Opening workshop: treatment of students with disabilities

He you!!!

This workshop is about direct forms of address like this one and about other forms of communication.

The participation of students with disabilities in education, labour, student activities and our society depends (among other things) of the images that exist about this group of students. There are students who think that other people see them as troublesome and needy persons who for this reason don’t disclose their disability or chronic disease. They let sleeping dogs lie. So they don’t use the special provisions to which they have a right. The consequence is: delay or failure of their study.

There are teachers who translate the concept of ‘equal treatment’ extremely literally.

They treat their students with disabilities on exactly the same way as students without. They don’t make any exception for any student with a disability. So for these students there are no possibilities to study in an adapted or other way, even if these students ask for such provisions. In fact they only look at systems, not at people.

In The Netherlands the Law of ‘Equal treatment’ means that students with disabilities ought to get equal chances as students without disabilities. In our view creating equal chances means to have an eye for the differences between students and to handle those differences as adequate as possible. To create equal chances we have to remove hindrances that students meet as a consequence of their disabilities and so we have to treat them unequal in / because of unequal situations caused by their disabilities.

At the same time we work on the right image building. This is difficult because many students dare not disclose their disabilities because of many reasons.

(Sometimes even they realise that they meet hindrances because of this decision!)

So one of our aims is alerting everybody (politicians, directors, teachers, fellow students, students with disabilities, if possible the whole world) to the images they have got about people / students with disabilities and especially about the influence of those images on the choices everybody makes in contacts with them.

In a big survey in The Netherlands (9000 students and teachers at 9 different institutes) we found that for instance teachers are definitely concerned with the item ‘studying with disabilities’. And very many of them declared themselves willing to support that students with disabilities can study. But there are also questions, like: what definition of disability do ‘we’ use? How to recognize students with disabilities? How to treat them? What to do and what to omit? How to guide, counsel, coach and support them? (And sometimes: how to find enough time for all this?)

Teachers sometimes are uncertain about the way to treat this group of students.

And the concerned students confirm this.