Accommodating Students with a disability

Written by Katie Barry & Ged Hayward

On Tuesday, 25th of April, an amazing event happened.

Student Unlimited, or Student Onbeperk (SO) in Dutch, is the TU Delft student organization supporting students with disabilities. Early in the New Year they teamed up with the University Teaching Qualification (UTQ) team in delivering a workshop entitled Accommodating Students with Disabilities. 19 lecturers from various TUD faculties attended.

There has long been a discussion at TU Delft regarding how and when lecturers can be guided and informed on how best to support students with disabilities. Katie Barry, an educational psychologist in Teaching & Learning Services (TLS) and Ged Hayward, a UTQ trainer, supported by Grant Penny from TLS and Jenny Venhuizen from the Horizon Project, were asked to scope and deliver an initial course for lecturers and other teaching staff on how to accommodate students with disabilities in their classes.

The disabilities TU Delft students face can be split between those which manifest themselves mainly as a physical disability, such as auditive-, sight-, body-, and movement-related disabilities, and disabilities in what are generally considered as ‘neurodiversity’, such as dyslexia, dyspraxia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autistic spectrum disorder (ASD).

After covering a few essential subjects such as the appropriacy of language and the importance of creating a safe, respectful atmosphere, the 19 lecturers took part in a quiz which introduced to some surprising statistics such as 34% of young adults with ASD chose STEM majors compared to 23% of neurotypical students. The aim of this activity was two-fold. It served in starting the day’s conversation on disability; touching on the subjects of what a disability is, the range of disabilities and the sizeable number of people who have a disability; obvious or otherwise. The second aim was for the attendees to start to build relationships and feel more comfortable discussing this subject, with each other, which is highly nuanced and is, for some, an intensely sensitive and private subject.

The group them split off into groups to discuss:

  • What kind of students with disorders do you encounter in class? What do you know about these disorders?
  • What do you currently do to help these students? How do you take these students into account with your course design?
  • What could you do to create a more inclusive education for these students? What facilities would you need for this?

These group discussions were made more vibrant and richer as representatives from SO joined the groups to discuss their own disabilities, any specific needs they have, and what their experience of education at TU Delft has been. The conversation was passionate, respectful, and fascinating. After an hour we held a plenary discussion on what had been learnt and what the next steps could be. The day was rounded off with nibbles and light refreshments; and a continuation of the conversation.

This event was the first of its kind which TLS has run; a pilot, and we collected as much feedback as we could from the group and will look at how we can improve the event and at giving more practical resources for delivering comprehensive, accessible education.

The takeaways from the session were:

  1. A widespread expectation that the corporate TU Delft should have accessibility as the default not the exception - such as dyslexia-friendly fonts for all of its standard PowerPoint slides and the TU Delft intranet, and significantly better accessibility for students with a physical disability.
  2. A surprising but widespread belief that lecturers felt they couldn’t affect improvements such as those mentioned above.
  3. There is a strong appetite from lecturers to generally do better; to be better informed and better tooled in accommodating students with a disability.
  4. Student Onbeperkt really wants to engage with TLS and with faculty teaching staff to improve accessibility for all.  

With special thanks to Emmelie van der Pol and Kaninik Baradi from Student Onbeperkt for planning this event with us, as well as to Grant Penny and Jenny Venhuizen for being extra expert voices on the day.