Today many students with disabilities (who could not have attended a college in the past) are able to flourish in a higher education environment. The American Disabilities Act of 1990 sets out legal rights and protections for these students. You should familiarize yourself not only with these rights but also with strategies to help these students learn. Different strategies may be required for students with physical disabilities and learning disabilities. More students are obtaining accommodations at the college level, so it is wort thinking about how to prepare your course to be accessible as possible for all learners. 

 

Physical Disabilities

In “The View from a Wheelchair,” Jeffrey Whitman, a philosophy professor from Susquehanna University, gives a number of insights for dealing with students who are physically disabled. You will find this essay in a remarkable issue of Teaching Philosophy that includes a number of essays on the subject of teaching students who also have disabilities. Here are just a few of Whitman’s suggestions:

 

• Be proactive. Many students with disabilities have learned to advocate for themselves, but the faculty member should also reach out to find out what accommodations are needed and make every effort to provide them (Whitman 347).

• Don’t unwittingly treat a person with disabilities as different in some way. Many of us were trained as children not to stare at people with disabilities. Indeed, disabilities often make us uncomfortable, which may lead to a tendency to ignore students with disabilities. You should make every effort to fully engage these students in your classroom and make the same demands of them that you do of every other student (Whitman 349).

• Don’t patronize students with disabilities or be overly solicitous. Whitman cautions against using some of the overly “pc” terms and thinking.  He writes “we are blind or crippled, not vision or mobility-impaired. Neither are we ‘confined to a wheelchair,’ . . . I for one am liberated by my wheelchair” (Whitman 350).

• Take advantage of the rich experiential background that students with disabilities can bring to our classes. In a safe academic environment, these students bring a completely new perspective to the classroom. Among other things, Whitman tells us that they may challenge many of the dominant assumptions of our culture, disrupting the “narrative concerning autonomy and self-sufficiency” held by many students (Whitman 352).

 

Whitman’s is only one of a number of equally important essays in this volume. Immerwahr recommends that every thoughtful person should read Robert F. Murphy's The Body Silent: the Different World of the Disabled. Murphy is a professor of Anthropology at Columbia, who suffered from a disease that progressively disabled him. This book was life-changing for Immerwahr and for everyone he knows who read it.

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In your career as a faculty member, you are very likely to have students who have sight impairments or hearing difficulties. It's important to think about how to work effectively with such students by making simple changes. For example, when a blind student is in class, it's important to always describe what you are doing. E.g., if you write material on the board, you have to verbally express what you are writing. 

 

Learning Disabilities

Students with documented learning disabilities have a right to specific accommodations. At this point, practically all institutions have an office that supports these students, and faculty members are usually informed of what accommodations are necessary. Here are a few of the most common problems and some of the recommended accommodations.  Many of these steps you can take to address such issues will also help students who do not have documented learning disabilities. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Universal Design for Learning

One way to handle the influx of students with accommodations is to design your course pro-actively to deal with such matters. Here are a number of tips:

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• When possible, have your course completely built within the LMS, with all the assignments loaded, from the first day of class. This way students who may need extra time on assignments can see all the work they may need to complete, get a head start on any assignment type they might find especially difficult, or obtain materials in a format that works best for them.

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• A common accommodation is something like "extended deadlines on assignments". This can be a headache for faculty members who don't want to keep track of who is permitted to submit late work and who isn't. To address this, you might have a policy like "all students have x number of dropped homework grades". This approach usually satisfies everyone: instead of extending deadlines, students can simply choose not to complete certain assignments without it impacting their grade. 

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• Try to provide course content in a variety of mediums: on the course LMS you can provide supplementary videos, post course notes, links to podcasts, etc. Loading in this sort of supplementary material tends to benefit all students. 

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• Make sure all material posted to the LMS is accessible: any videos should be captioned, and any documents need to be compatible with a screen reader. Most Word documents are compatible, so where possible convert files in to .doc or .docx format. If you have to use a PDF, make sure to use the 'auto-tag for accessibility' option. If you don't know how to do this, see here.

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• Incorporating principles of UDL also involves finding different ways for students to demonstrate competency: perhaps students can write a paper or make a presentation; perhaps you allow students to record voice answers to homework assignments; it could simply mean having a variety of components that make up a student's grade: homework, attendance, a paper, and an exam so that a students' entire grade does not rest primarily on one assignment type. 

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Sources:

Murphy, Robert F. The Body Silent: the Different World of the Disabled. New York: Norton, 1990.

Whitman, Jeffrey, The View from a Wheelchair.  Teaching to/by/about People with Disabilities, Teaching Philosophy.  Ed. Anita Silvers and Anita Ho (2007) 30.4: 345-356.​

University of Illinois Chicago's resource on Universal Design for Learning

Creating Accessible PDFs. Digital Accessibility Sources, Harvard University Information Technology. 

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Author: John Immerwahr
Update: June 20, 2012; 1-22-26--D. Sackris