Educators say more accommodations needed for student with complex needs. Then, educators say there aren’t enough accommodations for post-secondary students with complex needs. University of Toronto lecturer Simone Lewsen and KPU’s Dr. Seanna Takacs who is also
Co-chair of the Accessibility and Inclusion Community of Practice for the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services, discuss what needs to happen next.

Aired: Sep. 2, 2024, The Current, CBC

Visit the CBC’s site to listen to the interview.

Transcript of the interview below and on The Current’s site.

Educators say more accommodations needed for students with complex needs

Guests: Simon Lewsen,

SO: I’m Susan Ormiston and you’re listening to The Current. It’s that time of year again. Back to school. Grace Eamer is heading into her third year of university at St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She’s one of many post-secondary students who’s been granted academic accommodations.

SOUNDCLIP

GRACE EAMER: I was actually just recently diagnosed with ADHD. I’m unable to really pay attention throughout the entirety of classes. So, my accommodations just I have them so that it just makes it easier for me to kind of go about classes the same way as everybody else does.

SO: Her accommodations include more time on her exams and access to note takers and tutors.

SOUNDCLIP

GRACE EAMER: They’re there to help you. Like, school is going to be hard, but it shouldn’t be hard to the point where it’s just debilitating. And that’s kind of the point that I got to. And that’s when I realized, okay, like this is a lot harder than it should be. It was actually really, really easy for me to get them. It was just a matter of a little bit of paperwork, a meeting and contract being signed.

SO: But meeting the complex needs of all students can be a challenge for educators, and some are feeling quite conflicted and inundated with accommodation requests that are not always straightforward to navigate. Simon Lewsen is a contract lecturer at the University of Toronto. He’s also a magazine journalist who wrote a piece in The Walrus magazine about the pressures of adhering to a deluge of demands from students and accessibility offices. Simon, good morning.

SIMON LEWSEN: Good morning.

SO: So, you heard Grace. How familiar you with stories like hers?

SIMON LEWSEN: Yeah, I’m very familiar with stories like hers. And hers is a success story. It’s fantastic. It sounds like she got the accommodations that she needed. It sounded like accommodations were very much tailored to her individual needs. And that is sort of the example of what I’d like to see more of in higher education.

SO: She talks about ADHD. What other kinds of learning accommodation requests do you get in other instructors?

SIMON LEWSEN: So, you get a range of accommodation requests and some of them come to you, you know, in the way the Grace’s did. It comes from from the Accessibility Services office in the form of a letter telling you to do something. A lot of them actually come directly from students and are not necessarily backed by the bureaucracy. And there’s a range of them. Some of them are very legitimate, like Grace’s, some of them feel– you’re not quite sure what to think about them, and some of them seem less legitimate. And your job as a contract instructor is to figure out what to do about each one. And I can give you an example of the sort of range of requests I get. Sometimes I’m asked, students want to get credit even though they’re not attending class or to get credit for assignments they didn’t do, or to get make up assignments or to submit written comments instead of actually participating in class or to not come to class, or to have class beamed out over zoom and to attend class remotely, or to get extensions on deadlines and then further extensions on those deadlines, and then even further extensions after that. So, there’s a really, really broad range of accommodation requests that you get. Some of them, officialized by the university, some of them just informal between the students. I don’t think a week goes by when I’m not given a request of some kind or another. And my job in that is to figure out which ones I want to grant, which ones are reasonable, which are not reasonable, and try and find some kind of balance that feels fair and also conducive to learning.

SO: How much is that your job? I mean, are you under pressure to accommodate most of these requests?

SIMON LEWSEN: I think as a general rule, instructors do feel a lot of pressure to accommodate these requests. There is a kind of culture at university that that really pushes instructors to be accommodating. And I think some instructors, some of these instructors I spoke to for my piece, are fearful that if they’re not maximally accommodating, there could be repercussions. A lot of contract instructors don’t have any job security, and the fear is that if they do something that gets them in trouble or gets a complaint against them, they could find that their contracts are not renewed. So, even if that fear isn’t expressed directly, it is sort of lurking there in the back of a lot of people’s minds.

SO: You quoted an unnamed teacher in the system who went through this process, with a complaint about accommodations. And I’m just quoting your article. ‘These days,’ he says, ‘when I get a letter from Accessibility Services, I shut up and do what I’m told.’ Is that common?

SIMON LEWSEN: Yeah, I think that is really common. I think a lot of tenured professors are afraid of disapproval of their peers. People without job security are afraid of losing their job, and people aren’t sure what will happen if they push back. I think there are actually two problems that instructors are facing. One is that they want to grant requests because they want to be fair to students, and they want to make their classrooms as accommodating as possible. But some of the requests seem dubious, or some of the requests seem to undermine their learning outcomes or undermine what they’re trying to do in the classroom. But there’s a sort of fear that if they push back against those requests, there could be repercussions for them. And there are instances, including a very high-profile instance at New York University in which people have found that they’ve lost their jobs, because of complaints from students.

SO: Do you see harm in the breadth of accommodation requests for education?

SIMON LEWSEN: I don’t see harm in bespoke accommodations targeted to individual students with their needs. We heard from a student earlier on in this segment, and it seemed like she got very, very bespoke accommodations, very much targeted to her needs. And what that means for her fundamentally, is that university is going to be accessible to her in a way that it just wouldn’t have been otherwise. And I actually don’t see any harm in that at all. I’d like to see more of that, in fact. Where I do see harm is in this trend towards a more generalized culture of leniency, the sort of pressure that’s now being put on a lot of instructors to simply change the way they teach, not for individual students, but across the board. To not require participation for any students. To offer classes that are beamed online so that students don’t actually have to come to class anymore. To have screens in the classroom for all students, even if you feel that screens undermine your learning environment. To not have timed assessments anymore, these kinds of things, this push towards a more generalized culture of leniency, I think is undermining what we’re trying to do in education, which is we’re trying to create an atmosphere where there is a little bit of stress or a little bit of friction, because it’s in that atmosphere of mild stress or friction where learning happens. And I think when we take that away, we take away opportunities for learning and for growth.

SO: Do you think that’s a danger right now? That we’re not applying any stress?

SIMON LEWSEN: I think everybody who teachers worries about that right now. Everybody who teaches feels that they’re trying to create– what you’re trying to do in the classroom effectively is you’re trying to navigate a kind of sweet spot. Learning happens under situations of mild pressure, too much pressure, and you break people. And that’s not helpful. You push people out and exclude people, and that’s horrible. Too little pressure and you don’t have that risk taking that leads– that intellectual risk taking that leads to learning and growth. And I think everybody who teachers or most people who teach right now are fearful that we are losing that.

SO: In the minute we have left, Simon, what needs to change so that we can teach everyone in the way they need to learn?

SIMON LEWSEN: I’d like to see a much bigger investment in accessibility services so when students come requesting accommodations, they can be given the kind of attention they need and the kind of bespoke accommodations they need. Right now, I think accessibility services are picking the low hanging fruit, which is sending letters to instructors telling them to be lenient, instead of actually giving students what they need. In my piece, I talked to a student who was blind, who didn’t have access to accessible textbooks. And he had to teach his instructors how to do tactile drawings for him. This is the kind of thing we’re not doing for students at the same time that we are putting a lot of pressure on instructors to, you know, not have participation grades in their class. So, I’d like to see a bigger investment in accessibility services. And the other thing I’d like to see is I’d like to see instructors speaking out loud about this. I think a lot of people are frustrated about the way things are being done, but people in academia are often very scared to speak out loud about things. They’re scared to feel like they’re on the wrong side of sort of progressive orthodoxy. And I’d like to see more people doing what I’m doing right now and actually talk about these things, because I think these are important conversations to have, and I don’t think we’re ever going to get the balance right if we’re not even willing to talk about it.

SO: Hopefully this conversation is part of that. Thanks, Simon.

SIMON LEWSEN: Thank you so much, Susan.

SO: Simon Lewsen is a contract lecturer who teaches writing at the University of Toronto. He’s also a magazine journalist. Seanna Takacs is co-chair of the Accessibility and Inclusion Community of Practice for the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services. She’s also the practice lead in accessibility services at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey. Shauna good morning.

SEANNA TAKACS: Good morning, Susan. Thank you for having me.

SO: You’re welcome. What are you thinking as you listen to Simon?

SEANNA TAKACS: I have lots of thoughts. I think there is a climate, where education, post-secondary education is changing and shifting, and for a number of reasons. And along with that shift comes a real misunderstanding. And I see this in a lot of different ways, a real misunderstanding over what academic accommodation actually means. We have academic accommodations in the sense of what we do in accessibility services, where we take a student’s medical documentation, we figure out the functional limitations that they have in an academic setting, and we design accommodation plans based on that. And one of the constraints in that process is to actually avoid a fundamental alteration of the course. That’s contrasted with, let’s say, what I think Simon was alluding to is, you know, academic adjustment or modification. So, that’s where we get into, you know, real fundamental changes around course delivery, course expectations, grading changes in person classes versus, you know, being converted to zoom, those sorts of things. And they do need to be treated quite differently.

SO: Why do you think the accommodations have become fraught? I mean, it is a case that people are talking about them a lot.

SEANNA TAKACS: There are a number of reasons. You know, I think we have a much stronger awareness of questions of equity and diversity, which is good news. You know, we’re more mindful about inclusion and different pathways to inclusion. I think a lot of what happened in post-secondary, around COVID really helped people see, you know, we can make these sorts of changes. We can move online quickly. We can pivot really quickly. And then once the post-pandemic sort of world, suddenly a lot of those measures were taken back. I think it is leaving instructors and professors on kind of mushy ground, you know, is it based on disability? Am I, should I be modifying my class, to what extent? And a lot of the work that I do with faculty is around making those those kinds of distinctions.

SO: And can you briefly explain the approach that you use, the universal design for learning? What’s an example of how that might look?

SEANNA TAKACS: Universal design for learning is a curriculum design framework. So, the idea is instead of focusing on the disabilities or the barriers that individual students might face, we sort of take a systems approach and we look at design components. So, as an example, typically an accommodation would be audio recording of lectures which would benefit a student with, you know, particular types of disabilities. What UDL tells us to do is to say, well, you know, let’s examine the barriers that are present in particular classes, in particular activities, and examine whether audio recording could be something that would benefit everyone in the class? And we find when we start to implement some of these measures, and there are a bunch of different measures, a bunch of different ways that you can design pedagogy to be more inclusive, we start to see that a lot of different people really benefit from these sorts of measures in a lot of different ways.

SO: You know, there are so many different challenges and disabilities in teaching and learning. But in your experience, have you come up with sort of the overarching thing that students with special accommodations need?

SEANNA TAKACS: Oh, that’s a really good question. I don’t think there is one particular thing. I mean, we would love to have that sort of silver bullet. I think that would be amazing for everyone. But, you know, what we find is it’s really a concern of, you know, some pedagogical measures like really looking at pacing. You know, providing more challenge. In a lot of cases. Some students have requests, you know, they really wish that their instruction would move faster. Assistive technology is really important. We’re learning the benefits of captioning. So, when I work with faculty, I really suggest that they examine each class sort of as a unit rather than going person by person. Really look at the class as a unit. What does the class need? What are the barriers that the class is experiencing? What measures could be implemented from a design standpoint, from a proactive standpoint that would really support students?

SO: And Simon talked a bit about instructors or students who believe that accommodations aren’t fairly applied, that they perhaps take away a level playing field, or they dismiss parts of learning a material. How would you respond to that?

SEANNA TAKACS: I think that that’s a problem that can be sorted out with much better training. There isn’t a lot of work that goes into onboarding new faculty, and that varies from institution to institution. But by and large, there isn’t very much strong accessibility onboarding when faculty start at the institution. I really do think that with better training around access and accessibility, the duty to accommodate, course modifications, I really think that we’ll see some of these problems mitigated. And I mean, what really came across in The Walrus article was just this sort of confusion. And I do hear that from faculty. That they’re not sure what to do. They’re not sure what counts as a modification. They’re not sure, you know, what it means to honour some aspects of accommodation plans.

SO: Would you say that accommodations have been stretched too far or that we are missing some students?

SEANNA TAKACS: I think when it comes to accommodating with students with disabilities, I think we’re missing students. And I think Simon had written about a couple of examples in the article that were really salient. You know, when we run into alternate format texts, for example, when we have to use tactile resources, that’s really, really challenging. And there are people with highly specialized knowledge that, you know, need to mobilize that knowledge. We need to know more of that. It has to become knowledge that’s more generalized across institutions generally.

SO: It’s a huge subject. We’re out of time. Seanna, thank you so much.

SEANNA TAKACS: Thank you so much, Susan.

SO: Seanna Takacs is co-chair of the accessibility and inclusion community of practice for the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services. She’s also the practice lead in accessibility service at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C.