Creating an accessible curriculum for students with disabilities.

2. Reflecting on Content

Some disabled potential students might have an impairment which leads them to question whether they could achieve success in your course or programme of study. For its part, the University should (DDA Part IV Code of Practice, section 4.27) avoid making assumptions about what categories of disabled people can and cannot do. Questions such as whether blind students can succeed in Chemistry or whether dyslexic students can succeed in Social Work are not helpful, because they wrongly presuppose a uniformity of skills under impairment headings. They also wrongly assume a uniformity of the demands of courses or programmes of study across or within different institutions.

What you can do is to develop clarity about what in your course or programme are core, non-negotiable requirements. You can also convey to potential students a sense of any progress made in the development of ways to enable students to fulfill course requirements in alternative ways, whether the requirements are core or not.

“…Central to this course in Law is the development of students’ ability to analyze and produce accurate and persuasively argued statements of various areas of the law. Such statements and analyses may be in oral or written form, and there is room for flexibility here…”

“…While our course in Physics engages students in practical, laboratory activities, these serve as aids to theoretical understanding rather than to the development of practical skills.”

This latter example underlines the value of publicized clarity about what is core. If the acquisition and development of practical skills is regarded as key, then any student’s inability to acquire and develop such skills would be problematic.

“Staff are now more aware of the need for more specific information to be given out to potential students in regard to the nature of the programme and the core learning outcomes so that they can make informed decisions for themselves.”

Further, the need for agreement about what is core is also underlined: there is obvious potential for trouble where an admissions adviser thinks that a subject is largely theoretical and her teaching colleagues think that it is fundamentally practical.

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