 master's candidate at the University of Adelaide, which was built on unceded Ghana country. I'm also president of the Disability Illness and Divergence Association, or DIDA, which is a student union affiliated club and advocacy group that we founded mid last year, mid 2021. To give you a visual description of myself as well, I'm a pretty average height white woman with shorter length, light brown hair, I'm wearing a long-sleeved black t-shirt and you can't see, but I'm also sitting in my wheelchair. I'm really glad to be here today and sort of give you a bit of a snapshot peek into the student perspective of disability advocacy and higher education. What I'm going to talk you through today is a case study from the work DIDA does by looking at our work providing feedback to the University of Adelaide student retention and success plan and importantly to give you an idea of the process from students identifying issues to student organizing to student feedback to staff, building connections and trust with staff and following up to ensure that the issues have been addressed and basically through all of that how students feel throughout that process. I'll then touch on some further issues that we still need to investigate. So first note, I understand that Student Voice Australia and everyone involved in symposia like today are very keen on student partnership but I think it's important to remember that an institution's professed commitment to student partnership or individual staff champions or even entire departments full of champions for student partnership does not necessarily mean that that trickles down or up or sideways through the institution as a whole. For many students the experience of giving feedback remains a really negative one and I want to stress from the outset that this is regardless of the good intentions of staff receiving that feedback. Hearing students feedback that names a problem is merely the first step towards taking action on that problem. When hearing about a problem is offered as a solution, hearing becomes another kind of dissolution and I think it's important we remember that what you critique you can still enact. So here's our story. It was 2021 and a group of us at Adelaide were realizing that we informally had a kind of a network of disabled students and between us we were passing on tips and tricks, advice and warnings about how to survive within our institution. A common experience quickly emerged. We had all at one point or other had to drop our course workload to zero. We had to drop out, we had to withdraw and we had to defer. Basically we had to put things on hold and that was for a range of reasons from explicitly disability related to chronic illness, mental health, neurodivergence, the financial burden of being ill, family stress and sometimes it was due to hostile and ableist interactions with staff and students in classes. For those of us who hadn't dropped out, many had failed or had a negotiated non graded pass. Many of us had retaken courses some several times increasing their hex depth and it was basically a feature of the disabled student experience that we realized was uniting us. As we found a data we turned to the strategic plans at our university to see where disability fit into the policies and as I read the student retention and success plan I found reference to a report that it was based on which analyzed student withdrawal survey data. This report was entitled exploring student sense of belonging and was published internally in 2016. I'll refer to that as the sense of belonging report. Students were invited to provide feedback on withdrawal surveys when they reduced their workload to zero. Those responses indicated in the report that students were impacted by a number of internal and external factors that contributed to how strongly they felt a part of an academic community. Things like their interactions with staff and other students really stood out and the report identified three vulnerable student groups international students mature age students and part-time students. The report made recommendations based on its conclusions that I believe are sound. Quote being able to connect with people who are facing similar challenges academically and personally was often highlighted as vital to belonging. Unquote students need a strong support network for confidence and security. The report called for physical spaces on campus to facilitate this as well as events and workshops targeted to soothe that belonging that it's clear so many of us feel. So who is missing here? From data collection through to analysis through to conclusions not once was disability mentioned in this report and not once was disability accounted for as an equity group nor were LGBT students culturally linguistically diverse domestic students and First Nations students. This is a shocking oversight I think especially something written as late as 2016. For context 22% of South Australians have a disability and or chronic illness. The University of Adelaide reports 10.6% of the student population identified themselves as disabled at the point of enrollment in 2019 and this is above the national average for undergraduates of 7.7% in 2019. This is inevitably going to be an undercount as well. I could give a whole other presentation just on the barriers to disclosure. So what does the report say about illness and health reasons for withdrawal? Collection of the data in the surveys did not appropriately treat illness and disability as a standalone issue. In the reports findings, illnesses grouped together under the heading external slash personal issues, e.g. health and wellbeing, family, paid work. How can we even begin to analyze the impact of illness on student retention when it's mixed up in these other reasons? The explicit grouping of illness as an external slash personal issue locates the problem with the body and health of the student rather than with a disability or illness which has not been adequately supported by the institution. For example, I believe it's not the student's fault if they have to drop out because the University could not provide an accessible internship placement required for completion of their degree even if eventually the reason that they report on a survey is that they couldn't finish the course because they're chronically ill. There's clearly a failure in the withdrawal survey questions to be clear and the burden should not be placed on individual students to add that information in an additional comments box at the end of a survey if they're lucky to have one provided. This is clearly an issue of equity and access to education. We cannot leave the burden of addressing illness and disability issues up to the individual. That's where discrimination flourishes when we treat illness through an individualized model. This can be viewed also through the lens of a medical model or a deficit model where impairment is located in the individual is a personal problem. Abelism is reproduced when it goes unseen and unheard so we must start seeing it, hearing it and analyzing it. So how could this oversight happen? I think it's really clear to me that no one involved in the commissioning of this report or in its writing has a disability. Often at data we're told that progress is a slow beast that institutions move slowly but what if the students are sitting patiently waiting for that slow positive change but in the rooms where decisions happen the topic hasn't even come up. If we're invisible and we don't make it into the data we might as well not exist. There's so much irony in a report that describes how students quote expressed a desire to be recognized and valued by teaching staff unquote and where students were quote feeling isolated excluded and ignored unquote in a report that forgot us entirely. This report names diversity as something students expressed a desire for and diversity and inclusion are increasingly something which policy and strategic plans are very conscious of and verbal about. Many universities are proud to declare that they value diversity and disability awareness is increasingly considered a necessary skill for global citizens. However you can preserve a view of an institution by not including the views of those who would challenge that view. In other words the more you exclude the more you can appear inclusive. Every recommendation and most observations from the sensible report could be usefully applied to disabled students and benefit them immensely. A significant one which data continues to advocate for and work in partnership with staff on is the desperate need for access rooms on campus. A physical representation of the university's commitment to those students who need a private space to attend to their needs when in crisis or a flare up. The report calls for physical spaces targeted to vulnerable groups but without seeing us without seeing a need for these conclusions and recommendations to be applied to us the function of strategic and policy related documents must be questioned. What use are they if not for those who need them most? What use are they if not acted upon? This report and the student retention and success plan that it feeds into can exist and can sit on a shelf and not once be applied to an equity group which I'll remind you is one in ten students who desperately need improved support. And you might ask so what this is just one strategic plan of many but data has identified similar gaps in the alignment of other plans and we've done our best to bring that to the attention of their relevant steering committees. We are students doing volunteer policy work to bring our institution into alignment with its own professed values and we set up to do so with the student retention and success plan. So I reached out to staff who worked in student engagement. We were received positively and met with a team lead and had a really good discussion about the reason students drop out and the reason students might not complete the withdrawal surveys or might not even disclose they have a disability if they even know that they have one. The issue is and it's a common issue for us is that we hardly ever come up against outright negative hostility. Much more common is a positive reception, a commitment to improvement and then sometimes a lot of nothing and in many ways this benevolence this benign allyship is much more frustrating to deal with than outright hostility. It's harder to name, it's harder to spot and it's harder to even recognize in the moment when it's happening to you. A yes can in practice function as I know. A yes can mean I sympathize but that's just how things are. A yes from one staff member does not necessarily mean many staff within an organization are communicating that yes between each other or even talking at all. I can argue our case over and over and over again. Sorry. Having made our concerns clear we were invited to give feedback as a part of a group consultation of five students on the new start student retention and success plan 2022 to 2024. I want to note that what I don't know what previous consultation there was before this point this is just when Dider entered the process. We were excited this was one of the first consultations that Dider has since made a regular feature of our club work. However we received a copy of the draft plan 24 hours before the consultation meeting and we had off hands full with other meetings and consultation on another project. So we speed read through the draft in those hours before the consultation. When we attended there was one hour scheduled and we had a lot to say so we didn't get very far and the chair of the meeting had to kind of rush us along. We requested the opportunity to provide more extensive written feedback once we had a closer look at the plan and that's an accessibility issue for myself and for our Dider vice president. We needed time to read when we weren't in chronic pain and perhaps to use text to speech software. We're encouraged to do so as quickly as possible in two days but preferably less to meet an internal deadline for the draft and that wasn't enough time. This process was not accessible. We should not be made to feel like a nuisance for wanting to give the feedback that we were invited to give. If universities want feedback from students to be of sufficient quality they must provide enough time and they must consider things like alternative ways to provide feedback rather than simply speaking up in a single hour long team's meeting only a couple of hours after first laying eyes on the document. I want to turn to that other issue in the improvement of strategic plans and policies such as this one which results from hurried consultation of insufficient quality and quantity and that issue is that in working on a policy we can feel as though we have achieved something simply in our satisfaction with naming the problem. I'm wary of this as Sarah Ahmed warns in her 2021 monograph complaint a report can be quote a means by which the university is able to not deal with a situation by appearing to have dealt with it. I quote policies are something for institutions to be proud of but a policy can create the illusion of doing something without doing anything. It remains that students with disabilities will drop out because they are not appropriately or adequately supported by the institution and because of their marginalized lives within and outside of the institution. This is a fact and will remain so when policies just sit on shovels. So on some of the ways that feedback is collected Diada has been working in our own events to develop a method of engagement that suits the needs of our community. We focused on in particular building trust and raising political consciousness. Our goal is to validate each other by sharing our experiences and to recognize and highlight that our struggles are not our fault but in fact common and often cause trisystemic pressures and intersecting oppressions. There is some institutional literacy being built here when we do this. When our members know they're not alone when they know we'll stand by them when they feel safe they tell us what they've been through freely and without us re-traumatizing them. We've done this by producing our own surveys which we send to members as well as being involved in small consultation groups. We also use social events as a platform to flag our willingness to listen. We host events designed to produce content. For example, we held the first of our hopefully annual grievance festivals, a free space to vent design using the sociology method of co-performative witnessing. Students listen and I'll listen too. We also host protest audits to collect feedback on a specific topic of building design and accessibility. This puts an audit checklist into the hands of users with lived experience and it's an interactive and experiential event. It's important to us that we serve as intermediaries between staff seeking the input of students with lived experience and the disabled student community. Not as a barrier but so that we can negotiate the accommodations that a small consultation group needs so that we can have those sometimes tense sometimes awkward discussions first. We bear the brunt. Sometimes having one of us present from the data committee can encourage students to speak up who otherwise might not. Sometimes they want their story anonymized and reported by us so that they don't have to suffer the burdens of disclosure and complaint. For example, sometimes staff might send us a flyer appealing for student feedback on something and will suggest corrections to the flyer to make it accessible to students with screen readers or to include the option of Zoom interviews instead of in person for those of us who are immunocompromised in this ongoing pandemic. Then we'll distribute the flyer to our membership as well and hopefully we might have a bit more reach and value add than staff would alone. So small adjustments like that that we make in collaboration with staff go a long way to improving the student feedback process. But we have to be trusted to speak for our community and we can't rely on individual student written individualized feedback because safety in numbers is a real thing for us. In the end in terms of our interactions with student engagement staff in this case students with disabilities are now named as stakeholders in the current student retention and success plan which was approved by the academic board in November 2021. So this was a success but as I hope I've outlined the experience was not smooth sailing and there's a lot more work to do. Again this doesn't have to be a result of explicit hostility to be an issue and we need to name the problems and take action. If someone in the room with a sense of belonging or was commissioned had thought of disability we wouldn't have to do any of the work I've described at all. I hate to think how much was spent on the commission of the report and goodness knows we're data were not paid to correct these errors. We felt compelled to do so only because our work towards positive improvement of our institution depends upon our survival within it to do that work. We must retain students we must see them and hear them in the data and we have to actually be there to be heard. So there are still issues to be explored in terms of the current plan in particular how students are surveilled for performance and well-being in the process and the process of intervention when that is flagged which currently can be incredibly re-traumatising and uncomfortable. Another point which I always want to emphasise is that every time a disabled student drops out and doesn't go through with the forms the stress and strains of confirming retroactive withdrawal or fail sorts off their record and confirming remission of fees for their hex every time a student doesn't go through with that process the university profits. The administrative burden on students to go through with those processes is already difficult and disabled students are much less likely to be able to withstand that strain. These are students in physical psychological medical crisis. I'll say it again when disabled students drop out the university profits we must find ways to reduce that burden to support students through this process in a respectful dignified way that has their consent at all stages. Retention goes beyond the moment of withdrawal. So to return to policy and strategic planning in conclusion true empowered student partnership can address issues early it can avoid wasting time and resources it can avoid not just the neglect of disabled students but the harm that we continue to suffer. Feedback and complaints processes are often distressing and re-traumatising for students and we at data are lucky that we have such a strong peer community to help us cope and I want to end by providing you with some recommended reading on the topic of ableism in higher education and I want to note that the Jay Dormage book is open access so it's free as a PDF and it's free on affordable and Ahmed's lecture from her monograph complaint for the Wheeler Centre on YouTube is a central viewing for anyone interested in promoting diversity and inclusion at our institutions and she speaks there on how those who advocate for change are treated. I think it's an important reminder of the time and the energy cost to advocacy so that's where I'll end and I can put these chats in the further reading in the chat. Thank you so much Shona it was a very enlightening presentation and disability awareness and support surrounding it. We can take some questions for Shona. Please feel free to unmute yourself, raise your hand or pop your questions in the chat and Shona is also putting the links for the references for anyone. Forgive me for spamming you. So we have a question for Shona. Adriana thanks you for the presentation and she asks can you share a bit more around about the experience of running those alternative student feedback options? Yeah so I guess our process is sort of to talk to staff first to see what they want from us and then usually that does require a little bit of education to it so talking about what disability is and isn't what it might be what different needs might be for these students so we try to make it as universally designed as possible from the beginning. Then if we go to our membership and we seek their feedback we hear what they need so that might be you know the staff need to book a certain room they need to make it hybrid they need to be aware that some people are going to go quiet and to just not draw attention to that and that some people are going to need more time after the fact to provide written feedback all these things so a lot of it is us checking in with our membership making sure they feel safe beforehand and then the other alternative feedback options like our events we do the classic butcher's paper out lots of sticky notes and we keep conversation rolling and a lot of that is actually I'll be writing things down if a student is telling me their story so that they don't have to split their attention split their energy and in that way with their supported to document feedback that they otherwise wouldn't have the energy to do it all so that's sort of underrated effort to writing down something that was really upsetting I think it's easier sometimes to tell someone and then I can write that down so that's sort of example I hope that answered your question