This pilot study explored the potential of knitting as a stress reduction activity to promote overall wellness for first year college students with autism spectrum disorder. It was hypothesized that after engaging in a series of knitting sessions, participants would report a decrease in stress levels, as demonstrated using a pre-and post-session stress assessment. Six college students consented to participate in eight weekly knitting sessions to determine the effectiveness of knitting on managing stress. Participants completed a 10-Item Perceived Stress Scale, a knitting experience survey, participated in a 90-minute knitting group weekly for eight weeks, and recorded time spent knitting in between sessions. Participants reported their stress levels slowly reduced over the eight weeks as well as positive experiences with knitting. This study allows us to be cautiously optimistic that knitting helped first-year autistic college students manage their stress levels. Disability service professionals and college counseling center staff may find knitting groups to be of value for stress reduction in autistic college students. Additional research on the use of such groups is warranted.
The aim of this study was to better understand the administrative burdens that postsecondary education students face when attempting to receive accommodations. To do so, we gathered student narratives via 13 interviews at a large public research university in New England. Rather than uncovering administrative burdens during a formal accommodation request, we found that students face a relationally demanding process when working with faculty to implement their accommodations throughout the semester. We name this the accommodation redemption process. Faculty seemingly use this informal process as a way to leverage a student's capacity to redeem their accommodations. We find that students will respond to these relational demands by developing what we call relational strategies in attempts to ease accommodation redemption. Students interviewed showed varying capacities in developing relational strategies, leading to disparate outcomes for students and altering their development. We fold in critical disability studies frameworks of 'debility' and 'crip spacetime' to name the material realities of this process and point explicitly to the particular harm it causes. We conclude with a critique of self-advocacy in light of this examination. By bringing together research and theory from higher education, public policy, and critical disability studies, we create an analytic for mapping these less examined relational redemptive processes for future research and making institutional change. Recommendations are given for higher education institutions, practitioners, and researchers.
An important factor linked to the retention and success of college students with intellectual disability (ID) is support from their peers without ID. In this study with 63 college students without ID, we examined whether self-efficacy and intergroup contact are linked to participants' willingness to support their peers with Down syndrome. To test the role of intergroup contact, participants completed pre-and post-tests and were randomly assigned to indirect and direct contact conditions. Results indicate a significant correlation between self-efficacy and peer support. In addition, comparisons of participants' pre-and post-test scores indicate significant changes in their self-efficacy and peer support behaviors. Knowledge of these factors can inform models and approaches to motivate, recruit, and train college students to support the educational inclusion and success of peers with ID. Results are discussed in the context of implications for practice and research, as well as methodological limitations.
College students training to become service professionals need authentic and collaborative learning experiences regardless of hearing status. This case study examines a classroom experience created by educators in Emergency Management at the University of Central Missouri and Gallaudet University's Social Work and International Development programs. Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and hearing undergraduate students from different disciplinary fields collaborated remotely on a disability-inclusive emergency management project to assess a community hazard and propose risk reduction actions, all while navigating different communication preferences (e.g., written English and American Sign Language [ASL]). One major finding was that, while non-signing hearing participants gained cultural and communication competencies through working with DHH peers who were ASL users, DHH participants felt they did not benefit as much from the experience and were put in a position to teach about inclusivity, which was beyond their role as students. This study underscores the importance of pre-planning for cultural competency in university settings and illuminates pedagogical components necessary to deliver inclusive training that prepares professionals to lead and serve DHH populations.
Qualitative studies have revealed that disabled graduate students (DGS) are unlikely to self-disclose their disabilities and even less likely to register with disability services offices (DSO). The current study analyzed a survey of DGS at a large institution to determine if participants registered for services and if not, what barriers prevented them from doing so, to whom they disclosed their disabilities, and their perceptions of what services they required. Results indicate that over half of participants did not register with their institution's DSO for various reasons, including lacking awareness of available services for DGS, and seeking to avoid stigma and discrimination. Participants also described needing a range of services that are specific to their needs as DGS. Implications for researchers and practitioners and limitations are discussed.
While faculty impact on students' utilization of social and navigational resources is generally well documented, research on this experience for disabled students is limited. The purpose of this research study is to explore faculty priorities and understanding of service provision for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students to address the discrepancies revealed through review of the literature, as well as the uncertainty gap revealed among faculty in a preliminary study when it comes to their role in this process. A qualitative study was conducted to gather the perspectives of 18 faculty members at a postsecondary institution. A scenario-based approach was used in which faculty read about a situation and expressed their thoughts and action steps based on guiding questions. Three overarching themes emerged: faculty willingness, building a student-faculty partnership, and request for institutional support. Findings indicate faculty are willing to accommodate and support DHH college students but are looking for institutions to lead the way. These results offer implications and points of consideration for faculty and their institutions in ensuring positive postsecondary outcomes for DHH students.
In their pursuits of feeling successful, autistic college students may turn to several sources and tools. Until now, however, we largely have not understood what most matters to them. Stemming from a national study of autistic college student success, this paper explores the role of faculty members as a major piece of students' feelings of success. Our findings demonstrate how faculty who are supportive, understanding, and communicative to autistic learners are integral to their sense of comfort and confidence. On the other hand, autistic students note how the lack of disability and autism education, inclusive teaching measures, and emotional availability among faculty can compromise their feelings of success and thus represent major areas of improvement. We provide recommendations on how higher education institutions more broadly can invest in their faculty and additional measures to support autism acceptance, as well as an enhanced emphasis on inclusive measures to serve autistic students.
Few qualitative studies have focused on the experiences of neurodivergent graduate students as they pursue graduate and professional degrees, and particularly, how Black women make sense of their race, gender, and ability while preparing for academic careers. This study provides clarity on how their multiply marginalized identities lead them to make meaning of dis/ability culture, dis/ability identity, and expectations of academic performance and excellence despite experiencing executive functioning challenges. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 Black women graduate students, with special attention to race and dis/ability. Participants lived with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, dyslexia, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and auditory processing disorder. Participants shared the cultural norms and cultural stigmas among the African Diaspora as they relate to dis/ability and described how they sought refuge with other neurodivergent Black women. The article concludes with implications for research and practice, including more programming and pathways for (future) dis/abled faculty and more community spaces focusing on intersectionality.
Formed within the policies and laws of racist, antiBlack, and ableist systems, disability support services (DSS) offices remain the primary institutional intermediaries to access for Black disabled postsecondary students.3 The historical development and functional primacy of DSS demand an examination of espoused institutional awareness and commitment to supporting Black disabled students; we characterize this aspect as "racial cognizance" and employ two complementary approaches to examine its prevalence. First, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of University of California DSS websites explores multimedia indicators of racial cognizance. Second, we engage with interview data from four Black disabled women discussing the challenges they have encountered with DSS. We contextualize emergent themes from our CDA with these student narratives to discuss how DSS websites continue to employ color and race-evasive language, policies, and practices that privilege documentation and legal compliance over the access needs of Black students.
There has been considerable research examining racialized experiences and disabled experiences separately in higher education. Disabled student experiences have been marked by having to navigate institutional oppressive racist or disabled structures to meet the educational needs required to succeed on campus. There has been minimal research examining the combination of racialized, disabled experiences in higher education. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to illustrate how six underrepresented and racially minoritized (URM) disabled students experience race and disability while navigating higher education. Disability Critical Race (DisCrit) framework guided the research and interpretation of the results. This study used an identity-first language approach to connect race and disability to participants and provide autonomy and control of individual and collective racialized, disabled experiences. Through semi-structured individual interviews and focus groups, this study found that students perceived racialized experiences more tangibly than disabled experiences, there was a lack of representation on campus needed to meet URM disabled students' needs, and building URM disabled students' community created asset-based perceptions of racialized and disabled experiences. These findings should help higher education administration, faculty, staff, and students create supportive programs, initiatives, structures, and strategic planning that dismantle inherent racist and ableist structures, prioritize URM-disabled students, and provide more equitable higher education experiences and outcomes.
This article examines how carceral logics manifest for undergraduate racialized and disabled students who identify as or have a lived experience of disability. Using Disability Critical Race Theory, a crip-of-color critique, and carceral ableism and sanism as lenses, we challenge color-evasive ideology and explore how services that purport to "help" or "support" students-like mental health resources or disability support services-track, surveil, and police racialized and disabled students' bodyminds on college and university campuses. This qualitative study employs critical race methodology and critical disability methodology to center the counternarratives often undergraduate students. These findings expand the current K-12 literature in considering how racialized and disabled students continue to be subject to carceral logics as they enter institutions of higher education. Our themes examine how Disability Resource Centers enacted administrative violence, how racialized and disabled students were marked for removal and positioned as expendable and disposable on their campuses, and the ways in which students' reimagined alternative futurities rooted in care. This paper contains discussions about racism, ableism, suicide, police and medical violence.
In this research, we surface, interrogate, and disrupt how Disability3 law and the work of Disabled activists are appropriated and supplanted in ways that perpetuate the isolation of Disability as an individual experience in higher education. Alternatively, we theorize Disability law in higher education through a collaborative examination of the meaning and impact of mental health and wellness with Black and Brown college students with and without identified, or codified, Disabilities. We surface the presumed Whiteness of Disability by making visible Disability law's emphasis on individualism, paternalism, and "worship of the written word" (Okun & Jones, 2001, p. 3), and the consequence of the overemphasis on individual accommodation and intervention as a substitute for equity. We use the concept of "Terrible Sticky Truths" to highlight the pervasiveness of individualism in conceptualizations of Disability and the concept of "Subverted Truths" (Cannon, 2019) to illustrate the possibilities of reframing Disability in higher education around collaborative and communal accessible educational services and experiences facilitated by emphasizing intergenerational teaching and learning and critical care in work toward collective access.
Sex education in the United States is rarely comprehensive and inclusive, and individuals with disabilities are typically left out of sex education programs and conversations. When they do have access to sex education, it tends to focus on abuse prevention while ignoring sexual expression. The dearth of sex education available for disabled young adults has led to a need for self-directed sex education programs at the postsecondary level. Such a program, named Included, is inclusive of students with and without disabilities. Through flexible eight-week sessions, Included encourages students to ask questions, find reliable answers, and create content to share on Instagram. Included consists of weekly small and large group meetings. Large group meetings aim to evaluate content created by small groups and develop group members' identities as sex educators. Small group meetings aim to promote peer-led creation of material related to sexuality topics of interest. Grounded in the principles of inquiry-based learning, this peer-led program provides a structure for individuals to develop an understanding of diverse topics in sexuality while developing sex educator skills. From continuous improvement efforts and a community-based participatory research project, we learned that group members gained competence in sexuality topics and facilitation skills. The collaborative nature of the project encouraged an ongoing evolution of practices to increase the groups' effectiveness and inclusivity. Included is a promising emerging practice encouraging access to self-directed sex education at the postsecondary level for students with disabilities.
This study examined undergraduate Adapted Physical Activity/Education course descriptions for content, disability frameworks, and course benefits. A total of 599 course descriptions from 590 universities in the United States were evaluated using content analysis. Notably, disability-related content, such as definitions, was most frequently referenced. Of concern, medical model terminology and nonpreferred disability language were prominent, and only a small proportion of course descriptions directly highlight the benefits of taking the courses, minimizing their potential to recruit students into the classroom. Findings may have general and discipline-specific implications for revising course descriptions, including the need to replace offensive language to accurately represent courses and the value of course enrollment. Recommendations for how disability services offices, university faculty, and academic departments can engage in these efforts, both independently and through creating collaborative partnerships, are discussed.
While much support exists for autistic individuals from infancy through secondary education, better support is needed for autistic students' transition to higher education. Autistic high school students are less likely than nonautistic students to pursue postsecondary education and report experiencing various difficulties in college, such as mental health struggles and social isolation. The two-week Introduction to College Life Program (ICLP) was designed to support autistic high school students by giving them the opportunity to learn more about college and practice skills that are helpful for college success. The ICLP curriculum, which is grounded in the literature regarding supporting autistic college students, includes topics such as time management, self-advocacy, social engagement, dorm and commuter life, and self-care. The ICLP has been offered twice in person and twice online. To assess and continue to develop the program, autistic program participants completed an interview or an online survey about their experience in the program. Twenty-one participants provided feedback. All of the participants reported that the program positively improved their feelings about attending college (86%) or maintained their positive feelings about college (14%). Experiential activities, such as practicing communicating with faculty, were noted as the most helpful. Details regarding the program curriculum, participant feedback, and ways this program model may be utilized by other colleges and universities are discussed.
The purpose of this study was to explore an emergent professional paradigm in higher education disability resources-socially-just disability resources-as a potential means to enhancing access and equity in the experiences of students with disabilities. Because this is a novel framework of practice, we facilitated an appreciative inquiry initiative within a case study of one higher education disability resource center. Findings from the appreciative inquiry included the "positive core" of the disability resource center's implementation of socially-just disability resources, or the best of current practices in alignment with the paradigm's theoretical underpinnings. After an overview of the components of the positive core, implications for higher education disability resource professionals will be presented.
This study investigated postsecondary transition experiences among 20 four-year college students with chronic illnesses. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, this study addressed the following research question: What illness-related barriers do postsecondary students with chronic illnesses describe as being influential during their transitions to higher education? Data were analyzed using an applied thematic analysis approach (Guest et al., 2011). Findings indicated three key themes. Participants described: (a) unique challenges as they managed their medical care for the first time during the transition to college; (b) hesitancy to communicate with their parents about illness-related challenges during the transition; (c) influences on the transition from having fellow chronically ill immediate family members. Recommendations for disability service professionals and other relevant university staff members who work with chronically ill students are discussed.
Research suggests that racially/ethnically minoritized (REM) students with psychiatric disabilities are less likely to receive support services, have poorer therapeutic outcomes, and experience higher levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidality than their non-REM college-aged peers without psychiatric disabilities. This study highlights how REM college students with psychiatric disabilities make meaning of their experiences and identities while navigating systemic racism and ableism in higher education. Qualitative data were obtained through semi-structured interviews, and interpretative phenomenological analysis procedures were employed to identify themes. Disability Critical Race Theory served as the theoretical framework to guide the development of the study and interpretation of results. Analyses identified four superordinate themes and 16 sub-themes: challenges with diagnoses (sub-themes: cultural barriers to understanding mental health concerns, disclosing diagnoses, impact of diagnosis), belonging (sub-themes: isolation, inclusive intersectional spaces, connection to others with similar identities, navigating predominately white spaces, inevitable discrimination), identity development (sub-themes: self-awareness, negotiating identity, erasure of identity, navigating multiple marginalized identities, pride), and support (sub-themes: family support, social support, institutional support, self-support). This study demonstrates the importance of adopting an intersectional approach by centering race/ethnicity and disability for REM students with psychiatric disabilities and that systemic racism and ableism present major challenges for students navigating institutional settings.
The college experience can significantly increase feelings of anxiety in all students, as students find themselves in evaluative settings where academic, and often social abilities, are judged. Moreover, high levels of anxiety can lead to significant difficulties with navigating the challenges of college. For students with autism symptomatology, an elevated predisposition to feel anxious (i.e., trait anxiety) may cause more difficultly in successfully adjusting to college and succeeding academically. Thus, we examined differences in trait anxiety and college adjustment between cisgender women with and without autism symptomatology. We also explored the extent to which autism symptomatology and trait anxiety uniquely accounted for variance in college adjustment in women. Study findings showed that higher levels of autism symptomatology were associated with elevated trait anxiety. Additionally, both autism symptomatology and trait anxiety were associated with lower adjustment to college across four indices (academic, social, personal-emotional and total adjustment), although neither predicted GPA. We conclude with implications of our findings and recommendations for professionals serving autistic students, including disability resource officers.
A collaboration between campus partners including the center for teaching and learning and a fee-based student learning support program set out to engage faculty in an educational campaign aimed at designing inclusive classrooms for neurodiverse students. The Neurodiversity Institute, a two-day interactive experience, provides faculty with tools to support neurodiverse students in the classroom, while cultivating sustained change beyond their participation in the Institute. Participants are tasked with developing deliverables aimed at self-reflection and growth, departmental engagement, and strategic planning for more systemic changes to practice. Findings indicated that faculty who engage with this program report a better understanding of key terms including accessibility, neurodiversity, and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Moreover, the requirement that participants engage their department and plan strategically resulted in innovative approaches to serving neurodiverse students at the department level. This article discusses the goals of the program, findings from post-institute surveys, and recommendations for other institutions striving to change the culture and improve the educational experience for neurodiverse students.
