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Disability is part of the human condition. To ensure inclusion in higher education, campus leaders must consider how to fully embrace all students, faculty, and staff with and without disabilities. When developing a culture of inclusion, colleges and universities have specific responsibilities to students with disabilities to ensure they can learn and achieve their goals. As part of choosing the right school for you, you can consider the steps that the institution is taking towards disability inclusion.
Culture is shaped by the attitudes of administration and faculty and the lens through which disability is viewed. Even when students do not experience outright hostility, stigma and generalizations are likely to be the most prevalent barriers in the path of students with disabilities. To counteract common biases against students with disabilities while creating an inclusive campus culture, leaders at all levels of the institution must get involved. Inclusion on campus helps everyone to understand the common interests, goals, and aspirations of people with and without disabilities. Students benefit from a diverse, inclusive campus culture, which helps prepare them for the world of work and civic and community engagement.
Creating a Culture of Inclusion
Disability is a campus-wide concern. Typically, campus leaders turn to the disability support services and counseling offices on campus to build a comprehensive approach to access and accommodations. While those offices have specific and critical responsibilities to support students, becoming an inclusive community takes work at all levels—from senior leadership, to faculty and staff, to students. Research indicates that if new students do not experience a sense of belonging within eight weeks of arriving at college, they will be at high risk of dropping out. This is particularly true for first-time students with disabilities, with 25 percent dropping out by end of year 1 and 35 percent dropping out by end of year two. Thus, shaping the culture of higher education institutions is one of the most important steps to achieving the goal of disability-diversity and inclusion.
Strategies For Full Inclusion on Campus
Although no higher education institution has achieved full inclusion, many are striving to reach that goal. Drawing from a recent higher education inclusion guide on how to accommodate students while building a comprehensive culture of inclusion, we highlight action steps campus leaders can take for students with disabilities to achieve their highest potential.
Focus on Campus Design and Planning
What does it mean to create a campus that is welcoming and safe for all students? It includes attention to campus facilities and other physical space. The design and accessibility of a space communicates values and expectations. Inclusive spaces, or designing for inclusivity, takes into account the different ways in which we learn, work, and socialize.
Reflect on How Language is Used
How we refer to disability and people with disabilities can be limiting. One way to change detrimental attitudes or stigma toward disability is to intentionally use more inclusive language that dignifies people’s images and expectations. Using positive images of students with disabilities from different backgrounds can also help to familiarize disability.
Talking about disability and using inclusive language starts with how we define socially constructed concepts such as disability, diversity, and inclusion. Are the staff, students, or faculty nervous when talking about disability? Do members of the campus community either behave differently or feel they need to behave differently around students with a disability? How is disability portrayed on your campus or at your institution?
Build Faculty Capacity
Faculty may lack an understanding of inclusive pedagogy, so it is important to talk about disability bias and raise awareness about common disabilities. Faculty are likely to adopt inclusive teaching methods and materials if they are more knowledgeable about disability and understand that students with disabilities have limitations that arise from external barriers and not students’ inherent abilities. Students with learning disabilities, for example, do not have a reduced intellectual capacity. Rather they may have processing disabilities that can be addressed by the format in which information is conveyed, organizational mechanisms such as testing procedures and methods, and other tools. In addition, faculty can initiate conversations with students about supports they may need, or encourage them to consider the ways they learn best.
Ensure Technology is Accessible
Institutions should have a clear standard for accessibility when it comes to technology. The recommended standard from the U.S. Access Board is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, Level AA, which, until 2017, surpassed the 508 compliance standards for federal agencies. These guidelines include making captioning a standard element of all videos used in classes and on campus, providing a budget for creating video captions, and requiring that all new content posted to a website meet the accessibility standard and establish accessibility checkpoints before content can be posted.
Faculty should ask themselves the following before planning their classes and programs: How will this lesson work for students with disabilities? Doing a small mental checklist and double checking to see if their materials are accessible would really make a difference for a lot of students. While things like non-captioned videos and scanned materials rather than text files might not seem like a big deal to many, it prevents some from getting the full education they deserve.
Encourage Responsibility and Accountability
Leaders at all levels should be engaged in leading, messaging, and measuring improvements in inclusion. All staff should clearly see their own role in, and contribution to, inclusiveness. On-the-ground action among faculty, staff, and students needs to happen in tandem with support at the level of the president, dean, chancellor, or provost who embrace disability-diversity consistently and publicly.
Streamline the Student Accommodation Process
Common reasonable accommodations in higher education include changes to course formats and schedules, examination accommodations, housing changes (e.g., permitting emotional support animals in housing or offering separate housing for people with post-traumatic stress disorder or gender dysphoria), alternative methods of demonstrating or obtaining practical skills, and extra time to complete projects.
Part of managing the student journey is ensuring that students and faculty understand the process for learning about, requesting, receiving, and modifying requests for accommodation. Effective, user-friendly solutions for students also create opportunity for the accommodation team, including faculty, to increase their level of service. Institutions need to understand how learning can be impaired by not tending to inclusive practice and accommodation for students with disabilities. Are the accommodations designed simply to pass the ‘reasonableness’ test or does the institutions strive to support learning for all through inclusion? Is there increased flexibility in delivery? Is there variety in how learning is designed and delivered? Does increased interaction with faculty and staff meet the needs of students with disabilities when it needs to?
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