Topic Progress:

All post-secondary institutions in Canada have a legal responsibility to ensure that students with disabilities have access to the programs and services offered at our institutions, and are welcomed as full participants in our campus communities. This is known as our duty to accommodate students with disabilities. We meet this responsibility by providing reasonable accommodation and by removing environmental and attitudinal barriers to students’ full participation. We will be exploring these concepts in more detail in Lesson 2 – How to Accommodate.

In addition to these legally-based responsibilities, increasingly, we are trying to find ways to support students’ learning by looking at where they are coming from so that we can provide an effective learning environment where all students feel welcome, can access learning, and can show what they know. This translates into working to create a campus environment where students feel comfortable being themselves and where they feel their instructors and college staff are there to help them learn. With this goal in mind, providing inclusive campuses for students with disabilities focuses on considering how we can provide them with a level playing field in all areas of campus life. This would include:

  • feeling a part of the campus community
  • being able to actively participate and engage in the learning activities in their program
  • being able to access learning materials easily
  • being able to use that knowledge in creating their own work, and
  • having a level playing field to demonstrate their knowledge

These are the same things that we are offering to our students without a disability.

Students with disabilities have the capacity and motivation to succeed in their post-secondary settings but may need to pursue their studies in somewhat modified ways, or may need to access particular supports in order to remove barriers to their learning.

To explore some of the experiences of students with disabilities, we will look at three areas that can often present barriers to these students and will provide you with an experience of what it could be like to have these types of challenges.

Click on each accordion to expand and learn more about the three areas of challenge.

1. Speed of Information Processing:
One of the major impacts of many disabilities on learning is that students need to take more time than the average student to process information for a variety of reasons. This impacts both the speed at which they learn and the speed at which they produce their work. For example:

  • Students who are blind or visually impaired will need additional time to complete readings using audio format materials or braille when compared to the reading rate of many sighted students.
  • Students with attentional difficulties may need to take more frequent breaks to help facilitate concentration when completing school work, again resulting in more time being required to complete assignments or study for exams.
  • Students with learning disabilities may require more time to decode written material or to proofread their work for spelling and grammatical errors.

As a result, many students with disabilities will choose to study at a somewhat reduced course load. Thus allowing them to access the additional hours they need.

2. Environmental Barriers on Campus:

Other students may experience barriers in the classroom and campus environment that make learning more difficult for them.

  • This can include physical or sensory barriers such as not being able to access a classroom because of stairs or not being able to see the material being presented due to visual limitations.
  • Other environmental conditions may be less obvious. For example, students may experience barriers to their learning when information is presented fasted than they are able to fully comprehend, as may be the case for a person with a learning disability. Another example could be a how person with a mental health condition, such as an anxiety disorder, may find it more difficult to concentrate in a noisy high-stimulation classroom.
3. Barriers During Assessment:

Students can also experience significant barriers to their ability to express their knowledge and understanding of course content to their instructor. For example:

  • A student with a learning disability that impacts their ability to read, especially under timed conditions, may only be able to answer half the questions on an exam even though they know the answers to remaining questions as well.
  • Another student who has difficulty with producing written answers may struggle to demonstrate their understanding of concepts which they would otherwise be able to explain verbally very well.

Experiential Activity

Online InstructionsFacilitator Notes

What You Need:

For this activity you will need the following materials:

  • a timer or a watch (this is a timed activity)
  • a copy of the Colour Exercise Worksheet (PDF) (download this worksheet but do not open it until you are ready to proceed with the activity)

Activity Details:

Post-Activity Reflection Questions:

  • Was this exercise difficult?
  • Were you making mistakes?

Post-Activity Debrief:
Students with learning disabilities often take longer to process information because they are not able to process the information as automatically as those without a learning disability. As a result, processing may require more effort and concentration to accomplish. This exercise gave you an opportunity to experience interference between two types of information, making the requested information (colour of the word) harder to provide automatically.

Break the class into small groups. Have half the participants put on blindfolds. Then pass out written instructions for a sorting game that involves both colour and tactile components. Ask the group to complete the game. Then ask participants to pass the blindfolds to the other members of their group. Repeat with a second short game. Ask participants to share their impressions of the experience with their group.

Post-Activity Debrief:
In this exercise, the participants with a disability ie. with blindfolds, did not have access to the full range of information or input for the activity. They could not read the instructions themselves; they could not complete all components of the activity independently. You will now have an opportunity to consider the learning and participation implications of this reality which we created in this exercise.

Post-Activity Reflection Questions: Was this second exercise more difficult? Did it take longer? Did they find they were making mistakes?

Activity Summary Debrief: Students with learning disabilities often take longer to process information because they are not able to process the information as automatically as those without a learning disability. As a result, processing may require more effort and concentration to accomplish. The second exercise gave you an opportunity to experience interference between two types of information, making the requested information (color of the word) harder to provide automatically.

Case Study

Watch this video to learn more about Nicks experience with Dyslexia.

Discussion Questions – Given your experience with the experiential exercises earlier and after watching the video, what are your impressions of what attending college as a student with a disability could be like for a student attending your program? What do you think would be the most challenging?