STEM education should be inclusive of students with disabilities

The Hindu

19 hours ago

Increased access, equity, and inclusion for disadvantaged and underprivileged students in the education sector are envisioned in the current National Education Policy, 2020. This is a welcome step towards making society truly inclusive, but while this is an ideal that one can aspire to, the fact is that most higher education institutions (HEIs) have a long way to go to make it possible. When it comes to education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, the reality is depressingly different, in even the most well-funded institutions.
The estimate from the National Family Health Survey 5 (in a publication of the Indian Council of Medical Research) is that there are 63 million people with disabilities in India. This is less than 5% of the population and below the World Health Organization data which suggest that about 15% of the world population lives with with some form of disability.
There is no dearth of well-meaning legislation: the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009 guarantees access to free education up to the age of 14, including for children with disabilities. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 provides a comprehensive set of guidelines with considerable thought gone into them. It spells out the duties of educational institutions and the responsibility of the Union and the State governments to promote inclusive education.
Unfortunately, though, the reality is very different across the country. At the primary and secondary levels, students with disabilities are frequently segregated in special-needs schools, an unintended consequence of which is that their access to higher education and their exposure to different areas of study is selective and limited.
Reservation norms
Under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, all government and government-aided higher educational institutions are required to reserve 4% of seats for students with disabilities. Since most higher education and research institutions in India fall in this group, it is important that the Act be implemented in practice as well as in spirit. Disabilities that are covered include blindness and low vision, hearing impairment, locomotor disability, cerebral palsy and related disabilities, specific learning disabilities, and autism spectrum disorder.
At present, there are few institutions where this requirement is met, and wherever it is met institutionally, it is not done on a more fine-grained level, namely across departments. Indeed, most students with disabilities get admission through a so-called horizontal quota: seats are not specifically reserved for students with disabilities, and often they are discouraged from science subjects since that will decrease the number of seats for other students.
In short, they continue to face ableism, the various practices and prejudices that disadvantage disabled students and researchers. Ableism effectively is discrimination in favour of non-disabled people. The lack of tangible inclusivity measures in higher education institutions means that students with diverse abilities, with a keen interest in STEM subjects, and perhaps having been encouraged up to the high-school level, find the doors of tertiary education closed to them.
The institutions face many hurdles on the road to inclusivity. Campuses require a significant investment in order to become accessible: Most classrooms, laboratories, and hostels cannot accommodate students with disabilities. Administrators have many complex choices to make on where their (usually meagre) funds are to be deployed, and something that impacts less than 5% of the students may not seem cost-effective, but these are considerations that one needs to rise above.
Measures that have been implemented in countries in the developing world as well as in developed nations, in addition to strengthening national legal frameworks (UNESCO guidelines), include devising policies and strategies inclusive of persons with disabilities; making education accessible; adapting the form and substance of education; monitoring the implementation of the right to education for persons with disabilities; and promoting the right to education of persons with disabilities.
Accessibility audit
Reservation in education addresses only a small part of these rights. A far more urgent need is for sensitisation and training. Campuses constructed after 2016 should adhere to the National Building Code but this is rarely enforced. Older campuses require an accessibility audit, to learn what needs to be done in terms of reasonable accommodation for persons with disabilities. Campuses are typically large in extent. Older buildings have no lifts or ramps. Toilets are inaccessible. The list is long.
Conventional classrooms and laboratories are ableist: chairs, tables, and benches are of fixed heights, and access to laboratory equipment such as fume-hoods and furnaces is poor. Teaching and learning spaces in STEM do not easily adapt for students with disabilities who are then naturally discouraged from pursuing such disciplines.
Making laboratory experiments in science accessible requires both dedication and sensitivity. Physical access for students with impaired mobility is daunting, but the bias in the design of almost all laboratory experiments and much of pedagogy in general poses a major challenge for students with impaired vision. Since other than in pure mathematics, there is a component of laboratory instruction in all science courses, the physical environment of most existing teaching (or research) laboratories exclude students with disabilities.
There is enough empirical evidence to suggest that when given the same opportunities and access, students with disabilities perform equally well as other students. There is also evidence to suggest that awareness of special needs facilitates the science that has to be developed to mitigate them. The science of optometry started from a need to correct poor vision, and telephony traces its motivation to Alexander Graham Bell's need to communicate with his wife and mother (both of whom had difficulty hearing) but there are many other examples, with more wide-ranging benefits.
With today's technology it requires little additional effort to make laboratory experiments accessible to students with disabilities, be it through the use of speech-activated equipment, AI and electronics-based interfaces to convert signals from one form to the other (say visual to audio for the visually challenged and audio to visual for hearing challenged)
In this age, there is increased awareness of human rights and an increased awareness of diversity and of the various identities. Doing science is a privilege, and this privilege needs to be shared by all those who wish to be scientists. More to the point, this is a privilege that should not be denied to anybody, least of all because of the imagined limitations of mind or body.
Ramakrishna Ramaswamy is a Honorary Professor, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Berhampur, Odisha; views are personal