“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat,
“or you wouldn’t have come here.”
The section of the presentation will examine contradictions and tensions which have become insurmountable within Disability service provision in a rapidly changing landscape. These include: (i) growing demographics, (ii) the explosion of diagnostic labels, (iii) the need for financially sustainable solutions, (iv) the inherent clash between current practices and social model goals, (iv) the increasingly loud expectations of the student body.
Accessibility services in higher education are now in many ways at odd with both the reality of the sector and the philosophical intentions behind Inclusion. It is creating a tension that is often insurmountable and is leading to exhaustion and confusion among staff (Houghton & Fovet, 2012).
This section of the presentation is going to embrace the Alice in Wonderland theme of the conference and invite you on a journey, a dystopian journey to the unsettling reality we are soon to face if service provision is not rethought and redesigned with urgency. Let’s go down the rabbit hole…
Growing demographics
Demographics have exploded within Disability service provision. Why? There may be several variables at play: firstly students are perhaps feeling more stigmatized and more willing to come forward for services; a decade of inclusive provisions in the K-12 sector has also led to the emergence of a generation of students who have clear expectations with regards to Inclusion and see higher education firmly within their grasp. But do the reasons for this explosion in service requests really matter in the end? We are perhaps spending too much time wondering what has caused this phenomenon when we should instead be wondering how to address it.
Accessibility services are no longer able to cope with demand and there is no likelihood they ever will be able to again – not until they radically alter their format of service provision and the gatekeeping processes that guard access to them. In the meantime we are seeing serious repercussion of this quick rising wave: long bottlenecks and unmanageable waiting list are indicating to us clearly that the ‘intake’ process in its current format is unsustainable. It seeks to guarantee the provision of quality services but the minutia of the steps it requires creates an unworkable overflow which means many students are currently not receiving the support they need (Fichten, Heiman, Havel, Jorgensen & Budd, 2016).
Even when students are able to access services, the pressure in terms of time and resources is such that they are often provided with mere ‘template’ services that do not necessarily genuinely align with their actual needs. Staff are rushing through the process of seeing students, archiving diagnostic documentation and setting up exam accommodations. They can be so consumed by this ‘factory line’ process that they often do not have the time to ask the most essential of questions: What barriers are you currently experiencing this semester in your learning environment?
This, in turn, leads to an increasing dissatisfaction on the part of service users. Complaints are on the rise, so are litigious cases and out of court settlements. Even when accessibility services manage to maintain satisfactory ratings in terms of quality assurance, this may not genuinely reflect the significant percentage of students who may be dissatisfied but simply do not show up in statistics: dissatisfied service users tend to choose not to remain registered with an accessibility service and are therefore automatically excluded from compiled data.
Explosion of diagnostic labels
Another reality accessibility services are finding difficult to deal with is the current explosion in the types and categories of diagnostic labels. Accessibility services where created and shaped around an expertise that related traditionally to hearing, visual and mobility impairments. Accessibility services usually had in their ranks staff who had developed a specific expertise with regards to these impairments. Students registered with accessibility services are now diagnosed with vast spectrum of impairments and conditions that range all the way from mental health to chronic illness, and also include the full array of learning disabilities. It is impossible to have handy, within an accessibility service, consistent expertise that targets each diagnosis within this vast range of conditions. And yet we are still purporting to possess this expertise.
Accessibility services, indeed, still persist in positioning themselves as diagnostic experts when really that knowledge is not present or available. Nor should it be. Accessibility services will find their mission increasingly difficult to fulfill and maintain if they continue to position themselves as experts in relations to diagnoses that now exceed our collective understanding and awareness within our campuses. They also are increasingly being called out for not actually having this expertise, by stakeholders who are assuming they can count on a plethora of remedial targeted interventions with regards to each of these diagnoses and quickly realize they hold this hope in vain.
Another unfortunate repercussion of this positioning of accessibility with regards to diagnostic information is that the third party documentation itself literally becomes a barrier between the accessibility adviser and the learner. There is such a protracted process in place to obtain and submit this document that when it is finally produced it becomes the sole focus of interventions within the short window of time available, at the detriment of any authentic discussion that might otherwise occur between the service user and the student in relation to the actual barriers the latter are facing in their current learning environment. We have constructed processes where the document itself takes center stage and reduces all parties to mechanical roles that are almost devoid of authentic meaning. In a study run within an accessibility service trying to move away from this over-medicalization of service provision, staff found that students would automatically place the document physically between themselves and the service provider. When it was pushed aside, they would push it back to the same position, as if to suggest “it is all in there” (Beck et al., 2014).
Another regrettable consequence of this over-focus on diagnostic documentation is the fact that it is currently preventing accessibility services from gauging actual emerging needs from service users, and stopping them from addressing these new trends in a just-in time fashion. Many learners are currently approaching accessibility services not because they wish to obtain traditional accommodations in exams. They often increasingly understand their strengths and needs, and will frequently simply seek advice on what courses to take or to avoid. They are demonstrating an acute understanding that the barriers they are experiencing are caused by the design and format of the learning experience, not their own diagnosis, and are seeking campus expertise and knowledge as to where these barriers in design might lie. Instead they are being denied access to this straight-forward information because we are currently requiring documentation for any request made of accessibility services. A significant percentage of service request would, these days, require no alteration to instruction or assessment, but we continue nevertheless to act as rigid gatekeepers and to make all services dependent on diagnostic documentation. It is not a tenable position.
Need for financially sustainable solutions
It is hard not to acknowledge that accessibility services in their current format are financially unsustainable. Their format was designed and conceived in days where students with Disabilities represented a very small minority. The accommodations of their needs through targeted, individualized and costly remedial action was feasible, practical, and negligible in terms of costs. That reality has changed. These students represent a sizable share of the campus population. Continuing to provide services in this fashion is now extremely costly, not evidenced to be particularly efficient, and clearly unsustainable. The issue is not so much the expense that this creates annually but more the fact that these costs make no tangible change to campus structures or to pedagogy. As the volume of students requesting accommodations increase, so do costs, but these costs are repeated annually and wasted – in the sense that they fail to alter our practices, our pedagogy or our design, and lead to further costs snowballing in the future because no structural change occurs.
Inherent clash between current practices and social model goals
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0e3wMD0Cuk&feature=youtu.be
Increasingly loud expectations of the student body
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkSZrB2nyMQ
To download the video transcript ¶
Accessibility services in higher education are now in many ways at odd with both the reality of the sector and the philosophical intentions behind Inclusion. It is creating a tension that is often insurmountable and is leading to exhaustion and confusion among staff (Houghton & Fovet, 2012).
This section of the presentation is going to embrace the Alice in Wonderland theme of the conference and invite you on a journey, a dystopian journey to the unsettling reality we are soon to face if service provision is not rethought and redesigned with urgency. Let’s go down the rabbit hole…
Growing demographics
Demographics have exploded within Disability service provision. Why? There may be several variables at play: firstly students are perhaps feeling more stigmatized and more willing to come forward for services; a decade of inclusive provisions in the K-12 sector has also led to the emergence of a generation of students who have clear expectations with regards to Inclusion and see higher education firmly within their grasp. But do the reasons for this explosion in service requests really matter in the end? We are perhaps spending too much time wondering what has caused this phenomenon when we should instead be wondering how to address it.
Accessibility services are no longer able to cope with demand and there is no likelihood they ever will be able to again – not until they radically alter their format of service provision and the gatekeeping processes that guard access to them. In the meantime we are seeing serious repercussion of this quick rising wave: long bottlenecks and unmanageable waiting list are indicating to us clearly that the ‘intake’ process in its current format is unsustainable. It seeks to guarantee the provision of quality services but the minutia of the steps it requires creates an unworkable overflow which means many students are currently not receiving the support they need (Fichten, Heiman, Havel, Jorgensen & Budd, 2016).
Even when students are able to access services, the pressure in terms of time and resources is such that they are often provided with mere ‘template’ services that do not necessarily genuinely align with their actual needs. Staff are rushing through the process of seeing students, archiving diagnostic documentation and setting up exam accommodations. They can be so consumed by this ‘factory line’ process that they often do not have the time to ask the most essential of questions: What barriers are you currently experiencing this semester in your learning environment?
This, in turn, leads to an increasing dissatisfaction on the part of service users. Complaints are on the rise, so are litigious cases and out of court settlements. Even when accessibility services manage to maintain satisfactory ratings in terms of quality assurance, this may not genuinely reflect the significant percentage of students who may be dissatisfied but simply do not show up in statistics: dissatisfied service users tend to choose not to remain registered with an accessibility service and are therefore automatically excluded from compiled data.
Explosion of diagnostic labels
Another reality accessibility services are finding difficult to deal with is the current explosion in the types and categories of diagnostic labels. Accessibility services where created and shaped around an expertise that related traditionally to hearing, visual and mobility impairments. Accessibility services usually had in their ranks staff who had developed a specific expertise with regards to these impairments. Students registered with accessibility services are now diagnosed with vast spectrum of impairments and conditions that range all the way from mental health to chronic illness, and also include the full array of learning disabilities. It is impossible to have handy, within an accessibility service, consistent expertise that targets each diagnosis within this vast range of conditions. And yet we are still purporting to possess this expertise.
Accessibility services, indeed, still persist in positioning themselves as diagnostic experts when really that knowledge is not present or available. Nor should it be. Accessibility services will find their mission increasingly difficult to fulfill and maintain if they continue to position themselves as experts in relations to diagnoses that now exceed our collective understanding and awareness within our campuses. They also are increasingly being called out for not actually having this expertise, by stakeholders who are assuming they can count on a plethora of remedial targeted interventions with regards to each of these diagnoses and quickly realize they hold this hope in vain.
Another unfortunate repercussion of this positioning of accessibility with regards to diagnostic information is that the third party documentation itself literally becomes a barrier between the accessibility adviser and the learner. There is such a protracted process in place to obtain and submit this document that when it is finally produced it becomes the sole focus of interventions within the short window of time available, at the detriment of any authentic discussion that might otherwise occur between the service user and the student in relation to the actual barriers the latter are facing in their current learning environment. We have constructed processes where the document itself takes center stage and reduces all parties to mechanical roles that are almost devoid of authentic meaning. In a study run within an accessibility service trying to move away from this over-medicalization of service provision, staff found that students would automatically place the document physically between themselves and the service provider. When it was pushed aside, they would push it back to the same position, as if to suggest “it is all in there” (Beck et al., 2014).
Another regrettable consequence of this over-focus on diagnostic documentation is the fact that it is currently preventing accessibility services from gauging actual emerging needs from service users, and stopping them from addressing these new trends in a just-in time fashion. Many learners are currently approaching accessibility services not because they wish to obtain traditional accommodations in exams. They often increasingly understand their strengths and needs, and will frequently simply seek advice on what courses to take or to avoid. They are demonstrating an acute understanding that the barriers they are experiencing are caused by the design and format of the learning experience, not their own diagnosis, and are seeking campus expertise and knowledge as to where these barriers in design might lie. Instead they are being denied access to this straight-forward information because we are currently requiring documentation for any request made of accessibility services. A significant percentage of service request would, these days, require no alteration to instruction or assessment, but we continue nevertheless to act as rigid gatekeepers and to make all services dependent on diagnostic documentation. It is not a tenable position.
Need for financially sustainable solutions
It is hard not to acknowledge that accessibility services in their current format are financially unsustainable. Their format was designed and conceived in days where students with Disabilities represented a very small minority. The accommodations of their needs through targeted, individualized and costly remedial action was feasible, practical, and negligible in terms of costs. That reality has changed. These students represent a sizable share of the campus population. Continuing to provide services in this fashion is now extremely costly, not evidenced to be particularly efficient, and clearly unsustainable. The issue is not so much the expense that this creates annually but more the fact that these costs make no tangible change to campus structures or to pedagogy. As the volume of students requesting accommodations increase, so do costs, but these costs are repeated annually and wasted – in the sense that they fail to alter our practices, our pedagogy or our design, and lead to further costs snowballing in the future because no structural change occurs.
Inherent clash between current practices and social model goals
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0e3wMD0Cuk&feature=youtu.be
Increasingly loud expectations of the student body
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkSZrB2nyMQ
To download the video transcript ¶
