Making higher degree research more accessible
Associate Professor Kathleen Tait and Adam Johnston discuss what adaptions and considerations are possible to support HDR students to achieve their post graduate education goals.
Young adults with disability, and especially those with learning difficulties, have been attending tertiary education in increasing numbers over the past decade. More students are gaining the prerequisites for tertiary education as policies to promote the inclusion of people with disability over the past 20 years bear fruit.
Adam – tell us a little bit about your experience of being an HDR student with disability at Macquarie?
As a 49-year-old man confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy I know mine is a more fortunate outcome than most. With my sight, hearing and intellect all largely intact my life has included opportunities many with my condition will never experience. This is due to loving parents, who sat by many hospital bedsides, fought and paid for much physical therapy, and were deaf to many experts who said that I should be put in a home, and would never make it past Grade 3 at school – so why were they worrying about my education?
After twenty plus years of my own submission writing, countless terms on committees, and watching disability advocacy and support bodies up close, invocations of ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ do not convince me anymore. Today social justice suffers from the law of diminishing returns. People would always be presumed to be living with disability, while Rule 7.5 of the Rules for Support of NDIS Participants specifically forbade any funding for treatments or interventions designed to restore or improve a person’s functional capacity.
I wanted to investigate “How could restorative justice conceive of providing the wheelchair but never of lighting the path to the wheelchair’s redundancy, as the ultimate act of inclusion?” I chose Macquarie University to complete my doctoral studies, as Macquarie was where I completed my undergraduate career and – in the old real estate lingo of location, location, location – I wanted easy access to a library and other resources.
Kathleen, tell us a little bit about your HDR student.
Adam Johnston is a solicitor, holding a Masters in Law from the University of New England, Armidale and a Graduate Diploma from the Australian Institute of Company Directors. During his studies, he was a Senate Intern, and a delegate to both the 1998 Constitutional Convention on a Republic and the 2001 Corowa People’s Conference. He is a former long-term Member of the Government Solicitors Committee of the Law Society of NSW and has worked in various complaint handling roles for the NSW Ombudsman and the Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW (EWON). Adam serves on numerous advisory and governance committees as a Consumer Advisor to his Local Health Service. In addition, Adam is a PhD (Law) Student who also has Cerebral Palsy.
Adam experiences Spastic Quadriplegia Cerebral Palsy. The term ‘spasticity’ describes the very tight fine motor and gross motor muscles. The term ‘quadriplegia’ means that all his limbs are affected, and he cannot walk. Consequently, Adam uses a range of technology to assist him, including:
- a mobile wheelchair for getting out and about, and a manual wheelchair for getting around his home.
- speech to text software known as Dragon NaturallySpeaking for computer work. Dragon speech recognition software makes it easier for anyone to use a computer. Basically, you talk, and it types. Adam uses his voice to create and edit documents or emails, launch applications, open files and to control his computer mouse. Watch a video about how the system works.
Tell us a little bit about Cerebral Palsy.
Cerebral Palsy originates early in life and is a lifelong disability that affects movement and posture. The impact of cerebral palsy will vary for every student and is characterised by variable motor impairments. It can range from minimal to considerable levels of physical disability. Some students with cerebral palsy may experience involuntary motions or erratic movements, while others may have difficulty with balance and coordination and/or fine motor skills. Students may require the use of specialised equipment such as a wheelchair or walking frame or assistance to walk. Students with cerebral palsy may present with a communication disorder, vision and hearing impairment, sleep disorders, and/or associated epilepsy. Cerebral Palsy should not be viewed as a singular diagnosis. It is best to consider the term ‘cerebral palsy’ as a descriptive label based on a broad range of presentations that include type, severity, and various limb involvement.
For further information on supporting students with Cerebral Palsy, refer to Associate Professor Tait’s latest publication:
Tait, K. (2022). Chapter 15. Supporting Students with Physical Impairments. In Hyde, M. B., Dole, S. & Tait, K. (2022) Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement. Fourth Edition. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. (pp.328 – 360).
Tell us a little bit about Adam’s research project.
Adam enrolled in his PhD as a part time student in the Macquarie School of Law in 2016. His PhD topic is: From Citizen to Charity Case: Has Contracted Welfare Breached the Sovereign’s Duty to Her Subjects? Adam’s thesis considers several parallel but related processes in Australia’s legal and social history. The main one is the establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) which is aimed to bring certainty of service and support to all eligible people with permanent impairments.
How long have you been supervising Adam?
Adam’s Principal Supervisor is Dr Francesca Dominello – Macquarie University Law School. Francesca and Adam invited me to take on the role of Adam’s Associate Supervisor in 2020.
What forms of support do you offer Adam?
Wherever I see an opportunity for my HDR students to publicise their research, whether that be via a peer reviewed publication, a newsletter, a conference or an offer of advocacy or funding support, I forward this information to the student, and we discuss the relevance of that opportunity to their thesis requirements.
For example, Adam was able to access some funding for the creation of footnote referencing via the Student Wellness Team as this task was far too time consuming to perform using Dragon speech recognition software. As a team, Francesca and I support Adam with his conference presentations (eg assisting him to forward the Powerpoint slides while he speaks to the information presented in the slides).
In 2022, Adam has presented the outcomes of his research at the following professional events:
- Macquarie School of Education – Tuesday@1pm on Tuesday 15th March 2022
- Macquarie School of Law HDR Conference “New Directions in Legal Research Conference” on Friday 2 September 2022
- Biennial Civil Law Conference held on 19 and 20 September 2022.
We also have post-doc publication plans on track. Our co-authored article has been preliminarily accepted as part of a Special Issue entitled “New Horizons in Disability Law: Challenges and Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities in Post-pandemic World”, to be published in the journal Laws (ISSN 2075-471X, indexed in ESCI, Scopus).
With a strong history of co-authoring with my postgraduate students, I had the opportunity to put Adam in touch with another Macquarie PhD student who was conducting a supervisor/student publication study. Jiayu Wang, a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie is conducting her PhD project “Shaping Writer Identity of Doctoral Students in Co-authoring with Supervisors for Publication” under the guidance of Dr Cassi Liardet and Dr Juliet Lum.
As a team, Adam, Francesca and I participated in Jiayu’s study in 2021–2022 which was investigating the writing process of doctoral students’ co-authoring with their supervisor for publication in the areas of Arts and Social Sciences and how the co-authored writing process impacts and shapes students’ scholarly writer identity. We hope that by participating in Jiayu’s project our HDR team experience was helpful for other doctoral students and supervisors to better understand the co-authorship between doctoral students and supervisors and to improving doctoral supervisory training in the Faculty of Arts.
What have you needed from others/the institution to provide HDR supervision to students with disability?
- There is no doubt that students with disability are disadvantaged by the extended time that it takes them to compete tasks. Access to support services that can assist students who are reliant on speech to text software are mandatory.
- Cerebral palsy is a disability where students are likely to require medical appointments and hospitalisations. Time away from study results in multiple applications for extensions of time to submit which is again a time-consuming process for students with disability. Leniency towards extension of time to submit applications is essential for HDR students with disability.
- Pausing study is one option. However, supervisors need to consider the ramifications of pausing students’ enrolments because this option assists with the time allotted to thesis completion, students lose access to the library and to support services such as the Wellness Centre and Student Advocacy. In addition, HDR supervisors receive no teaching workload hours to support students with disability when they are “paused” and thus not “enrolled” in their studies.
- It is important to remember that HDR students using wheelchairs will require special taxi transport to and from the conference venue, university campus and sites related to their research project. Additional funding for HDR students with disability to support this form of specialised transport would be most welcome.
How can the University support both HDR students and HDR supervisors with disability?
- Special Education is the practice of educating students in a way that accommodates their individual differences, disabilities and special needs. This highly specialised field involves individually planned and systematically monitored arrangement of teaching and assessment procedures, adapted equipment and materials, and accessible settings. Academics without specific qualifications in this field tend to raise awareness of a wider category of difference focusing on human rights issues, gender equality and matters of ethnic diversity. Whereas academics with special education qualifications have firsthand experience of and can instruct on a range of different approaches to teaching, assessment, the use of technology, and techniques for accommodated and adjusted education for students with disability. These aspects of support are designed to help individuals with disability achieve a higher level of personal self-sufficiency and success in university and in their community, which may not be available if the student were only given access to a typical classroom education.
- Tertiary students with disability should not be disadvantaged because they choose to enrol in a part time study capacity as this will allow them the additional time that they know it will take them to complete research and writing tasks. However, a part-time enrolment status results in students having limited access to their HDR supervisors since a reduced enrolment equates to a reduced academic supervision workload allocation. Thus, a one size fits all approach to workload allocation for supervisors of HDR students with disability is not appropriate. For reasons of equity, to support HDR students with disability, an additional category resulting in an increased adjustment to academic supervision workload needs to be created for the supervision of HDR students with disability.
- HDR students often present their research projects at conferences. When supporting tertiary students with Cerebral Palsy is it important to think about environmental adjustments that will be required at the conference venue in advance of the students’ presentation. For example – investigate the seating arrangements and the venue layout, accessibility for mobility aids like wheelchairs, classroom acoustics, suitable adjustments for independent power point controls, sloping boards and bathroom modifications.
- Environmental adjustments are best informed by specialist staff (ie physiotherapists, occupational therapists, academics with special education qualifications and speech pathologists). Specialist academics with disability specific knowledge and experience of the functional impact of the disability will be invaluable in supporting the individual needs of each student and to explain use of various support technology to their HDR supervisors.
- A PhD thesis requires a lot of writing. To support HDR students with disability who struggle with handwriting, supervisors need to consider technological solutions such as an eye-gaze computer navigation system or speech-to-text technology.
- At supervision meetings, to help with comprehending and processing instructions, allow the student more time with transitions and tasks. Understand that students with disability maybe prone to anxiety and unrealistic time limits are likely to heighten it.
- Regularly check in with the HDR student with disability to help them achieve set goals. Once they have reached it, set a new one. Be mindful to always ask the student how they would like to approach an activity – don’t make assumptions.
- Finally, academics need to remember that Cerebral Palsy occurs on a spectrum and no two students are going to be alike. The disability may have both a physical and cognitive impact. Whatever the student’s limitations are, ensure that they have a voice in supervision team discussions. It is important to know what the students are thinking and feeling so that supervisors can create an inclusive learning environment where the student feels heard and understood.