Supporting students with disability and health issues: lowering the social barriers
Medical Education 2012: 46:564–574
‘Managing’ disability: early experiences of university students with disabilities
Recent UK legislation, operational from December 2006, places a duty on all public authorities, including higher education institutions, to actively promote equality of opportunity for people with disabilities. The university studied here has a number of initiatives in place to develop good practice in this area, but how do students themselves experience that provision? Research about people with disabilities has sometimes alienated them by failing to reflect their own perspectives. This study, explicitly aimed at incorporating students' voices and using interview and video data, offers some insight into students' experiences of the aids and obstacles to an inclusive learning environment at one university.
Dyslexia and the Life Course
The life stories of adults diagnosed with dyslexia as children were examined, with emphasis on the related emotional experiences. The life story method of narrative analysis was used to compare and analyze the accounts of 12 participants who were interviewed extensively. The findings indicated that self-esteem problems may emerge by early childhood as individuals contend with aspects of their learning disabilities that interfere with typical development. By school age, all participants noted self-esteem problems when they experienced struggles or failures in school, which could feel traumatic. Testing and diagnosis improved self-esteem when conducted in a relevant manner that led to adaptation. The central plots of the participants' lives were characterized by the interplay between the functional challenges of their learning disabilities and the related self-esteem issues. Compensation involved the individual's areas of competence and the resources within the environment. Niches in late adolescence and young adulthood held potential to dramatically improve compensation. Participants generally exhibited four ways of life in adulthood and an added sense of emotional insecurity. Each attempted to integrate lifelong emotional experiences related to living with diagnosed dyslexia.