Improving Disabled Students' Learning: Experiences and Outcomes

by Fuller; Mary

• ISBN13: 9780415480482
• ISBN10: 0415480485
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-06-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

How do disabled students feel about their time at university? What practices and policies work and what challenges do they encounter? How do they view staff and those providing learning support? This book sets out to show how disabled students experience university life today. The current generation of students is the first to move through university after the enactment of the Disability Discrimination Act, which placed responsibility on universities to create an inclusive environment for disabled students. The research on which the book is based focuses on a selected group of students with a variety of impairments, as they progress through their degree courses. On the way they encounter different styles of teaching and approaches to learning and assessment. The diversity of their views is reflected in the issues they raise: negotiating identities, dealing with transitions, encountering divergent and sometimes confusing teaching and assessment. Improving Disabled Students " Learninggoes on to ask university staff how they experience these new demands to widen participation and create more inclusive learning climates. It explores their perspectives on their roles in a changing university sector. Offering insights into the workings of universities, as seen by their central participants, its findings will be of great interest to all practitioners who teach and support disabled students, as well as campaigners for an end to discrimination. Crucially, it foregrounds the views of disabled students themselves, giving rise to a complex, contradictory and always fascinating picture of university life from students whose voices are not always heard.

Table of Contents

What is the issue with disabled students' learning?

Introductio?

What our research study tells us

Managerialism and equalities: tensions within widening access policy and practice for disabled students in UK universities

Listening to disabled students on teaching, learning and reasonable adjustments

Assessing disabled students: student and staff experiences of reasonable adjustments

Curriculum and pedagogy: challenges and dilemmas for teaching staff

Identity work: ways of being a disabled student in higher education

The idea of fitness to practise: discourses of disability and the negotiation of identity in initial teacher training

Troublesome transitions? Disabled students' entry into and journey through higher education

Organizational structures for disability support: contradictions as catalysts for chang?

What are the implications of our study of disabled students' experiences?

Reflections and conclusions

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.