Exploring Staff and Faculty Perceptions of the Impact of Non-inclusive Design on Student Mental Health in Higher Education: Awareness, Impact and Responsiveness.

Abstract

This study examined the perceptions of three stakeholder groups (faculty, instructional designers, and accessibility services personnel) in relation to the impact of the design of instruction and assessment on student mental health – within a post-secondary campus in Western Canada.  The study adopts a broad post-modern paradigm when examining impairment and disability and focuses on the social model of disability as a lens. The methodological approach adopted draws from the phenomenological tradition, but also borrows some tools from narrative enquiry.  Inductive coding was carried out to extract thematic categories from the initial 3 interviews.  These categories were then used to carry out a thematic analysis of all 13 semi-directive interviews.  The themes which emerged from the analysis with most impact include: (i) impact of faulty design on student mental health, (ii) varying stakeholder awareness of this impact, (iii) notion of context specific awareness, (iv) lack of tangible proactive intervention in this sphere, (v) lack of communication between stakeholders, (vi) tension between learner mental health and the notion of challenging pedagogical outcome. The findings overall suggest that a significant degree of awareness does exist across the campus in question with regards to the impact of design of the learning experience on the mental health of students.  The degree of awareness about the impact of design on student mental health varies depending on the stakeholder involved and the context, but little proactive intervention to frame guidelines, for inclusive redesign that might be conducive to good mental health, is observable in this post-secondary landscape.  Communication across campus stakeholder groups is identified as a significant obstacle to transformation.  The article widens the contextualization of these findings through the lens of an ecological analysis of power dynamics and communication patterns in relation to teaching and learning across a campus.