Inside Higher Ed published an essay earlier this week relating the experience of a college literature professor teaching a student with disabilities. In order to protect the privacy of the people involved, the online news resource for higher education professionals removed all identifying characteristics of the author, including name and gender, and only identified the student as Jacob. The first-person account, entitled “What Should I Do About Jacob?,” provides insights into the challenges faced by institutions of higher learning to include people with disabilities into the mainstream college experience.
At the start of the semester, the professor is informed that Jacob is registered with the college’s Office for Students with Disabilities; but because of student privacy laws, the professor is given no specifics other than a list of accommodations available to Jacob to aid him in the classroom. This lack of context becomes the professor’s primary source of frustration as Jacob continually produces unsatisfactory work on assignments but disregards any of the professor’s requests to address the concerns one-on-one. The professor has had other people with disabilities in the classroom prior to Jacob and had always been able to address every student’s needs on a case-by-case basis.
When the professor reaches out to Jacob’s counselor, the response is to “hold him to the same standards as his peers.” This feels like a fruitless exercise to the professor, who nevertheless complies with one additional allowance:
I have continued to mark each of his papers and exams according to the guidelines I have set for the class as a whole, though I make a point to find something positive, no matter how small, to say about his work. A few days from now, I will do the same with his final.
It’s understandable for the professor to find the circumstances surrounding Jacob’s case as constricting; it’s counter-intuitive to an educator’s mission to spend a 14-week semester with a student who makes no advancements in skills or knowledge and feel they have done right by that student. The professor poses a dozen questions to this point near the end of the essay, the last one being, “What is the purpose of higher education, for both the individual and society as a whole?”
An answer to that question, at least with respect to people with disabilities, is found in an article published in The Holland Sentinel on the very same day as the Inside Higher Ed essay. Reporter Lisa Ermak covers a program in the Western Michigan city that allows young people with disabilities to attend classes right in town at Hope College, a liberal arts college rooted in the Christian faith, with a total student population just over 3,000.
One of the teacher’s in the program, Emily Perton, says her seven students read and write at a level that would not satisfy the enrollment requirements, but that is not the measuring stick of success:
… [S]tudents don’t receive a grade or college credit. Instead, the program is meant to help them adjust to the social setting of college and the rigor of attending class on their own. The ultimate goal, [Perton] said, is to prepare them ready to enter the workforce after four to six years in the program.
There is no mention in the anonymous essay whether Jacob was taking the author’s memoir course for credit. In fact, it doesn’t seem as if the professor’s institution has effectively communicated any goals or motivations for enrolling people with disabilities with their faculty beyond legal requirements to do so.
But as with similar post-secondary programs we looked at last month taking place at Vanderbilt and Florida International University, the benefits of inclusion can extend beyond the individual student’s ability to carry out the assignments. For the student with a disability, being part of a classroom setting can be an accomplishment that positively impacts his or her opportunities to join the workforce. Maybe the professor’s efforts to include positive comments along with the grades will help Jacob somewhere down the line.
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Images by Rennett Stowe, used under its Creative Commons license.