From the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. In the picture, Professor Nicole Phelps (left) lectures her United States History class on November 19 while Nicole Sargent transcribes the class notes for hearing-impaired students at the University of Vermont.Some things in academia never change, but the big lecture is not one of them. Take Nicole Phelps’ U.S. history survey course at the University of Vermont, where the professor delivers her 50-minute monologue in a kind of 21st-century landscape that was unimaginable a generation ago.
Overhead PowerPoint slides accompany her talk. About a fourth of the 100-odd students in the stadium seating are typing away on laptops — lecture notes, presumably.Another laptop is busy at the front of the hall, but the typist isn’t a student. She’s a transcriber using a software program called TypeWell that puts the lecture into words to be read simultaneously by a student with a hearing impairment using one of those laptops above.
Accommodations for students with disabilities aren’t entirely new to higher education, but technological advances — like those that facilitate the laptop interchange — are making more learning aids possible, and not a moment too soon.
Students who benefited from special education mandates over the last two decades as they passed through grades K-12 are enrolling in college in growing numbers. And public institutions of higher education are obliged under federal law to accommodate them.
At UVM in the 2007-08 academic year, 594 students, or about 6 percent of the undergraduates, notified the university’s ACCESS office that they had a confirmed disability of some kind — ranging from Attention Deficit Disorder or assorted learning disabilities (the most common two categories) to visual, auditory or mobility impairment. ACCESS (Accommodation, Consultation, Collaboration & Educational Support Services) has a staff of learning and support specialists who work with self-identified students a year at all levels.
According to a UVM survey, undergraduates with declared disabilities are in classes taught by about 700 faculty members, a majority of the university’s teaching staff. Many of those professors aren’t necessarily savvy about how to accommodate disabled students who show up the first day of class. Nor are many of them well-versed in the most effective pedagogical techniques for all students, disabled and non-disabled alike. After all, unlike primary and secondary teachers who are certified in part for their educational training, teachers at the university level are hired by virtue of their expertise in their field specialties, as reflected in their advanced degrees and publications — not necessarily because they know a lot about teaching.
Now suppose an English professor who regularly teaches Shakespeare finds, one semester, that a registered student is hyperactive, and the next year, that one of the students is blind. Rather than retrofitting the course every time to accommodate different disabilities, the professor might want to consider designing the course in advance for virtually everybody.
The prevailing term for this in higher education is “universal design for learning,” or UDL. UVM’s Center for Disability and Community Inclusion recently was awarded a $1 million, three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to help implement this across the campus.
The notion of “universal design” originated in architecture and industrial design in the 1970s. The idea is that when buildings or products are engineered so that they can be used by people of all abilities, everyone benefits — not just those who are disabled. One commonly cited example is the Cuisinart, with its oversized buttons, big handles and bold print.
Susan Edelman, a research associate professor in the College of Education who helped write the grant, points to another everyday example: curb cuts — those gaps at corners where the sidewalk is at street level. Besides facilitating wheelchairs, she said, “Curb cuts have “lots of other uses — for roller bladers, shopping carts ...”
Applied to education, she said, universal design acknowledges that “Every learner is different. Some are better listeners, others learn better visually. Others use their hands ...”
The UDL approach means planning courses “from the ground up” with diverse learning styles in mind. The grant will, among other things, marshal UVM’s resources to help faculty members do this.
So, for example, that course on Shakespeare might be designed with options that include books on tape, or captioned videos, or student-performance opportunities. UDL advocates contend that when an instructor modifies the teaching approach to engage a variety of learning styles, other students benefit as well, not just the disabled — just as a curb cut benefits a skateboarder as well as a wheelchair user.
Larry Shelton, a professor in the College of Education, said he stumbled onto the UDL mindset before it began gaining currency in higher education. He has been putting audio files of courses on his Web site for several years, and now he’s experimenting with speech-to-text software that could benefit other kinds of learners.
“A lot of students with disabilities don’t need a lot of changes,” Shelton said, “but when you think about what changes you can make for them, it makes it better for everybody.”When he started putting recordings on the Web, he recalled, faculty colleagues said, “‘You’re going to give them another excuse not to come to class.’” Shelton’s response: “I don’t take it personally if someone doesn’t come to class. Students who are likely to skip class because they’re blowing off the class aren’t going to listen to the recording anyway.”
He recalls a student with attention deficit disorder several years ago who was only able to focus on a lecture by listening through an ear receiver — that way, she was oblivious of ambient noises that had distracted her before.
Apart from technological fixes, he said, the UDL approach has led to other changes in his teaching style — more elaborate descriptions in some lectures, for example, or modifications in how exams are administered.Providing resources to help faculty to design courses in “universal” ways is a major thrust of the grant. Nevertheless, in a tight fiscal era when tenure-track faculty growth lags behind enrollment increases, the question remains how much additional work the UDL approach will require of professors who can already be heard complaining of overload.
Phelps said accommodations don’t pose a problem for her in her lectures, although they sometimes affect her preparation schedule if some students require an outline in advance.On the other hand, she recalls a course she taught at the University of Minnesota in which “visual learners” needed lots of pictures, while a legally blind student needed as few as possible.
“This is an example of one of the potential problems of universal design and multiple learning styles,” Phelps said in an e-mail. “Meeting everyone’s needs in this kind of situation definitely requires more work on the part of the instructor, since two sets of related but different materials are needed.”
Elana Buchalter, a first-year student from New Jersey who is “severely to profoundly deaf in both ears,” said she is getting more assistance at UVM than she did in high school, where she had to sit near the front of the class and relied on friends’ notes.For lectures in a UVM psychology course, she reads the TypeWell transcription on her laptop. In another course where the transcriber, like a court reporter, does a word-for-word transcript, she sits next to the transcriber and reads along. For her math class, notes are typed up and also available later online.
“I think it would be extremely difficult for me to get a good education without these accommodations,” she said by e-mail. “I would feel lost, and I feel I would miss a lot of important information.”
She lauded both ACCESS and UVM faculty for their help in providing the assistance she needs.
Not all disabled students are so upbeat.
“As at other universities, students with disabilities at UVM often report dissatisfaction with the ability of faculty to make appropriate accommodations
for their disabilities,” states the proposal for the UDL grant. “The rate of course withdrawal and non-completion appears to be higher for students with disabilities.”
And faculty, for their part, “report frustration with the lack of support they have available to understand the nature of students’ disabilities and how best to accommodate them.”
Phelps said that in three years as an instructor, she has worked with about 30 students who have required accommodations. She assumes that in creating a syllabus for a large lecture that 5-10 percent of the students will need accommodations, so she plans accordingly.
“To me, the biggest challenge of universal design is trying to find ways to make sure that the students who do not require any accommodation remain active in their learning,” she said. “A significant number of students seem to want to be as passive as possible — they want to be entertained, like they’re watching television.”
By contrast, she said, the students with disabilities “have used those accommodations to help themselves learn more effectively. They have been active learners, and they have done well in my classes.”
Many students with disabilities apparently keep them under wraps. Edelman cites a national study that reported nearly 60 percent of students with disabilities chose not to disclose them to their institutions.
Buchalter has some advice for such students:“If people speak up about their disability and aren’t afraid to hide it and allow faculty and professionals to work with them, life is so much easier,” she said. “No one is going to make any comments or argue with you and make your life harder. Everyone wants students to be able to get equal opportunities and get the best education they can.”
