Disability and Self-Advocacy Experiences in University Learning Contexts

Cynthia Bruce,M Lynn Aylward

doi:10.16993/sjdr.741

Abstract

Disabled students in Canadian universities are usually taught that they must develop the ability to discuss their disabilities and assert their rights if they want to achieve academic success. Yet this individualized skills-based approach can privilege deficit-focused methods and impose hierarchical and mutually anxiety-provoking student-faculty relationships. This study documents the experiences of disabled students and their professors arranging academic accommodations by exploring the relational necessities of student self-advocacy and how they shape experiences of teaching and learning at three Nova Scotia Universities. Findings expose the existence of formal self-advocacy teaching alongside informally communicated behavioural expectations. They also make evident the often unrecognized relational complexities inherent in claiming disability rights, navigating university process, and meeting expectations around student sharing of disability and accommodation information.

Highlights

Canadian universities have articulated a growing awareness of the accessibility barriers often experienced by disabled students in recent decades
Open-ended interview questions generated rich stories (Aylward 2006) about disabled students’ and university faculty members’ self-advocacy, accommodation, and negotiation experiences. Sharing these accounts offered an opportunity to dwell in the messiness of the everyday interpersonal exchanges created by obligatory acts of student self-advocacy
The aim was to draw on the lived experience of disability in all its complexities to deepen understandings of the nature of post-secondary disability support structures and to evoke possibilities to disrupt and resist the constraints they so often impose (Corker 1999; Corker and Shakespeare 2002)

Summary

Introduction

Canadian universities have articulated a growing awareness of the accessibility barriers often experienced by disabled students in recent decades. Efforts to increase the post-secondary participation of disabled students through the establishment of individual learning arrangements have resulted in slower-than-desired progress toward equity and have affirmed that participation for all remains a goal, not a reality (Guppy 2004; Opini 2008). Within post-secondary institutions in Canada, disability is usually positioned as ‘an individual “problem to be fixed,” rather than an opportunity to reconceive what inclusion “means” in higher education’ (Cox 2017, 559). Bureaucratic borders define who qualifies for support within a medicalized frame that situates disability as deficit or lack (Oliver 2009), and accommodation procedures generally align with mainstream notions of access as an individual undertaking (Titchkosky 2011). Some people qualify while others do not – a reality that situates accommodated learning as optional and infuses its procedural elements with discretionary power

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Conclusion