Everyone has the right to a higher education no matter who you are, however some people might need a little extra help getting there.
Doctor Jeff Preston is an assistant professor in the field of disability studies. He has a rare form of muscular dystrophy and he talks about how the world needing to be more accessible to disable people.
Listen to Jeff Preston’s comment here or read below
“How, and why do we represent disability? Jeff started to say. The more that I looked at it and the more that I read about it, the more that I saw that there were these sorts of two conflicting views of disability that were starting to be investigated through the field of disability studies”.
Jeff continues “Which is that on the one hand, we have this very dominant medical perception. Disability is seen as a problem of the body. It’s all about defects and dysfunction, illness, sickness, weakness, problems of the body and mind that must be fixed through medicine. But, when I’m looking at myself and my own experiences, I’ve never seen my body as being fundamentally the problem.
In fact, as I’m sitting in my wheelchair, I’m looking at around the world and I’m saying, you know, if the world was a little more accessible, I would not be as quote, unquote disabled as I am now.”
After I spoke with Jeff, I decided to turn my attention to Fanshawe and I spoke to Shelley Sinclair. The manager of accessibility services and I decided to ask her
Listen to Shelley Sinclair’s comment here or read below
“Students who have permanent disability would register for our services by completing the early ID online. So that’s found at www.fanshawec.ca/early ID. They complete that intake form, which gives us a little bit of information around, what accommodations they might need and what barriers or challenges they might experience at the college.”
Shelley says “From that point, they’re invited to come to an orientation around accessibility services and what we offer, and they’re also assigned an accessibility counselor. So, the next step would be for the student to meet with their accessibility counselor and that counselor meets with the student and does an intake.”
Shelly continues on “The consoler and student really just tries to understand, what accommodations have worked in the past, what they might need at the college. Together they create an accommodation plan, they also review documentation. So, students with disabilities have to submit documentation of their disability, and often on that form, there’ll be some indication of things that might be helpful.”
“Then the accessibility counselor creates what we call an accommodation form, which is similar to what students and IEP that students would have had in high school. Then that accommodation form is sent to the student’s professors, every term, just letting them know what accommodations would be required for that student”. Shelley explains.
Finally, I wanted to ask Shelley about residents and what happens if a disabled student needs accommodations there as well because they were going to live on campus.
Listen to Shelley Sinclair’s comment here or read below
Shelley explains “When it comes to residents, if we’re meeting with the student during our intake and they know I’m going to be in residence and I have certain requirements, we connect with residents around how they can best meet those needs. So, for example, as you may be aware within residence there’s several rooms that are designated barrier, free rooms.
Shelley continues “So, they have larger pathway. It’s just a lot easier to move around in. Larger doorways, we certainly ensure that all of our entrances and doors have automated access for students. Other things you might see in residents, if a student was in residence with the hearing loss or that sort of stuff, we would have visual smoke alarms and different things that we would work with residents to ensure are in place for the students”.
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