Moving Towards More Inclusive and Equitable Post-Secondary Experiences for Students with Disabilities: Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals


Evan Wicklund, Carleton University; Olivia Boonstra, Canadian Centre on Disability Studies (Eviance)

In 2021, researchers at Eviance (Canadian Disability Studies Incorporated) undertook a three-year project entitled “Innovating for Inclusive and Equitable Post-Secondary Education (PSE): A Pathway to Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”. This collaborative project brought together three community partners from Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs) and three academic partners to advance the SDGs related to quality education (SDG #4) and decent work (SDG #8). Project objectives were based on the premise that collaboration across universities and colleges which scale up innovative and inclusive approaches to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is essential for realizing inclusivity in both PSE institutions and places of employment (Fovet, 2021; Meyer et al., 2014; Murphy, 2021). The objectives of the project include supporting Canada’s efforts to meet the SDGs as a pathway to decent work by closing gaps in the knowledge and skills of key stakeholders in PSE concerning inclusive education. These high-level tasks included: undertaking research about how UDL practices are experienced by diversely located students and graduates with disabilities (La Dyiur and Bair, 2018); generating and sharing information about innovative practices in UDL (Evans et al., 2017); creating and distributing digital resources and creating opportunities for collaboration on UDL for PSE excellence in diversity; fostering and increasing collaboration across Canadian universities, colleges and DPOs; and, establishing an accountability and monitoring framework for use by participating universities and colleges, and for subsequent use by PSE institutions more widely. In this session, researchers from Eviance will share our project findings and speak about our experiences managing our collaborative multi-year project. Specifically, we will outline conclusions from our activities, which include, but are not limited to: a) a primary analysis of the Government of Canada’s Survey on Disability pertaining to PSE; b) two literature reviews, one on the transition from PSE and decent work and another on UDL in PSE; c) an analysis of the experiences of students with disabilities gathered from a survey of over one thousand participants; d) a secondary analysis of the National Education Associate of Disabled Students (NEADS) townhall meetings about the barriers to inclusive PSE; and, e) a total of nine national social labs, where we brought together diversly located stakeholders (students, administrators, faculty, members of accessibility and accommodations offices, etc.) to address barriers and create innovative solutions regarding inclusivity in PSE and decent employment. We will also discuss strategies for working collaboratively with our partners and other contributors over the three-year period and share considerations about future work for advancing the SDGs. Our goal in this presentation is to summarize the impact our project has made, but also to initiate a dialogue with the broader disability studies community and seek to establish connections with other scholars and advocates interested in equitable initiatives in PSE and decent work. More specifically, we focus on the benefits and issues related to student activism (Bruce, 2020), intersectional and reflexive approaches to inclusivity in PSE (Beck et al., 2014) and the need for co-creation between students, faculty, and administrators to ensure inclusive practices for all students are sustainable (Gilles and Dupuis, 2013).

This paper will be presented at the following session: