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NEW WAYOF
LEARNING BY PIPPA STACEY
The landscape of higher education looks quite different as students start the new academic year. A mix of attended and remote learning will be the order of the day, which will be a positive for many disabled students, but why has it taken a pandemic to enforce these reasonable adjustments?
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t’s been a difficult few months for students beginning or returning to higher education. How the next academic year will unfold could be anybody’s guess, but it looks as though the majority of people will be studying at least part of their degree remotely. To me, that decision makes sense. Students will be able to study from home, because doing so would be in the best interests of their health. However, this very adjustment has consistently been denied to disabled and chronically ill students for years and years.
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posabilitymagazine.co.uk
Overall, I adored my own time at university, but the challenges I faced due to my energy-limiting chronic illness highlighted a real lack of genuine understanding from my university. Although they were willing to be lenient with my attendance, and recognised the fact that I simply wasn’t well enough to attend all my contact hours, they weren’t even open to discussing whether the lectures I missed could be recorded so that I could watch them and study from home. Even though other departments offered this by default, the explanation from Disability Services was that the technology set-up this required wasn’t possible for my course. And instead of initiating further discussion as to how we could get around this, their curt suggestion was that if I was struggling to attend contact hours, perhaps I should be taking a year out instead. At the time, I was of course upset and incredibly disheartened by this response. It wasn’t until years later that I fully realised that it was discrimination too: something that prohibited me from having the same educational experiences as my non-disabled peers. However, I’d like to think I got the last laugh. I taught the majority of my degree to myself, mostly, from bed, and still graduated with a 2:1 in 2016. Since then, further discussions with chronically ill students has shown that my experiences were far from unique: far
