the ways in which individual accommodation hinders inclusion, students and university staff also emphasized the positive aspects of individual accommodation. If there is a supportive culture and university staff have adequate resources, focussing on the individual needs allows them to find appropriate solutions and highlights the individual situation of each student. Students can feel heard and their disadvantages can be properly compensated for. However, this is rather the ideal case scenario. In our interviews, students reported a lack of a supportive culture in many disciplines, and in society in general, while the staff and lecturers experienced individual accommodation as demanding in terms of time and resources. We can therefore conclude that relying on individual accommodation to include students with disabilities can create significant barriers that can (re)produce exclusion. Universities should therefore rethink the way they implement inclusion and instead refer to measurements of universal design.

Pascal Angerhausen is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the International Center for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel. Email: angerhausen@incher.uni-kassel.de

Shweta Mishra is the Managing Director of the German Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Policy Research. She is the Associate Editor of the Research into Higher Education Abstracts Journal. Her research focuses on social inequalities in higher education access and outcomes. She is an associate member of the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel.

References

Gattermann-Kasper M, Schütt M-L. (2022) Inklusive Hochschule. Konzeptionelle Grundlagen, aktueller Stand und Entwicklungen. In: Recht der Jugend und des Bildungswesens, 70, p. 92-106

Goldberg, C (2016). Is Intersectionality a Disabled Framework? Presenting PWIVID: In/Visibility and Variability as Intracategorical Interventions Critical Disability Discourses, 7: 55-88

Steinkühler J, Beuße M, Kroher M, Gerdes F, Schwabe U, Koopmann J, Becker K, Völk D, Schommer T, Buchholz S (2023) Die Studierendenbefragung in Deutschland: best3. Studieren mit einer gesundheitlichen Beeinträchtigung Hannover: DZHW


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The SRHE Student Access and Experience Network

by Manny Madriaga

On the 28th February 2020, SRHE launched the new Student Access and Experience Network. The network merged two formerly separate networks to encompass the entire continuum of student participation in higher education from access to experience and success, providing an insight into academic, social as well as welfare aspects. (The launch event occurred on one of those non-strike days for those of us engaged in the UK’s UCU industrial action.) It also occurred as the Covid19 pandemic was beginning to emerge as a factor in the UK  life – the day before the launch, the UK government’s chief medical adviser, Professor Chris Whitty, indicated that the country could face at least a couple of months of disruption. At the time of writing, just over 40 days has passed since the launch event, and much has changed in all our lives. It definitely has affected our work, our relationships with each other, and our connections to our students. This has triggered us to open up a space to discuss many of the issues that we have recently confronted in the sector due to Covid19.  Particular questions have arisen as to whether university responses to the pandemic will reduce or exacerbate structural inequalities for students in accessing and engaging in HE. For instance, Dai O’Brien has described in a previous SRHE blogpost that teaching and working remotely during this time can be virtually inaccessible.          

The launch event highlighted key issues around the whole student lifecycle. The event began with questions around access and the history of university outreach programmes with Dr Julian Crockford’s presentation, ‘Tensions, Contradictions and Perpetual Loose Ends – ‘Widening Participation’ in HE Policy (audio and slides)’, outlining contentions around theory and practice in targeting interventions to specific groups of students. The seminar then extended conversations with Dr Camille Kandiko-Howson’s paper, ‘From Cinderella to Queen Bee: Student Experience Research (audio and slides)’, highlighting issues of student participation and success and the role of higher education institutions within that. Finally, the event provided an opportunity to explore inequalities in graduate outcomes with Professor Nicola Ingram and Dr Kim Allen sharing their recent work (audio and slides). 

From these stimulating presentations, questions and discussion emerged from the diverse audience of widening participation practitioners, researchers, and graduate students. In these conversations, we engaged with evidence of how higher education not only transforms students in positive, meaningful ways, but also significantly marginalises many. As a new network, we have set out to explore these processes of marginalisation and structural inequalities that affect the access and experiences of students in HE. The HE sector is rarely value-neutral and meritocratic. Instead, universities, and other higher education contexts, are highly contentious spaces, structured by class, gender, and race, among other things. Notions of the ‘traditional’ student obscure the varied pathways into higher education as well as the intersectional nature of students’ identities, including special needs backgrounds, experiences of care and estrangement, and age. It is worth mentioning here that Dr Kandiko-Howson rightly argued in her presentation that we should not be talking about the ‘student experience’ as something monolithic. We should be talking about student experiences. This is similar to the point made by Karen Gravett in her SRHE blogpost in challenging the dominant narrative of students as experiencing a homogeneous ‘student experience’ in their university transitions.   

The beauty of all three presentations at the SRHE SAEN launch event is the offer of conceptual tools to challenge dominant discourses in widening participation, student experience, and graduate employability.  Dr Crockford, for instance, shared his own experience of working in widening participation, shining a light on the data issues in monitoring and evaluating university access. Reflecting upon her own experience as convenor of SRHE’s Student Experience Network, Dr Kandiko-Howson held up and reminded attendees of the seven principles of good undergraduate teaching practice of Chickering and Gamson (1987). Being reminded of these principles parallels our own ambitions as a network in countering much of the deficit-oriented perceptions of students on issues of access, retention, and academic performance. Professor Ingram and Dr Allen introduced their ‘social magic conversion table’ to demonstrate how employers may sift and exclude certain groups of university graduates to construct their ‘ideal’ graduate hire.    

Although we come equipped with new knowledge and have made new connections with others across the sector, we do have anxieties and more questions about the state of higher education and our students during the time of global upheaval. The launch was one of the last events we actually attended in person. We are all working remotely and attempting to connect to our students with our online lectures. We are aware we are not the only ones. Thus, we are asking you to contribute to crowd-sourcing an array of the following to inform research, practice and policy in the area of widening access, student experience and progression in the light of Covid-19. Our goal is to bring together diverse perspectives, ensure all voices are heard, and start building a repository of ideas and solutions in response to current circumstances. 

Please add to the following Google document: https://tinyurl.com/sk6jv5h  

Based on the resultant log of initiatives we are hoping to bring together researchers and practitioners in moderated discussions in the coming months to inform policy and practice.

Dr Manny Madriaga is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. He is a co-convenor of the Society for Research in Higher Education Student Access and Experience Network.


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How literature puts a spark into university access debates

by Anna Mountford-Zimdars and Colin McCaig

“The greatest competition to the establishment of social science was literature” observed one of our undergraduate lecturers many moons ago. If you wanted to know about the conditions of Victorian England, would you like to read a report detailing the diet and housing conditions of members of different social groups or read Charles Dickens?

As scholars in the field of widening participation and social mobility we were implicitly challenged to reconsider this question: is it literature or is it social science that touches us, and motivates us to change policy or even our own actions? Unsurprisingly, we argue that there is room for both genres, but literature wins hands down in terms of instilling passion and allowing us to consider issues with our hearts rather than heads.

We are talking here about Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, that ‘went viral’ in the United States and beat Michelle Obama’s autobiography to become the Goodreads Choice Award 2018. Among the over 50,000 reviews of the book is one from Bill Gates and the book was on Barack Obama’s summer reading list.

Reviews and talk-shows featuring the memoir have focused primarily on the family story and the often disturbing relationships between family members, which led to the ultimate schism between Tara and her parents. But reading the book as social scientists, we did not only see  a memoir of bizarre familial dysfunctionality, we found ourselves reading this book as the ‘ultimate widening participation’ story.

Born in Idaho to a Mormon survivalist father opposed to public education (indeed, any government activity), Tara never attended school or saw a doctor. She spent her days working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. While one of her siblings taught her to read, another frequently attacked her violently with the parents looking away. Her story of transformation through education began when Tara taught herself the numeracy skills required to pass the standardised entrance test for universities, the ACT. This set her on an education journey to Brigham Young University (a Mormon university in Utah), Harvard and to her PhD at Cambridge, England, on The family, morality and social science in Anglo-American cooperative thought, 1813-1890.

Reading Tara’s story with the eyes of social mobility scholars, it offered much reassurance for academics committed to the access agenda. Tara is admitted to higher education despite her lack of traditional (school) credentials. She receives a partial fee waiver by the institution. When, eventually, she applies for federal financial aid help, she receives help from the state. Her tutor encourages her to apply for a study abroad opportunity at Cambridge. Not only this, but when she is not selected, he uses his knowledge of her and her context to advocate for her and succeeds in getting her a place. Other tutors spot her talent and encourage and advocate for her to obtain a scholarship – the Gates scholarship – to undertake her PhD work at Cambridge. There are also wider support networks: when she first enters higher education, a Mormon Bishop supports her though conversation and, at Cambridge, she is able to enrol at the University Counselling Service.

We read this as a partial redemption story for those working on access and increasing opportunities. We are often frustrated by slow progress and continued inequities in access, progression and success in higher education, or we see HE institutions struggling to change as fast as society to be fully inclusive. There is always a feeling that more could be done: our outreach programmes sometimes don’t reach the most disadvantaged. There can be inadequate regional coverage of opportunities. Higher education may not be the right choice for everyone. Our institutional timetables don’t always allow for students to have part-time jobs they need to fund themselves or their caring responsibilities. We have to make the same arguments year after year to keep widening participation as a core consideration of the daily activities of our institutions. Universities are all fishing for the same ‘diamonds in the rough’ which, in the UK, is often solely defined as a disadvantaged student, however measured, with unusually high grades given their opportunities and context. We need to work on widening access and funding for postgraduate study. And all this is not for lack of social science evidence of what the issues are, or ideas of what needs to be done to achieve greater evidence – it’s just that it is hard to do it all the time. So, it is easy sometimes to be frustrated.

And then along comes Tara and tells the story of how it is all worth it in the end. How she encounters academics who are fundamentally decent human beings, who can contextualise her knowledge and lack thereof, who care and make a difference. And she tells of a state government that does actually offer funding (if modest), of institutions that offer scholarships (if modest), of scholarship panels that are thoughtful – perhaps even wise – and of professional service parts of the university successfully working to support students.

But there are also questions the book leaves us with, that emphasise the need for further research: Tara was able to compensate for an almost complete lack of education by passing a college entrance test. This would not be possible in the English system – save for, perhaps the Open University, institutions respond to market drivers and want young people from a traditional trajectory of having been to school, taken exams (especially A-levels in favoured subjects) and demonstrated prior success. Tara would have been denied the  opportunities of higher education in the UK and we would have lost out on a PhD – and, more importantly, her book.

We can also ask how people who share some of Tara’s ‘educational disadvantages’, such as rurality and home-schooling, could be reached and inspired to change their journeys. It is clear that Tara is an incredibly resilient and reflective woman; it would be unreasonable to infer that everyone in her circumstances could have taken the path she did. How can we support more people who share some of Tara’s characteristics to enter higher education?

We also wonder about the role of academic discretion, one of the greatest aspects of being a professional in higher education. The academics in the book put their discretion to good use to support Tara, creating a powerful story of individual academic success and opportunities. But how can we create more structures that enable more of such individual success stories? For example, we don’t know – from the book – whether there are established links between universities with a specific religious focus – such as Brigham Young – and favoured entry to her subsequent institutions, Harvard and Cambridge. Was her discretion-enabled journey really about her specific talents, or was she just the Mormon applicant with the most harrowing backstory? Access work is all about equalising opportunities for progression into HE, but the implication is that Tara was helped on her way because of her initial church affiliation and subsequent links between institutions with Christian foundations. In essence, the access question is: would an uneducated rural girl from the mountains of Idaho have the same opportunity if she didn’t have familial links with the Mormon Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? Discretion, when it is essentially discrimination, can be more structural than personal.

Social science can give us good questions, good evidence, answers and facts. Literature can put the soul and heart into the stories and inspire more thinking, research and action. Dr Westover may not have intended to create new lines of research in social mobility, but she has nonetheless succeeded in doing so perhaps to a greater level than recent scholarly books in the field.  So we end with a big thank you to Dr Tara Westover for sharing her fantastic story!

SRHE member Anna Mountford-Zimdars is Professor of Social Mobility and Academic Director of the Centre for Social Mobility at the University of Exeter. SRHE member Colin McCaig is Professor of Higher Education Policy in the Sheffield Institute of Education at Sheffield Hallam University.

Which books beyond social science have influenced your academic practice? Write us a blog about it, or if you prefer discuss an idea first with editor rob.cuthbert@uwe.ac.uk.