Disabled students and staff in universities
Wendy Merchant, Victoria Mason-Angelow, Stuart Read, Stephen D’Evelyn; Sheila Trahar, Sue Porter
This project started at the point when the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA) had been severely reduced during 2014, with the intention that universities would take responsibility internally for providing an environment in which the need for individual support would be reduced. Following this, provision of individual support at UK universities was outsourced, and in January 2017 guidance was issued by the Disabled Students Sector Leadership Group to vice chancellors and senior managers about ‘inclusive teaching and learning’.
This context provided a perfect opportunity for disabled students themselves to contribute to this debate, enabling our own university to develop its strategic plan for greater inclusivity and diversity. The goal was to:
“Listen to how disabled students formulate their own experiences of the barriers that they encounter in the higher education environment, and what it takes to improve their inclusion in education.” (p.3)
While the research data were all collected at our own university, we know from the literature and the surge in interest in conferences across the UK that these issues are not unique to Bristol, nor even to the UK. The method followed a participatory model, where student researchers took the lead in planning and in creating a platform for their own agenda, as it developed during the project. Nine students, all female, responded to a call for a ‘co-research’ group, and they remained central to the research activity in this project for the first two years of the study, holding 13 group meetings where they reflected on their own experiences at the university. One of the significant gains from this group was their own growing sense of empowerment and peer support, which several of them said they had never experienced at the university previously. They successfully applied for funding from the 2016 ESRC Thinking Futures Festival, in which they held a Forum Theatre event, enacting scenarios based on their experiences, and asking the audience (the ‘spectactors’) to intervene and reconstruct the action.
During the second phase of the project, five of the group created their own personal reflections in written form. Group members assisted the research associate by carrying out interviews (15) with disabled students across the university, and helped to analyse these. Their own project reached a conclusion before their studies and careers led them away from Bristol, and they took part in a collaborative writing weekend, producing a ‘zine’ which expressed their experiences as well as their analysis and reflection on what needed to happen in the university.
During the early phases of the research, it became apparent that the disabled students’ experience was matched by similar issues amongst disabled staff. This project therefore expanded its remit, to include a focus on disabled staff in the university and was led by disabled staff in our own project. This part of the project followed a similar model to that of the disabled students, with an auto-ethnography focusing on ongoing experiences and on the actions taken to tackle disabling issues in the university. Several of the group were also active in their support of the Staff Disability Forum, which had previously struggled to attract membership across the university. The data was subsequently enhanced by 13 semi-structured interviews with other disabled staff members across the university. Data for both the student and staff side were transcribed and analysed using process coding, so that we could describe the shape of some of the practices in which participants’ experiences were grounded.
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