Team Reflection: Engagement and Belonging for Students with Disabilities

Over the past year, the Innovation Hub partnered with Accessibility Services to gain a deeper understanding of how students with disabilities can fully engage in and feel supported in all aspects of campus life. In this blog, the design research team reflects on how they felt about listening to the voices of students with disabilities, and the impact the listening has on creating change.

Written by the Engagement and Belonging for Students with Disabilities Team

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This year, in partnership with Accessibility services, the Innovation Hub explored how students with disabilities can fully engage in campus life. Beginning in May 2024, our passionate team worked to understand student perspectives and identify student needs to be champions of inclusion and ensure that every student living with disabilities has the opportunity to participate in campus life and get the most out of their university experience. Below, we share some of the key insights we’ve gained from the project.

Lived Experience: The Backbone of Change

Hearing first-hand the experiences of students living with disabilities brought to light the unique challenges they faced with campus engagement. Nicole reflected on how interacting with students who have lived experience with disability re-framed the way we thought about engagement and belonging on campus as a team.

Nicole: Being able to hear directly from students’ disabilities and hear from their experiences changed a lot of my existing perspectives about participation, engagement, and about what it means to be a part of the university and of the relationships on campus. 

By including student voices about university engagement, we can reflect on our own understanding of engagement and belonging while challenging ourselves to think outside the box to address student needs. Alena shared how prioritizing student perspectives throughout the entire process kept the central goal of research focused on identifying student needs.

Alena: A lot of times, if you don’t explicitly make the effort to take student voices into account in all parts of the process, research can end up drifting. It can have a strong intention to really represent the voices of students, but if it is not bringing students in on multiple phases of the process, a lot of times it can misrepresent what students want, what they’re feeling, and what they’re experiencing. That is something strong about this project, as we brought back students throughout the process to make sure that we were still on track; that we were actually hitting those marks.

Ultimately, students with lived experience with disability were key advocates who could best identify and speak to the needs of other students living with disability just like them.

Fluidity in Defining Disability

We explored disability as identity— noticing that it is inherently personal, varying, and fluid. We realized that we often think of disability in a very binary way – as either disabled or not disabled. We can create a solid divide between these experiences, but this division is blurrier than one might expect, as students define their disabilities differently. Nicole spoke about how important it was for students to be empowered to explore their relationship with their disability and identity, ultimately deciding what it means to them. 

Nicole: We really just aimed to respect how people made disability a big part of their identity. Some people take a lot of pride in their disability identity and some people do not. This tension helped me realize that our identities are something so individual and there isn’t a correct way to define it. It really is in respect to every person and how they want to involve this part of their experience into their lives. 

It is important to reflect on how we as allies can acknowledge the fluidity of disability identity. Through this work, Lauren reflected on how students’ relationship to their disability may also affect their perspectives on accessibility.  

Lauren: The line between disabled and not disabled is not as concrete as we’d like to make it seem. And this might affect how students see themselves in relation to accessibility – they may see accessibility as something foreign to them. 

Although everyone experiences and defines their disability differently, we can still consider implementing a diverse array of accommodations to ensure that as many students as possible receive support that matches their unique needs. Fundamentally, students’ needs, and goals are all unique, and how they meet their needs and receive the support that they need depends on how they define their disability.

A Process of Undoing

From buildings to classrooms to student life events, we noticed many systemic barriers that hinder students’ ability to freely participate and engage in campus life. Accessibility is, fundamentally, a process of undoing and re-building. Stella shared how we can each take action to ‘undo’ some of these barriers that may seem impossible to remove by taking on small, simple actions – like turning on captions. 

Stella: Students want to see multiple forms of accommodations and accessible captions when they enter events and attend class. Designing these accessible accommodations will not only benefit the students with disabilities, but they also benefit the other students in the classroom and other event participants. They will, as a result, make an environment more accessible.  

Yet, accessibility cannot be limited to just tangible changes, although these are very important too. It is also about transforming university culture to guarantee that students can feel connected to their peers and have the opportunity to establish long-lasting connections with them. The feeling of isolation in the U of T community can affect students with disabilities differently, as they are not always able to partake in student or faulty-led programming. Alena and Lauren reflected on how accessibility is difficult to find everywhere else outside the classroom.

Alena: One thing that had also came up a lot in co-creation was students’ desire to have clear pathways and resources available once they have graduated – future-preparedness measures. Students are wanting to feel career-ready right after school, and they’re wanting specific resources that will address their concerns for entering the workforce. I thought that was really powerful.

Lauren: I feel that the world is built on a lot of flawed beliefs and understandings, for instance, of what disability is, and of the value of accessibility. So, I think a lot of the things that we do are just almost reincorporating the truth of things into the world. I think we’re dealing with a world where it’s more of a process of undoing. And even if it doesn’t necessarily materialize immediately into something physical, I think that even putting that into the world as a thought does make it better.

Accessibility can be a complex, winding road, but we found that what matters the most is to keep students with lived experience at the front and center of our conversations when brainstorming ways we can help. By reflecting on how we can contribute in our own way to ‘undoing’ this culture, we can provide students with the foundations they need to succeed academically and professionally.

Creating Signals of Belonging

Prioritizing the voices of students with lived experience with disability to better address their needs on the University campus requires us to acknowledge the different ways in which students wish to identify themselves and their varying relationships with their disability identity, as they do not relate to their disabilities equally. Yet, as we acknowledge differences, it is important to identify small ways we can make change and help others to challenge systemic barriers. We all have a part to play in platforming the stories of students with lived experience to ensure they can engage in campus life and in post-graduation opportunities to the fullest.  

As a team, we’re so proud of the work we have done on this exciting project since May 2024. We encourage you to explore the Innovation Hub’s Design Research Reports to learn more about our equity-centered research at U of T.

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