Students with disabilities – some initial considerations

Disability is diverse and is not the only dimension of a student’s identity that creates barriers to learning, but it’s an obviously relevant one for us.

This is a deep and substantive topic for which there is significant scholarship, but I will point out a few most salient truths. First, it is a well-known fact that students with disabilities face additional challenges in education that make successful outcomes more difficult for them. Secondly, we know that, given the right support and conditions for learning, we can close the outcomes gap for these students and improve their experience. Thirdly, the number of students registering in “accessibility offices” with, learning, cognitive or mental health conditions, has risen dramatically in the past decade. This last point is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, increasing numbers of students with disabilities accessing higher-education is an indication that we have progressed in our societal effort to make the pathway here more visible and navigable for them. On the other hand, it remains deeply concerning that so many students are living with these challenges especially when we consider that higher-education itself can be a complicating factor or even the proximal cause.  

People working as Learning Strategists in this context see all of this palpably and we can often feel that we are witnessing something broken in a system that we are powerless to change. As mentioned earlier, our deepened understanding of, especially learning and mental health disabilities and their effect on academic experience, has led to significant improvements in how we support those students. Learning strategy work has emerged as one of the essential components of that effort. It works. But it’s also discouraging for those on the frontlines who know that even their best efforts are unequal to the task, one that is much better solved by systemic changes that would make higher education more hospitable to all. We see up close the “hot coals” that are being strewn upon the path that many students walk, the harmful and unnecessary things that diminish their experience (Hannah, 2019). 

But in that imperfect system, the work we do for students with disabilities is a significant and critical part of the role and there are some unique considerations when doing it. 

The first universally applicable consideration is to ensure we are providing an accessible space for students when and where we meet with them. It behooves us to apply the principles of universal design to make them welcomed and in a way that reduces any need to disclose their disability. This is a bedrock consideration, not unique to our work and requires vigilance, attentiveness, continued learning, and a commitment to correcting mistakes when they happen. 

More germane to our work in particular is the challenge of supporting students with learning and/or cognitive disabilities – those with difficulties learning in certain domains or contexts, with developmental disorders like autism, with chronic or acute mental illness, ADHD, brain injuries and others. This represents a significant subset of students whose experience of education and learning and studying can be fraught in a thousand different ways and for whom the “evidence of the value of learning strategy instruction is seemingly ubiquitous” (Fagella-Luby et al, 2019, p. 63).  So, we apply all the best approaches to learning strategy work with these students that we would do with any student, while being attentive to the additional entanglements of those disabilities – the cognitive and metacognitive difficulties, and the sometimes myriad extra burdens that are entailed in living with them – seeking accommodations, being self-advocates, managing medications, experiencing stigma, educating others, etc. It’s a lot of extra labour. Sometimes learning strategies and new study skills can be yet another thing students have to learn or be responsible for. This fact may influence our approach to providing them. What may be uncontroversially effective as a strategy for one student, may be regarded as burdensome or counterproductive for another.  

But perhaps the most consistent or common challenge that students with learning/ cognitive disabilities reveal is with so-called “self-regulated learning”, another construct to help us understand what kinds of variable traits are conducive to effective learning.  Self-regulation, a concept arising out of social-cognitive theories of learning often associated with Albert Bandura, has become an enduring one in the field of learning strategy work. Self-regulation in learning is variously described in the literature but centres on the idea of agency or control over a few key domains of learning – motivation, emotions, cognition, and behaviour. That’s a lot of fancy words to describe what we tend to know when we see it. It would be like describing a good baseball player as someone who has a strong sense of goal orientation and agency over their swing. But “self-regulated learner” does have more explanatory power than simply “good student” and, as I mentioned in Part 1, it describes very well the specific characteristics that make that “good student” effective. An expanded list includes things like: 

• Being motivated and oriented by both intrinsic and extrinsic learning goals 
• Having a developed sense of metacognition
• Being able to mitigate the adverse effects of stress on learning
• Being able to identify and call upon resources of academic and other supports
• Being able to move productively through academic adversity and setbacks
• Being able to self-advocate
• Being self-aware
• Being able to calibrate strategic learning according to the specific context
• Being able to reflect upon past performance and recalibrate where necessary

Challenges with self-regulated learning are not unique to students with disabilities, of course, but they can be pronounced. We know well that there is a direct relationship between one’s ability to apply a range of metacognitive strategies and a successful academic experience.  Understandably then, most efforts at supporting students with cognitive/learning disabilities have focused on academic, study and cognitive skills, and less on the social and emotional experiences of these students. This has been an oversight since both things matter in the development of healthy, self-regulated approaches to learning. Learning Strategists are often frontline witnesses to this aspect of student’s learning lives, the emotional complexity that accompanies one’s relationship to learning. For students with disabilities, this relationship can be especially complex. So, we are very well positioned to intervene at this juncture to support students who are prone to task avoidance, feeling “stuck” in academic work, have a pronounced fear of failure, and are beset by other emotional entanglements thwarting their efforts to study. Research has identified many of the characteristics of more adaptive or self-regulated students including“…self-acceptance of [disability], self-awareness, intelligence, perseverance, proactivity, goal-setting, academic achievement, use of support systems, and emotional stability” (Willoughby & Evans, 2019, p. 176).

• The upshot of this is a simple syllogism: 
• Self-regulated learning is an important feature of academic success
• Students with disabilities are prone to compromised self-regulation in their learning
• Learning strategists can support the development of greater self-regulated learning by helping to foster greater self-awareness and compassion, normalizing failure, and acknowledging the emotional content of learning.
• Therefore, we should include this approach as part of our work

So, how to do incorporate this function into the work?

Surprise surprise – no rulebook on this. I think most good educators, including Learning Strategists understand this tacitly – that attentiveness to a student’s emotional relationship with and disposition towards learning is a critical consideration impossible to ignore. And talking to students about this explicitly is simply good practice – talking to them about how their emotions might be getting in the way, suggesting strategies to better regulate them when they do, helping them develop more discernment about which learning strategies work and when, helping them reflect on their own learning experiences etc. 

It’s essential Learning Strategy fare. But there is, as always, the caution here of veering too far into therapeutic or psychoanalytic territory with this kind of focus. Learning Strategy work is not regulated so we need to be vigilant about not offering interventions that are more rightly the controlled acts of mental health providers.  And students with disabilities will be navigating their academic accommodation process with the disability services offices on campus. We are not the providers of nor advisors for accommodations, rather, our work is the accommodation. Nor are we “treating” the students therapeutically. But, by making space for explicit discussion about the features and importance of self-regulated learning, we can help them generate greater agency and control over their own learning and better understand and manage the affective features of their learning experience.