Newsletter: Ellen and Anne are students with disabilities: Here is their best advice for you as a teacher

Ellen is BSc student at the Department of Geoscience. She enjoys her studies but faces a few more challenges than some of her fellow students. She has several disabilities that affect her student life.

"You often feel like you’re the only person with a disability. It's important to talk about the fact that many people have something they're struggling with. It's normal to experience rough patches during your time at uni. Even people who don’t have a disability do,” she says.

Talking openly about disabilities is exactly what Ellen does in this article.

She has a mild degree of autism and has struggled with depression and anxiety during her studies.

For Ellen, this means that she has some special needs, especially for communication to be clear. "For some people, their autism diagnosis can mean that they struggle to decode what is being said between the lines," she explains.

"My brain zooms in on details. I need clear communication to help me understand, for example, what I need to do in an assignment. Otherwise, a string of questions pop into my head about structure, relevance, time management and so on. For most people, these things are probably obvious, but I need very clear instructions," says Ellen.

Her disabilities mean that things like going on field trips are more taxing on her than on many of her fellow students. As a result, she needs structure and a clear overview of her daily schedule so she can take her energy level into account. Ellen’s advice to teachers is therefore to use the planning tools that are available.

"I think Brightspace can help provide a good overview of what will happen throughout the semester. It's important for me to know when things will busy or when I can expect a heavy workload. This can help me plan my time and my private life so that I have more energy for my studies," says Ellen.

Overall, she finds that the teachers at the Department of Geoscience are very understanding and open to discussing with the students with disabilities what they may find challenging. She emphasises that reaching out and asking for help can be difficult and requires energy. That is why she likes it when teachers initiate the conversation about the hard stuff or check in and ask how things are going during the semester.

Ellen hopes that being a student with a disability will become more normalised in the future.

Anne’s studies at the Department of Biology and Department of Chemistry are also affected by the fact that she has several disabilities.

"If I have to sit or stand for a long time – that is, for more than 40 minutes – it starts to hurt a lot. So I need to constantly change positions and to lie down every once in a while. Mentally, I get overstimulated very quickly," she says.

For Anne, predictability is essential because, like Ellen, she plans her daily routines based on her pain and energy level.

"If I've been in the lab for many hours, I'm exhausted afterwards. A day of lab work often requires two days of rest where I don’t get out of bed. I usually have headaches and severe pain. But I try to plan my days based on my energy level so that I can participate in classes as much as possible," she says.

In general, Anne’s disabilities mean that she has a lot of extra planning compared to her peers.

In addition to frequent visits to her doctor and the pain clinic, she spends a lot of time informing teachers about her challenges and trying to find solutions if she can see that specific elements of a course will be challenging for her. A solution could be that she participate in some of the teaching online or that she take some breaks where she can sit or lie down during long lab exercises.

"This semester, for example, I have a lot of lab work. I started writing to teachers, the board of studies and other players already in the autumn because I knew it would be a problem for me. Writing emails to all the different people involved in a course is very time-consuming, and I don’t have a lot of time or energy because of my condition," says Anne.
 

That is why it makes her happy when teachers are open to discussing how they can plan their teaching to accommodate students with disabilities.

"For example, this semester I contacted a teacher about my challenges and asked if we could make an appointment to discuss them. And their response was just so laid back: ‘Come and see me and we'll figure it out.’ It was so nice to turn up to class later and know that both my teacher and the instructor assigned to the course were very understanding about my challenges," says Anne.

Her dream is that, in the future, AU will have a single unit that students with disabilities and teachers can turn to for advice and clarification in connection with questions about, for example, dispensations and the possibility of alternative teaching formats and types of examination.