Although people with disabilities have made significant strides toward educational equity, they continue to face struggles in college that perpetuate their dismal college outcomes. Current research focuses on struggles endured in the on-campus setting and provides little insight into online course experiences. Toward addressing the knowledge gap, the study opened a social portal to online higher education, leveraging disability as an experiential lens to understand online course challenges and the potential for universal design for learning practices to reduce obstacles to academic success. We considered online course experiences concerning impairment effects and disablism within a social relational disability studies perspective.
The study's methodological approach embraced liberatory access, leveraging access intimacy to practice interdependence as a recruitment and data collection tool that valued and enabled a disabled, deafblind researcher. An inductive thematic analysis foregrounding seven students with disabilities' lived experiences identified three themes in the data: adapting to impairment effects, negotiating constrained autonomy, and implying universal design for learning. Study results showed that students with disabilities negotiate how their impairments and chronic illnesses affect their embodied functioning while also contending with structural and pedagogical constraints that impede students' efforts to adapt in ways that allow for flexibility in pace, time, and duration of academic work. Online course spaces were most beneficial and supportive for students with disabilities when instructors practiced universal design for learning. The implications of experiencing disability in online courses include a need for disability justice approaches to faculty training and research investigating universal design for learning practices, students with disabilities invisible work, and access intimacy in the higher education context.
Melanie Hinojosa, Chair.
Zoom:
Passcode: 661409
Read More