 Thank you very much everyone. Hope you all had a nice break. So we are in for a huge treat now. So thanks to technology we are able to go over to Australia. And Grant Meridith is going to present. I think it's about one o'clock in the morning where he is. So yes, so he said that he didn't mind when he presented. So I've got nothing to do with that. Felly, dwi'n ffordd, rydw i'n fawr, rydw i'n fawr, Grant Meredith. Rydw i'n gweithio, Grant. gall findings from net works that could assist students who are starting up. I probably know some people in the audience, but just for people who don't know who I am, I'm not sure why my slides are not working now. I actually am a lecturer of IT Ffocussing ond actually multimedia and gaming with Federation University of Australia. I also lead a research program called TAX, where we are looking at various software platforms for the people who are stunner. I also research stuggering but more in a sociological sense, so this is just one of a few studies that I've been working on. At the moment, I'm actually just about to submit my... It's actually focused on Australian university students who are stunner. So basically looking at how they negotiate their student life cycle. And it's actually a very, very large study. It encapsulates three different methods. First, there was a web audit of all 39 public Australian university websites. This study has been actually published and basically looking at from a public view, what information can we find about how any given university could accommodate someone who studded? So actually looking for mentions of stuggering and then some forms of strategies. What I found was actually very, very little. From a public perspective, there was very little at all when it came to stuggering that I could access and very few with any specific mention of a speech this order, which was interesting, but I can kind of understand that, but I won't get into that during this presentation. When I did a survey of 102 Australian university students who started, so a majority of those students had actually graduated and again, there was a survey which ranged from about 40 questions or so, looking at the complete student life cycle from pre and the Romans through to graduation. One of the big encouraging findings from that was that only two students, only two Australian students who had enrolled in the university had actually dropped out because of their stuggering and the other ones were either still active students, but a majority had actually graduated and we had moved into jobs that their university degree had actually trained them for. A surprising result, I think for the general public more, possibly, is that lots of them were studying topics, for example, like law, medicine, nursing and education, all areas which rely actually fairly heavily on the spoken word still. And then I did, I guess, more in-depth data, 15 Australian university students who started, I actually interviewed them, and that was very interesting because those stories expanded more and experiences I could actually see deeper. We do have some considerations here, I think, when it comes to the actual data. So a lot of the data was actually gathered nearly 10 years ago. I'm only a part-time student and I've actually gone a little bit over time. So the data is perhaps just a little bit dated. And I also think, and again, this is an area which needs a lot more study actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some Australian cultural perspective involved with the data also, where stereotypically Australians like somewhat self-reumatory data. So it's a little bit of a line. And there's kind of the attitude of everything will be right, mate, and just basically get on with it and get it done. I'll also say that these students to me seem like a very, very confident bunch of students and the people who were in the survey, they chose to participate. So possibly there might be a slight bias there also, because they were a very, very extremely confident group, group, group of students. The interesting thing is, which this presentation doesn't focus on much, is a lot of the students used what I would call concessional bargaining. And what I mean by that is, during their actual student journey, at times they made trade-offs between grades and basically voting speaking. So during some forms of oral assessments, these somewhat seemingly confidence students were actually aborting them or not doing as much work as they should actually get the grade which they possibly could have gotten, like a much, much higher grade. But they were perfectly aware of that and expressed almost a pretty high level of a sadder's faction with those choices, too, which was a very interesting finding. So today's focus, and again I can be talking about this topic for Alice, is looking at the disability liaison units which sit within Australian universities and probably also over in the UK. And a little bit of a discussion about what the students thought of these units and how many students actually did access health and then what levels of satisfaction came from that help. So in Australia, these units are set up to basically accommodate students from a wide range of impact, you know, broken legs through to, you know, very severe. And this ability is trying to make sure that, you know, these students can still have a fair education. They're like a middle ground between usually the students and the staff, especially the academic staff. And they focus on reasonable accommodations, so it makes sense that if a student is training to actually be a nurse, they're going to have to do rounds, you know, in an actual hospital. But then it's working out what, you know, what sort of accommodations could they do in those rounds to possibly make, to possibly not focus so much on their speaking or to make sure that everybody knows about that there are stuttering and to make sure that they're still actually marked fairly too. And negotiations haven't been the entwines, you know, students and staff and students and this unit and staff and this unit in terms of what the academic is also happy to allow in a sense of strategies. So it's not just that we randomly accept everything, you know, that there still might be a little bit of negotiation there depending on the individual course requirements too. Now, basically, you know, we have over 100 students that I gathered data from, roughly that only 10% of these students actually accessed help, which was interesting. But again, knowing the self-free line attitude of many people who study, you know, personally, I can understand why this is. Most of them, and most of them, and these are also the including the people who did not access, simply assumed no help existed there. They did, but they, many of them reflected that when they were going through primary school and through high school, they were offered no help. And they saw no help. So they assumed that at a university they would also be no help. One of the major parts of my study is the rejection of the labelled disability and a majority of all the students surveyed outright re-injected it. They did not see how stuttering was one. In some cases, they were actually ignorant to what disability meant. But I think really from an identity shift place, it simply did not want to align with that term. Then less likely to possibly access the disability liaison units for help. Most of the very few students who accessed help only accessed help in their third and in an Australian context, most likely their final year of studies. Sorry, it's a final pivotal year. There might be some very important assessment tasks, possibly some of these sort of oral based or very orally focused assessment tasks were worth a lot of marks or that they had to be passed to a certain extent. And that's when they were actually accessing help. Very, very limited strategies offered sometimes by simply being part of the team and pressing the next button on a PowerPoint slide or presenting in a separate room. There was a very limited set of strategies offered to the students. But the students did reflect that they were rather satisfied still with what was offered and the re-exalt. They were still basically getting what they were hoping for. It just wasn't to the extent that they actually hoped for and especially a lot re-reflected, they had no real say. They weren't asked them themselves what they actually wanted and practically most of them said they still wanted to actually talk. What the very alarming factor here is, of the 10% or so of students who access help, most of them left that process with feelings of confusion, higher feelings of shame, having asked to help, having to disclose their stuttering to possibly multiple parties, having to actually prove it and embarrassment. And they also indicated a lot of them that they had shifted identities. They actually said, as a result of accessing support, they felt more disabled than they did before actually accessing help. Which again is a very interesting finding, but it's something that we definitely don't want to see. You don't want confusion, shame, embarrassment occurring from a process which is meant to be empowering, confidence building. So that's actually a surprise finding, but I think it's one of the most important ones actually. This leads me to what I term a vicious cycle. So we've got very few students who start accessing help at the Unies at least in Australia. The disability liaison units as a result have expressed limited strategies for such students. I actually contacted all 39 universities, spoke to their disability liaison units and the ones who answered me, basically none had ever seen a student who stutters present for help. Which leads in terms, students who start out being more possibly the third from seeking even more help. There's somewhat satisfied with it, but again it's not empowering. They indicated that the disability staff were actually nice and they were friendly and they were giving them time to actually talk and answer. But they weren't actually really listening to them or not wanting to hear what they actually wanted. Again then as a result disability liaison units are exposed even less to students who are stutter and they have again limited strategies. And it just keeps going around and around in a circle at the moment. So I think our job in the future is to try to break this cycle in some fashion. Just some thoughts sorry because I haven't got a lot of time to talk. So we have to try to encourage these students to actually consider accessing help if it's required from free enrolment onwards. Because most of the students, a large majority, were saying they were not even looking for help free enrolment. It was not even in their mind, not a single thought there. We also need stuttering organisations to be proactive themselves. So we need to be sending information to unis to be doing presentations at unis to be more involved. To make sure that universities know we know this is a serious thing. And stuttering and the impact of stuttering on the individuals at times can be actually fairly marked. And it's not inconsistent impact either. And again you know leading to services like stuck and some other things like web sites etc. We also possibly need to think how we positively frame disability in our own ranks too. So stop seeing it as a negative, understand some of the legal definitions of it. And start to align slightly to it because if we align to disability, there's large disability worldwide organisations, some of them very very powerful, very very strong. We can also assist. And stop thinking of disability models as being only two, like the social model and the medical model. Because there are other models out there which organisations or individuals can actually accept. One such model is called the affirmation model which really focuses on the individual, making them aware that their differences are valuable to themselves and to the greatest society also. So I think this is just some ways of starting to actually change the opinions. I think especially conferences like this are key. But we've got to get the messages out beyond even these conference awards too. And that's my presentations thank you. I think I've finished on time. If anyone has any questions you can, I guess if there's some question time and you're quite welcome to email me also. Is anybody there? Hello? Yep, Lindsay. They're coming your way. Hi Grant, it's Lindsay Pike here from the University of Bristol. Really interesting findings and really depressing as well. I was really sad to hear that help left students feeling worse than before. But I really like the idea of the affirmation model rather than just thinking about it in medical and social model terms. And wondered what you think could be done in universities to promote that and what the best ways in might be. And whether there were any insights from speaking to students about who might have been able to offer help that was more positive and useful for them. One interesting thing from these students was Lindsay that no disability layers on staff accessed any form of guidance from a speech therapist or a stuttering organisation. So, again, that's a knowledge gap area. I think it's a difficult one when it comes to disability. And I think language has to change a lot and the way that even these units actually frame themselves. Because it's more about inclusion than simply having that D word in a title and actually seems to be a blocker. But Lindsay, it was incredibly interesting and I've got to write a paper on it. The attitudes from the students who started about what the disability actually meant. And they were definitely separating themselves from the stereotypical view. For example, one student basically says, look, I can walk, I can hear and I can see. I am not disabled. So, I think it's a hard job. But I think it has to start at a organisational level, especially amongst stuttering organisations. Any other questions from the audience? Yes. Hello, Grant, this is Barry Hayward. I work at Kings in the disability support team. That finding struck me. I don't know, but I speculate as well maybe how we offer support to people could be part of the picture. I recognise what you say about people have a view of what disability means and whether it fits with them. Abed, who was speaking before, said he was asked for evidence. I spoke to a student recently who didn't have any evidence. But I think universities have to look at that strongly about requiring medical affirmation of something. It goes back to, we used to sort of, still do a bit, but we used to throw a lot of resources that cost money at students. And I think it was perfectly reasonable to make sure that there was proof of a disability to allocate, you know, tax payers money. But when we're talking about what we are in this area of letting lecturers know what they should do, perhaps producing a document that describes what adjustments might be required, I don't see that we need to ask people to prove they have a disability. And I wonder if that might be part of this feeling of stigmatisation that it seems has come through by people seeking support. So that's something I'll certainly take back into the sector here. Oh, thank you, Barry. Barry, what I'll say is all 10 students who basically asked for help were asked to approve their stuttering by actually seeing a doctor. And they were actually kind of confused why. You know, how does a doctor know that I stutter or not? And then they said that the doctors that they saw were also kind of confused too. But every single doctor signed it. But again, it's an extra step. They've taken a brave step to ask for help. Then they're told they've got to actually prove it. So they've got to go to somewhere else, say yes, I'm a person who has done this, can you please sign this? Then go back and see another person. You know, it's maybe three or four steps there. No, OK. Well Grant, thank you very much indeed for your time. And please go and get some sleep. Thank you very much. Can you please show our appreciation? Thank you. OK, thank you very much. So can you please welcome our next speaker, Dr Clare Tupling? OK, just give me a second while I remind myself what I'm talking about her day. And hopefully click the right button, which would help. OK, there we go. So for those of you that don't know me, that's who I am. I'm Clare Tupling. I'm a sociologist by trade. And I'm a senior lecturer in education in the College of Arts, Humanities and Education at the University of Derby. As a lecturer, you can imagine that I do quite a lot of talking in my work, so a lot of teaching, a lot of presentations. Supervising doctoral students. Anyone who works in academia will know you have to go for lots of meetings, some of which can be exciting. And there's also making phone calls. I work with a lot of part-time students, a lot of students that don't come onto campus. So the only way that you can communicate with them is by Skype or telephone calls. So there's quite a lot of speaking that I do in my job, and I also have a stammer. So as well as kind of spending most of the day talking, there are some other more mundane activities like admin that don't involve a lot of speaking. But it's actually the speaking part of my job that I enjoy the most. I don't know many academics that enjoy the paperwork, but perhaps there's some. So just by way of orientating ourselves to what I'm going to talk about in this presentation, I'd just say briefly. This is a kind of a navigation, a guide to what I'm talking about, so you know what to expect. So I'm going to talk a little bit about myself and my research and where that research came from, that additional labour for academics use stammer. Then I'm going to go on to link to our conference theme and consider what we mean by silence on campus. And I will consider then, as a part of that, the reasons and the consequences for declaring yourself to be a disabled academic or academic with a disability. And then I'm going to look at some initial findings from my research that's ongoing about the experiences of academics who start me, including my own experiences, how that fits in as well. And finally, actually this presentation is going to serve as a recruiting platform if anybody wants to volunteer to be part of my research. I've got my contact details at the end, or you can just speak to me. So this is a research study that I'm currently involved in. So it's experiences of managing fluency and disfluency amongst higher education lecturers who stammer. That term lecture is quite broad because some lecturers don't do a lot of teaching, even though they're called a lecturer. There's researchers and there's also a PhD student who might do a bit of teaching as part of their studies. So this research didn't just come out of nowhere, it didn't just wake up one morning and think, oh this is interesting to research. So it's been shaped by my own experiences of being a lecturer who stammers and who's had to navigate some of the challenges in that workplace as a consequence. So briefly about myself, I've been teaching since 2004, which seems like a lifetime ago. So many in social sciences and education, so these are disciplines that require a lot of discussion. I hope I've been doing that job successfully, I probably wouldn't still be in it if I wasn't that successful. My stammer's been an ever-present during this time. It's caused me to question my ability or suitability for the job or whether I'd be accepted in the job. It's caused me anxiety about whether I can maintain the speaking responsibilities that I've got. But even though it's been ever-present, it's never really prevented me from doing the job, I've been doing it since 2004. I've found that mostly students don't care, and if they do care initially, they are bothered about it initially, that worry soon wears off. But there's still that anxiety, so I feel as though I have to sound good, I have to sound right in order to make a good impression. We know from research studies that students report that a presentation that is more fluent, they rate that as better than a presentation that contains some non-fluencies or disfluencies, even though the content that is being presented is the same. I'm expected to go to meetings and be articulate, I'm expected to make phone calls and have other oral communications. So there is this, am I performing well enough, am I satisfying my students? Because that's a big concern in higher education, is our students getting what they're paying for? In my current role, things have changed quite considerably in the last few years, and I think that has come mainly because instead of retreating from my stamina and hiding it and not really talking about it, I've accepted that it's there and I've had to do something to make life a little bit easier for me in my role. So as a sociologist, I'm trained to think beyond myself and look at the wider context and to find some conceptual and theoretical approaches to understanding my experiences and those of other academics who stammer. In the course of becoming more interested in the experience of somebody who stammers in higher education as a lecturer, it turns out there are other academics who stammer, we've heard from some of them today, and there's at least two of us in my college. So the title of the conference then is Silence on Campus, and Claire invited us to make a noise about stammering. So I'm just going to go through some thoughts about what we might mean by silence on campus. This isn't a definitive understanding, it's just some things that I think are quite interesting to think about. So writers like Saint Pierre and Chris Eagle talk about how stammering disfluency has been largely absent from disability studies, and they are making attempts to relocate stammering within disability studies. Now disability studies fits within the social sciences and humanities, and it offers a way of understanding the way that disability is socially constructed. So regardless of whether one thinks of stammering as a disability, the approach is a perspective of disability studies, offers a way of understanding stammering. So it's been silence because actually academia has not really talked about stammering. Studies with people at Stammer has shown that disfluency is the greatest impact in the workplace, and similarly Klein and Hood's research showed that people at Stammer felt that their disfluency negatively impacted on their job. Their job performance. So why would you want to talk about it if you think that stammering is a deficiency? So if you don't talk about it, you're silencing, you're silencing stammering. And Claire Butler's work has shown that in workplaces that there is an expectation to sound right. So why declare yourself to be somebody who's to stammer's? You wouldn't want to talk about it. So this is how stammering becomes silent on campus. However, we also know from other research, so John Horton and Faith took a look to disabled academics in geography, and they suggest that the academic workplace is frequently a place that constructs somebody's disablement. So it's a very significant context if you're in academia. And so their participants felt that they became defined by their disability and that they were excluded by their disability. It had impacts for their teaching, it had impacts for their research and it had impacts on their career development. At the same time, disabled academic members of staff often declared themselves to be disabled as an activist position, which isn't a straightforward, so we could do that, disabled academics could do that. So there is this theory, Giddens is very simply put, I'm not going to go into it in any great detail, we haven't got the time and so on. So there's this idea that we construct our own identity, we're active in choosing who we are, our identities. And so therefore identifying as a disabled academic may be a choice and it may be an assertive choice. You might be making a statement of solidarity or making an assertion of a right to be treated in a particular way or the right not to be discriminated. But it can also be risky. And there's some research that I did, a paper that I wrote with my colleague Deb Alfwet where I'd talk about how I came to declare myself as an academic with a disability. And this was in quite difficult circumstances which I am not going to go into. So there was a choice there, I chose to do it, it was a statement, it was kind of an assertive move to make, but the circumstances had kind of forced me into that position. And it was also in some ways, even though everybody knew that I stammered, I couldn't hide it, I'm not capable of hiding it, so that choice isn't always there. So if we turn to some of the experiences of academics that I spoke to that stammer, I've described them as accidental academics. I don't think this is unique to people that stammer, I think it's common in higher education, people come into higher education when they didn't plan to, through changes of circumstances. But I think some of the ways that people who stammer talk about their role in academia, it's almost as if they're waiting to be found out, then it's a little bit uncomfortable there. So some of the people I've spoken to talked about how they had self-imposed career limitations, so opting to do with job or follow a degree course that involved no speaking, but then finding themselves in academia and then realising that they did have skills in communication and how then the stammering became less of an issue or it became less disabling. There's also those people that stammer that once in academia decided that's where they wanted to stay just in lecturing roles that didn't want to pursue leadership roles because they felt there wouldn't be capable or they wouldn't be taken seriously in a leadership role or a management role because of their stammer. And there's also the additional labour that is quite interesting, so one lecturer talked to me about how in addition to the lectures that they would produce, they wrote a transcript of every lecture that they did and made that available to students. And they did that not because they were asked to, but because they felt that if they didn't, they would be disadvantageing the student. No other lecturer was expected to do that. So it was the extra work. Instead of just giving it an old presentation, they would also write a paper to accompany that. In terms of my own experiences of additional labour, it was the extra time and effort that I had to make to arrange tutorials by Skype or to make phone calls. It meant that I was having to book rooms that were empty or somewhere that was quiet where I could go and make phone calls and have these Skype conversations. And it just became unsustainable because you'd have to wait three weeks before a room became available in academia. Everybody's booking rooms that just isn't in of space. So, since I came out as an academic who Stamerson was disabled and keen to find a way of getting through it, things have changed for me. I've called this slide to train your chair. It could be tame your chair. So this really relates to my own experiences of how I've managed to change my circumstances at work. So one of my challenges is talking at meetings. Some of the more formal meetings, very perversely, I'm easier to access because they're bigger. It's a university-wide committee. It's very procedural. The space is where you are expected. The place is on the agenda where you are expected to speak. So you hand up to the chair and that's a very effective way of managing it. Some of the less formal meetings are actually more difficult for me to access because people just chipped in. So I'm now managed that by telling the chair in advance where I want to contribute to and he then has the responsibility of inviting me in to speak. It means I have to do extra work because I have to read all the papers a week or two in advance and prepare my response. But what it does is demonstrate my ability and it allows me to effectively contribute in a way that I wasn't doing before. So it actually demonstrates. So it isn't just the university being kind. It isn't just my boss being kind. I've actually demonstrated that those strategies work. And because I'm contributing more, I'm challenging that superiority of fluency. It's very common for me to go to a meeting in Stammer. I can't say my name fluently at introductions and now everybody else. I think it's now kind of content with that. So I think as academics in Stammer, I think we have a responsibility to assert your right to Stammer. And my final point is this research is ongoing. I would welcome any other academics, whether they be lecturers, PhD students, researchers, etc. who will be willing to be interviewed as a part of this research. And that's my email address. Thank you. A couple of pages of references if you're really geeky and you want to know them. Thank you. Any questions? Hi. I wondered if you'd come across any students who Stammer in your work and how you manage that, if you have? Yeah. None of the students that have Stammer have. I've not been done yet. Let me start again. I have known students that Stammer and they've not declared that as disability, so that point that Grant was making. I think sometimes colleagues or colleagues have tried to intervene to support them and not exactly in a very helpful way. So they've assumed that they Stammer because they're nervous. And when I've tried to offer the suggestion that they contact the BSA or that kind of advice, it's been met with dismissal that we know the student. We know it's about nerves and confidence. I think there's an unwillingness or a reluctance of students who Stammer to declare that and to ask for help on that. It could be because they don't know that the help is available. I do know a colleague that is working with a student that Stammer's at the moment who was on a workplace. She's kind of struggling with whether she's made the right career choice and my colleague is discussing the kind. She's using me as an example of the kind of strategies that she could think of. I really enjoyed your talk. I've heard of one academic in particular whose job was to deliver a lecture, but rather than delivering a lecture, he changed the format of his whole course and turned it into seminars instead. So that's an example I've seen personally as well how it can impact people. But my question was, my phone has gone off, how much of the imitations you described are self-imposed and how much of it is in response to seeing how other people with disabilities are treated within academia. I've seen and heard from people that it's more of a response in terms of seeing how badly treated a disability can sometimes be in academia because it's a high pressure environment and there's a lot of pressure to perform essentially. I recognise those self-imposed limitations. People have spoken to talk about that. They chose to restrict their career. If I'm being honest, that was my experience. I think it changed when I started saying what my needs were in terms of being quite persistent about that but also demonstrating that those changes did make a difference. So I got moved from a very loud office. I was working very loud office. It was almost impossible for me to use the phone to arrange those Skype tutorials for students, but since I was moved to quite an office, that's completely changed. I've demonstrated that those adjustments have worked and become much more effective. The other reason was because, as you say, recognising that employers, although they don't actively set out to discriminate, that there is unintentional discrimination, so it's an act of solidarity and I've now become the college disability coordinator as a consequence. Our next speaker is Professor Deborah Johnston. Thank you very much. I've got the advantage of coming at this stage in the day because quite a lot of the background context that I wanted to set has been set by our earlier speakers. So I guess I want to touch on that and just to highlight the key elements that we've talked about that I think are really relevant. I want to come on to the reason that I think all of the things we've talked about are even more important for us to tackle and to think through now than they were in the past. That's this point of the rapidly changing context which is in my title because the university systems we're looking at now are quite different to the ones that we were looking at 10 or 20 years ago. So very wordy slide. You can see who the sociologists are in the room and who the economists are, so at least there isn't data up there or graphs, right? But I'll just talk through it and actually, as I said, I can touch on some of these things really quickly. So on the left-hand side of this PowerPoint, what I really wanted to pull out is some of the ways that people who stammer might find their experience at university is affected by the fact that they have a stammer. And it's crucially the things that we've talked about, the issues around the choice of programme and module and ways that people might act in class. So perhaps withdrawing, perhaps being more silent, or perhaps if they're able to, and this is from BSA literature, so excellent BSA resources on this, perhaps actually trying to make their point avoiding stammering but doing so in such a way that it becomes hard to follow. And those of us that stammer will recognise that as something that we might engage in. At the top on the left, I put some things that came out of a focus group that we held here at SOAS last year and it was a focus group that was held through our partnership with STUC. And what was really interesting is students here at SOAS talked about all of those things but they also talked about something that I hadn't thought about, that hadn't been at the forefront of my mind but should have been, and it was precisely around those social interactions. So perhaps being away from home or having to get to know lots of new people in the first couple of weeks and those social activities, either things that were happening around the programme or the module, those awful meetings where you have to introduce yourself, you all go round the room and we heard, I bet, given an example of that, or even in social groups outside of the classroom where there was particular stress around having that social interaction and how would you be dealt with, how would people react to you. And I think it's important to add the social dimension to the academic one that we've been talking about. People's experiences in universities don't come separately packaged, they're kind of integrated together and if we don't feel we belong or we feel that we're disadvantaged in one sphere, it affects the other sphere. On the right hand side, I thought though, and this is the bit, I guess is the more controversial bit and I am using that social model of disability, is that if we think about what we've been talking about, we've been talking a lot about the perceptions of people who stammer. But of course when we're in a setting, like in a social setting, we're talking about that interaction between someone who stammer and possibly someone who is a non-stammerer and how does that work? And we know about the range of studies which say that stammering affected speech can lead to uncomfortable or unpleasant feelings in non-stammerers and there's a very wide range of studies. And I think importantly for us, there are a lot of studies in universities among college students mostly in North America and I guess that's because college students are a nice captive audience for researchers to do this kind of work on. And I'm giving this because I think it's really important as the context for what we're talking about. You know, we're talking about clear evidence and I particularly encourage people if you are able to to look at the Boyle Blood and Blood study from 2009 which is a recent piece of work looking at the perceptions of non-stammering college students in North America of speech that is punctuated by stammering. And the interesting thing there, the important thing there is that there was clear evidence of greater perceptions of wanting to socially distance themselves from people that displayed stammering speech and also having negative connotations of people that stammered. And that was true across the piece. Those perceptions were changed somewhat when groups were presented with different stories about why people stammered. And so this particular research group conveyed information to each of the groups that they did this work with and where people were told that stammering had psychological causes. There were greater negative perceptions than the groups that were told that the causes were unknown or that the causes were genetic. And that's interesting. It shows you that the things that non-stammerers bring with them into interactions with stammerers do affect the way that they perceive stammering. So I think it's really important we think about the context. How well educated is the general public? How well educated is the student body? And the reason that I think that's important is that we're talking about university systems that are requiring students to interact more than ever. So quite a lot we've been talking about how the lecturer interacts with a student who stammers. But I think we have to consider also how do other students interact with a student who stammers. And that's because of a range of factors that have meant that a wider range of programmes than ever before are using group-based teaching or group participation for key parts of their teaching. And I wanted to talk about why that was and I wanted to set the scene because I think it is a scene that is more challenging for us and really talks into the things that Grant was talking about, about the relationship between students and disability support officers. And so I think if we go back to that big context, one of the things that I want us to all be thinking about is that greater stress faced by students in universities now. And that's something that we have a really wide range of evidence about. Part of that stress is greater financial stress. We know that most students are taking out student loans to cover fees that are substantially higher than they were back in 2010, 2011. There's also been changes to the framework for accessing the disabled students allowance. So even if a student wants to access that, it's become more difficult to access funds for particularly non-medical interventions. And importantly, and this is something that opens up new opportunities for us. That's because universities are themselves now charged with being more inclusive right from the start. And so the whole aim of that change in the disabled students allowance has been done partly with the intention of saying in fact university teaching must be inclusive right from the start. So people that have disabilities shouldn't have to ask for reasonable adjustments, so adjustments that are made after the fact almost, but should be able to actually access teaching and learning in a more accessible way. So very clear sets of guidelines to universities that they must teach in an inclusive way. And that inclusive teaching approach is often geared around meeting the needs of students with specific learning differences. So dyslexio, dyscalculous, other kinds of disorders within the specific learning disability spectrum. And if you can read it, if you've got really good eyesight, I've listed what the expert group says that these are. And I'll read through them quickly. I mean, these are all things that sound great and are great, are genuinely great, but they do provide challenges for us. So the first thing is a requirement that lecturers and universities put all of the materials for a course in some way that's accessible, so that the material can be accessed by students in an easy way. The second requirement is that that accessibility is much wider. So most universities now will put information up electronically. So rather than having to wait and go to the lecture and get that printed lecture handout, most students now should be able to get their material online and read it and have sight of it before the lecture. To ensure that reading lists are focused and up-to-date, so that particularly people that might have difficulties covering large amounts of reading are not having to do so much. And that people really think about why they're getting students to engage in work. To facilitate the recording of teaching so that students can replay and hear again. I mean, all really excellent stuff. To use plain English and clear presentation in class so that you get your message across. Pre-select diverse learning groups to make sure that learning groups have got positive dynamics where you've thought about how students interact with each other. To diversify the range of learning opportunities so that we don't just have that traditional large lecture. So someone up here, lots of people out there, and just being talked at that there are lots of other ways that we seek to engage in teaching and in learning activities. To think of students as learning partners. People that are there with us on a journey in learning to ask them what they think about teaching. To ask them what they think about learning to get that feedback. And then finally to embed inclusive practice all the way through so that the people up here, the lecturers, the support staff are more diverse. As a positive indicator, all of this sounds fabulous and it is, it is. But I wanted to pick out some of the bits that are more challenging, I think, for people who stammer. And that's because in all of this story some key approaches have come out that can be more challenging. And particularly in the light of the data that I just gave you about the difficulty of managing the perceptions of non-stammerers. And that's because when you look at what's happening across a range of programmes, it is very much about the use of group-based learning. So participation within a group or perhaps participation in class. How much does someone ask questions? How much do they attend tutorials? Or assess presentations. And there are lots of clear pedagogical rationales for that switch and for that change over time. And it's not happening in every programme but it's happening in many. But in the context in which people who stammer may not feel confident in asking for adjustments, might not feel confident in expressing what their rights are, they can often come into those contexts and be negatively affected. And I wanted to think through some of the ways that that might happen. It might happen in a way that's particularly building up some of the concerns that started off the lecture with. So if you're assessed on participation in class but you feel that you can't ask questions, then you could find that you have lower marks. If you don't feel that you come to tutorials but a percentage of your mark comes from attending tutorials, you might have lower marks. If there is a piece of group-based work and you find it hard to interact with others in your group, you might have lower marks. If you are doing an assessed presentation and the lecturer mistakes your disfluency for lack of knowledge or lack of certainty, you might have lower marks. So I just want to make this really clear. It's a real concern that I have that a range of initiatives that have often at their basis, that idea of let's change up teaching, let's make it innovative, let's make it diverse, let's interact with people in different ways, all really good. We talked about that earlier, the kind of positive things about going around a large group and all introducing yourself and changing it so it's not just the person at the front talking. It's all done with really good intentions but can lead to situations that are disadvantaging for people who stammer. As I said, these sorts of techniques have come in because of a desire to be more inclusive and because it seems to be talking to the needs of a range of people that might have particular kinds of disabilities, specific learning differences. It's also true that these sorts of approaches are often used if you've got a skills-based approach. If you're wanting to help students develop workplace relevant skills and they'll be in a workplace that's group-based or that involves oral presentation, that's another reason why lecturers are using these sorts of techniques in the classroom. To be perhaps more focused on the finances, I can also see that using bigger groups, using group-based work is something that might get driven by cost-saving measures as well. Much cheaper to mark 10 group assignments than 60 individual assessments. So there are lots of factors that are leading to this kind of approach in teaching and learning. But, as I said, can lead to disadvantages for people who stammer. There's also... I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't have an answer to that. Whoops. Nobody has got an answer, even Siri, even Siri. But actually we have got some ideas about answers. You see I segued really well. And there are lots of potential mitigations. Now we've talked a lot about this and I think all that my slide does is perhaps organise things we've already talked about in a different way. This particular slide came out of two different exercises that we did. So when we did that focus group with people who stammer at SOAS last year, we also talked to students about what helped them, what was positive in class, what was supportive in class. We had our SOAS Learning and Teaching Conference last summer and we spoke to learning and teaching experts, to academic colleagues, about what approaches they could use to ensure that people that had a stammer, people that had other kinds of communication disorders weren't disadvantaged. So this slide is something of a summary of lots of individual ideas that have come from those activities. It really talks to things that we've already raised. I think importantly are some things that go right across this. And it is something that perhaps links well to Grant and Grant's presentation was really fabulous. I'm really glad that someone's doing that kind of structured, rigorous work. But what was clear from the work we did at SOAS was this and the people that I spoke to had really similar experiences to the people, that much larger group that Grant spoke to. People that didn't realise or didn't think that they had any rights. People who didn't think that they could ask for adjustments to the way that teaching was done or the way that their marks were assessed. People perhaps who had never been in a group with fellow stammerers who actually hadn't thought about the extent to which their difficulties were constructed by the university context, who thought that stammering was an individual problem, was their problem and almost was their fault. So in that context it becomes very difficult or it wasn't clear to them that they should be accessing the disability support services. And again, most people in that spoke group did not regard themselves as having a disability so that label didn't connect with them. So we have to find ways that people who stammer realise that they have options, they have things that they can ask for and things that can be done that will help them in their learning journey. And that means educating staff, educating academic staff and educating professional services staff around the issue so that it's easier for people to think through what to do if they're approached by someone who's stammer and Grant talked about this really well. More generally what students said was that the lectures and the seminars that were most positive for them were the ones where the lecturers created a positive environment right from the start, not just for them but for everybody. An environment in which people felt they could ask questions, they could show they didn't understand things, they could talk about the problems. And there was something there and it's really hard to... I've created an accepting environment and that really doesn't quite get to it. But that environment where it's okay to have different learning styles, where it's okay to say you're struggling with things, that was something that students said really helped them. The lecturers that did that meant things were much more positive. So just to start to pull these pieces out, we talked about large lectures and some of the things that really concerned students that stammered was the practice of calling out in large lectures, so picking on someone and asking them a question. And it can be quite commonplace. And that feeling being so worrying for some people that they wouldn't come to a lecture. They wouldn't come to a lecture for lecturers that did that. But conversely, on the other hand, feeling that they couldn't contribute to the questions in a lecture either. So it was the usual suspects that always asked questions in those large lectures and that people felt they couldn't do it. But actually, there were lots of ideas that people had about how that could be remedied. And in fact, we saw one of those in Lindsay's presentation earlier, the use of new technology to ask questions. We used Slydo, there's also Paddler. These are all free bits of software that are really accessible, that can create a more open environment. Because it isn't just people who stammer that don't like to ask questions in large lectures. Lots of people find that intimidating. And so we have ways that we can overcome that. In group or tutorial settings, I wonder if it's similar in a way to what Claire was saying about tame your chair or talk to your chair. But what students said is, it's really important that lecturers chair those interactions, those interactions that lecturers set acceptable standards of behaviour. People were worried about being teased, were worried about negative comments and also feeling that they didn't get a chance to speak. That they might end up self-silencing because they didn't want to be teased or to have negative comments. I guess to make space for people to speak if they wanted to. So it was this allowing self-differentiated approaches. On the one hand, people said, look, I really don't like it if we go around the room and I feel I've got to speak. But on the other hand, sometimes I might like a chance to speak. So it's about that ability for a student to say to a lecturer, I'd really like to make a contribution on this. I might need more time to get started. A negotiated approach, a lecturer that's open to that approach. Finally, in presentations and assessments, a really crucial one was about removing fluency from assessment criteria. Actually, if you look at assessment criteria, actually very often formal assessment criteria and never have the word fluency in them because unless you're actually doing a programme that's all about you becoming fluent, not hesitating, why should fluency be in there? But we all know, I've seen it, that in real life, when people are assessing presentations, fluency, confidence, poise, all of those things affect your final mark. And I think what we need to do is, we need to give guidance to people that are using assessed presentations to think about what is it you're looking for in that presentation. Is it wonderful fluency a speech or is it knowledge of a particular subject? Is it the ability to group ideas and really challenging it when we see those sorts of assessments? But also a whole set of issues around changing the amount of time someone has, the approach to assessed presentations, and we've talked about those, doing assessed presentations to a different audience, having a different amount of time, being able to do them in a different format. Lots of really innovative ideas and actually ideas that are well recognised and understood. You go to the BSA website, and there's a fabulous list of ways that assessed oral presentations can be adjusted. So I think what I wanted to end with was that in this context of these, quite radical pedagogical changes, some of them in the name of greater inclusion, but changes that can often lead to new sites of disadvantage for people who stammer, and by the way for other people communication disorders or social anxiety that don't benefit from being assessed through verbal work, or don't benefit from being assessed through group work, that we really need to challenge how we think of inclusion. Perhaps it goes back to what Grant was talking about. What's our view of disability? What are the disabilities that we're adjusting for in university, and how do we do that? I think the message that came out from those focus groups and that work with academics and people that led in learning teaching was something about flexibility, and that's a real challenge to all of us, especially in universities. You have these set approaches, and right at the start of the year you put it up on the website and you say, my lectures will be 60 minutes long and the tutorials will be 55 minutes and they'll be assessed in a certain way, but actually some of this is about having that flexibility built in right from the start, but also having that more accepting environment. This is where I enter the statement about an inclusive environment for people who stammer, being good for all learners. I've been talking about the fact that a range of the moves towards inclusion that we've just seen them, that we've just seen earlier did not be good for people who stammer because they create new forms of assessment that can be difficult for someone with a speech impairment. However, if we move towards that more flexible environment where we are allowing people to verbalise far more what works for them, how they can best learn, when we have more discussion about, what are we trying to assess in that presentation? What are the skills we want to see? Genuinely, that will be good for all learners. That environment will be a more positive one. So that's what I wanted to end with. So thank you very much and if there are any questions, thank you. Hi. I just thought that I wouldn't mention that stammering can also indirectly affect non-verbal assessments because they feel that they are unable to talk to and express their ideas to other students and so something that could be a result of that is that their ideas aren't very clear in their writing. That's because people don't get the opportunity to talk things out with fellow students. I think we'd all recognise that that the more we talk about an idea, the sharper it becomes. For example, a good thing and it's kind of linking to something that Claire was talking about but as you progress in academia as you become a master's student a PhD student, routinely what people do to refine their argument is to go and present at seminars. I'm speaking very fluently now but I had a stammer that made me feel when I was in my 30s anyway that I really couldn't do that and in fact it was really difficult to go to seminars and to share those ideas and then to refine them. That sort of feeling that you can't engage in that way can have more pervasive effects. I guess the challenge is what's the solution for that? Is there a way you can share material on other kinds of sites or in other kinds of ways and get feedback on it? I just wondered whether that's something that you've seen or thought about. Well, something that I thought that I thought something that could maybe start at the undergraduate level as if the lecturers can maybe ask and maybe ask the students and not simply who wants to ask a question but also ask who wants to ask a question but is too is too afraid to to put the hand up? So actually things like Slido or Padla, those other techniques would be really good as well even in smaller settings perhaps. Thank you. Hi, I was wondering has and so has implemented any of the tips and ideas you thought of in your presentation and then also one other thing is that I'm a student at King's and so I stammer also and one of the really good things that and basically only one of my modules has put into place is that yes and so basically we do have a group presentation but then also we are each and basically required to and basically write up our ideas in a blog because it also counts for participation and so that is so it's another way of assessing participation which I thought really really useful but then that only happened in my third year but at least it's a positive change. So in terms of what we've done so we are trying to encourage the use of Padla so we use Padla usually and we're trying to encourage that in large lectures and very specifically trying to encourage it in the situation of that lecture point out and that depends a lot on the style of the lecturer but you know that thing about putting someone on the spot and asking them a question and the other thing is the criteria of fluency in assessed presentation and actually where I'm having a really interesting discussion and there's still a lot of discussion to have is around language acquisition and the extent to which fluency gets marked positively in oral tests of language acquisition and it's a really interesting one and I think we have to push heavily. If someone is learning Japanese for example there are people who are Japanese who stammer and they speak fluent Japanese so it's not about fluency it's about the ability to convey ideas in a language but there's a real struggle and I know there are colleagues in the audience who specialise on this area and I think it's one we have to really take on board and we have to really we have to keep pushing these boundaries so the issue of fluency is one that's being something in assessed presentation is a big issue and I'm trying to work on it and so if others are interested in that I'm really keen to hear from you but particularly in foreign languages. Lovely, well otherwise there's one here. I would support the idea of different style and different approaches and it was interesting to hear a clar saying that that students score a lower score for disfluent presentations compared to a fluent presentation and I had a lecturer in my university days who had quite a severe stammer but he was fantastic and he just went the extra mile to make the presentation more impactful more interesting more useful and more inclusive and if he was scored he'd score a lot higher than all the other fluent presenters and I think it's just an example of an acquired strength of people who stammer there's enormous opportunity to stand out as a person who stammers by being almost forced if you like to be slightly different and have a different approach So I think that's a really good point and I have known other lecturers that have stammered and often that means that people work even harder on their presentations the negative of that is that people often do a lot more work I used to look at my colleagues who would just roll out for a lecture when I used to over prepare lectures I think that's a really common story that I hear among lecturers that stammer that I'd over prepare make sure I'd really got it but that was positive for my students because I think a lot about what I wanted them to take away and I think that kind of focus is good but I'd also say there's something about the fact that we know that stutter-filled speech can elicit certain feelings in non-stammerers and possibly in stammerers as well I just don't know if that research has been done but I think for me self-disclosure was really important that I said I have a stammer I will get stuck it's going to be fine I would commonly say at the start of anything because I think if we can change what the norm is that good speaking doesn't have to be lack of absence of hesitation so I wonder how much we can do that bit that Claire talked about that campaigning work but I think if we can really challenge the championing of fluency and say there are other ways of speaking that's a really positive thing and I think we can sometimes do that with students who are perhaps hearing someone that stammers and who is open about stammering for the first time in university and so we can change some of those norms but maybe that's wishful thinking I don't know okay thank you very much thank you thank you everyone so we're now into the final stretch of the day so we're going to have a quick break now if we could try and get back here for a quarter to four please that would be great thank you very much one two two two two two we'll be starting in a couple of minutes thank you very much can I ask you to take your seats please so we're going to start now our next presentation is from Claire Norman and it's entitled universities stuck in their ways Claire good afternoon everyone and good afternoon as well to everyone who is watching this on live stream my name is Claire Norman and this is my presentation for the day it's universities stuck in their ways so just to talk you through what I will be discussing in the next half an hour talking about who I am which would be helpful for most of you who don't know me what stuck actually is I'll go through some statistics for you just to really get you in the Saturday mood I will also go through the university members of stuck and I'll talk you through the stuck process too so we'll go through the focus group and the seminars summaries that I have been holding over the last few years and we'll talk about the future aims of stuck and I'll finish on any easy questions that you guys may have to ask so who am I I'm Claire I have standard since the age of 5 so that's 22 years now and just to give you a bit of background so I read French studies at the University of Warwick from 2010 to 2014 and I recently completed a distance learning masters in counter fraud and counter corruption studies I'm a Maguire program graduate other speech therapy courses are available I have to say that and that was in 2017 and I was part of the BBC2 documentary The Secret Helpers which was broadcast in March last year after I graduated I landed a job with Amazon as a bilingual fraud investigations specialist and now I currently work at CIFAS which is the UK's leading fraud prevention organisation as an intelligence analyst so what is stuck as you hopefully know by now as I've put it on all social media and on every single bit of paper that you guys have today stuck stands for the STAMRAs through university consultancy originally it stood for STAMRAs through university campaign but I felt like I was doing more than campaigning I'm trying to advise people I'm trying to introduce change I founded SUC in 2014 during my final year of my French degree and it basically started because I had my final year French oral which was worth a very large proportion of my overall degree mark so I went to my university's disability services and said I have a STAMRA I've got this presentation can you please help and they said just breathe which as we know is very unhelpful advice and they also said have you considered picturing your examiner's naked yes my STAMRA is gone so as you can tell I wasn't happy with this advice at all I was really thinking how many other people with not only a STAMRA but also other invisible disabilities are being given really rubbish advice such as that and I thought well no one else is going to do anything about this so I better do it so I set up STUC on the back of that and STUC is free it's completely and utterly free so Ian mentioned earlier universities signing up to STUC I wish they would to be honest and they're not which is a real real shame in the last five years I've managed to get 16 universities on board and I'll talk through them later but I've had emails back from universities saying that they they can't join STUC because they don't have any STAMRAs at their university exactly and other things such as resources and they don't have any staff to cover the STUC relationship but it's just me all I need is one room on their campus and I will do the rest of the work so it really is very little time and work on your part unless you're Deborah and offer to help with this conference so yeah I get lots of reasons why universities can't join STUC but I do keep pushing back I often get messages from university students saying hi is my university part of STUC and when I say no they are really upset by it because they feel like their university isn't supporting them in the ways that they should and that's something that I really think we need to change so STUC at the moment is a service provided to universities in the UK on the basis that I fund it myself and I can't afford to go abroad so I've been asked to help universities in Italy and as much as I'd love a holiday I can't fund it so for now I'll be saying in the UK but hopefully if it spreads then hopefully it'll be a wider scope and most importantly I think is STUC supports not only students but also the staff and the personnel so I'm not missing anyone out at all you'll find that on the internet if you look at help pages for people who stammer they will specifically target a certain group and even though this is what I'm doing here I think I'm the only person who is targeting everyone within a university sphere as opposed to just students or just staff I'm trying to make sure that everyone is being supported in the ways that they should so for those of you who like numbers I'm going to put some statistics up here for you so according to 2017 data the number of undergraduate and postgraduate students was 2.3 million academic staff was just over 200,000 and non-academic staff was 212,000 so according to my calculations that is 2.7 million people who are involved in university life in the UK which is incredible a huge, huge number and if we divide that by the common statistic that 1% of the adult population stammers this means that stuck has the potential outreach of just over 27,000 people and if you think that only 16 universities have signed up to stuck out of 140 universities in the UK that shows either how little resource there is but also how much universities need to sit up and pay attention and make sure that their students and staff are being supported in the ways that they can so here is a list of my favourite universities in the country we do have a couple more universities in the pipeline who are really close to joining which is fantastic in order that they join so starting from Newcastle and UCL in 2014 going to the University of Essex last year so these universities were very very keen to join stuck they're very proactive in their approach as well some universities are already very forward thinking in their ways to support people who stammer and others aren't so much I'll just say that much so some already have many support mechanisms in place and others not so much so it isn't about competing and trying to be the best university from a stuck perspective but it's more about sharing best practice and seeing if one university is using something that works why not replicate it elsewhere so it's a very simple way to see what works in other universities and if that can be adapted to suit another university's framework so because I whoops hello so hopefully this will start playing in a minute no so I tend to focus more on animations and the actual slide content so this was going to be a map where the stuck members are but it's not loading so if you just picture a very wide range of dots that will show where all of the stuck members are so yeah okay so the whole stuck process then is I pester a university like mad by email and ask them to join and outline the ways in which the university can support those people who stammer after they join I then hold a focus group on campus to discuss with people who stammer people who work in the disability services their student support mental health basically anyone who is interested in stammering they can come along and we want to address what the university is and isn't doing for them that's the key so it's letting people speak in a non-judgmental environment to make sure that their voices are heard as a group rather than individually and following that I take those notes that people have made and I host a seminar which is more where the people who are able to make changes and put things into action meet and I lay out the findings to them and I say look this is what your students and staff are wanting you to do and this is what your staff and students are saying you're not doing enough of to allow me to reach my full potential and it's from that that we start to create a plan of action and put it into practice so I'm just going to briefly cover some of this summaries of the focus groups that I've been holding over the last few years so lack of awareness this one's pretty obvious we've all heard it before it's more people don't know what help is available to them so many many students have said to me that they don't know how to ask for help they don't know who to go to they don't necessarily consider their stammer to be a disability so why would they go to disability services so there's obviously there's a very fine line as to whether we consider a stammer to be a disability or not but that depends on the individual's needs and also there's a lack of awareness not only in the academic space but also outside of the university sphere so when I applied to DSA at the start of my final year and I said I have a stammer I would like some resources to help me firstly I didn't stammer at all in that meeting so I don't think they believed me that I actually stammered they offered me a free laptop and a free printer thank you very much I'll take those but that's not going to help me so again I think it's about raising awareness and getting people to understand what having a stammer is how it manifests itself and how that would affect someone in an academic setting in particular incorrect information and acting on myths this is one that really makes me angry because for example as we've all heard many people when they see someone who stammers will tell them to take their time to relax to not worry etc which are all things that we would say to someone with anxiety for example so many people think that stammering is linked to her anxiety one could cause the stammer could cause anxiety sure but that doesn't mean that you get to treat them in the same way so telling someone to be relaxed is not going to help someone even if it helps someone who has anxiety you can't copy and paste those methods onto someone else just because they have a stammer also myths such as people who stammer can't enter a job role where they need to speak as you can see today we have completely busted that myth 100% but people often believe incorrectly so that people who stammer are less intelligent than others more nervous it's possible that we're more nervous because we have a stammer but it doesn't mean that we are naturally nervous as people mental health it's obviously a very commonly known fact that stammering and mental health are very much linked not only on the anxiety scale in terms of general anxiety and also depression and this could also lead to more serious consequences and one thing I'm calling for is for mental health support services at universities and the disability support to try and work together because they're just not communicating with each other and it must be understood that even if it doesn't affect some people others will be affected by their disability in terms of their mental health but why aren't they working together interviews so not only interviews for students in terms of getting a graduate job but also staff staff who want to try and get promoted to go up to the next level who feel like they can't because of the pressures that they will need to be talking for the majority of their job so it's about trying to raise the awareness of that and to not let your stammer get in the way of landing your dream job assessment methods so some universities have set assessment methods for their modules whereas others offer a bit more flexibility for example at Warwick for the course that I did I was able to choose between exam coursework or half and half but I know that some universities have very strict ways in which certain modules are marked so if you have a a module that someone really wants to study but they have a stammer and the only way to assess that is by an oral presentation are they going to choose it some might which is great but others might be too scared to and that could be something that they really really want to study so are we prohibiting some students from studying what they really want to because they're worried that they won't do well because they're being assessed on their fluency or their communication skills and something that we all know and it's something that the British Stammering Association has been saying for a long time now is that it's what you say not how you say it so why are we marking people on how eloquently they talk on how fluently they talk that doesn't matter it's what we say that matters and if it takes me twice as long does that matter really in the grand scheme of things it doesn't it doesn't matter and also for non academic staff may not see people in in an academic setting so I have one example where a student came up to me in a stuck focus group and said that when they forgot their gym pass to enter the campus gym they had to say their name to the person on the reception desk and they started to stammer as most of us will stammer on our names and the person on the desk refused to let them in because they thought that they were lying because they couldn't say their name so let's just think about that you're being accused of lying because you are unable to speak eloquently how demoralising and rude is that and just because that person might not know something about stammering it could really shatter the confidence of that person who was just trying to get their name out so it's not only teaching the academic staff it's also about trying to make sure that everyone is armed with the tools and the knowledge that they are able to just wait and let people who stammer talk not interrupt them not accuse them of being liars or anything like that so on to the seminar summaries so some things that we have put into place are campus-wide events to raise the awareness of stammering visible text to advertise support so my my theory is that if a university openly advertises that they will offer support to people who stammer more people will disclose because they are openly saying we are able to help people who stammer so if you come and tell us that you have one we are able to help but equally it's down to the student or the staff member who wants the support to go and ask for that help so it needs action from both parties if one person is doing all of the work and the other isn't reciprocating that it isn't going to work so it needs both parties to be equally active for mentoring the university of York now has a mentoring scheme where students and staff who stammer will have a mentor not necessarily to help them with their work but it's just someone to help them give them support and to give them someone to talk to so as Ian mentioned earlier in his presentation with his mentoring scheme it really works and that person doesn't necessarily have to have a stammer themselves but just having someone who understands and won't interrupt you and will just listen can make such a massive difference Improved inclusion and diversity training is something that I would really like to see rolled out and I think that this is really key because many many students aren't aware that if their staff are not educated in the fact about stammering they may discriminate but not on purpose but they may not know that they're actually hurting that person's feelings so if we change the way that students are sorry that staff are trained just to let them know how a stammer might manifest itself we could make big differences and that might help the student feel more at ease when they're studying as well so it's all about making people feel comfortable and not feeling alienated because of their stammer and reasonable assessment adjustments so I'm not saying that all universities should offer options where the student doesn't have to talk full stop just being flexible with the ways that students can be marked should everything be based on all presentations I don't think that's hugely necessary but again if you have a module that is assessed purely by vocal participation if someone who has a stammer feels that they aren't able to choose that module that is a flaw in the university's framework that is an absolute flaw if we are stopping our students from choosing the modules they really want to do from studying the topics they really want to specialise in isn't that what university is for something to bear in mind so future aims for stuck is to continue to grow the member base we've got 16 I've only got 134 to go obtain permanent funding so I fund stuck myself so to have some money wouldn't we all like money it would be really really helpful to work with the national union of students so I really want to be able to get a wider outreach and I feel that through the national union of students would be really a key way to do that I also want to collaborate closely with charities and organisations who work for people who stammer so for example the British stammering association the employers the stammering network etc to host events focusing on stammering and university life such as this one not only because I think it's really useful for people to learn more about how to support students and staff who stammer in a university setting but also without meaning to be hyperbolic these conferences I truly believe have the potential to change people's lives if people are able to take back to their university some ways that they could help students the potential to really change someone's life to recruit volunteers it's just me and I run stuck on my own outside of a full-time job so most of my annual leave is used up to travel all over the country to talk to people so if anyone wants to do that for me come and let me know to discuss disability disclosure with UCAS and I will probably talk about that in the Q&A session next and of course to develop and grow my website as well so thank you very much for listening does anyone have any questions for me Michael is on hand I'm Jenny I'm a disability adviser at the University of Northampton it was really interesting listening about what you're doing and how you work with universities I was just curious how do you engage with universities that don't have students with stammers in touch with them so then you won't be able to do a focus group at the beginning so we've only had a couple of universities who have joined stuck who don't have students who stammer they have staff who stammer so it's more about trying to reach out to anyone who does but also it's even if it isn't helping anyone who is studying there at that particular moment in time doesn't mean that they're not going to have people who stammer joining that university in the future really if a university doesn't have any stammerers there because that's just only for 12 months and they may find that in the autumn that they have loads coming so it's about preparing people for the best that they can thank you any other questions time for just these two and then we'll have to so how you've got the kind of 16 universities involved however I notice that neither of the ones that you went to are on the list ah yes so how did you decide which universities to approach which ones and we're going to respond best to your message and what you were trying to do so I emailed every university going it took me a whole weekend and it used up a lot of my internet so I did contact every university and I just basically explain what I want to do and how I can help and then it's just down to them really there's only so much that I can do as I was saying earlier with a two-way participation I need the university to actively want to do this otherwise it just isn't going to work thank you just one more question hello Claire my name's Moira I'm a careers advisor working in a further education college of student 16 plus I know it's only you at the moment doing this I work with students some who had stammers and help prepare them for interviews and going into employment or internships you were talking about raising the awareness of stammering and I know that it's difficult for you being on your own doing this with universities but would you be prepared say in the future to do some kind of CPT training for staff in FE colleges would that be an option where you could raise the awareness in that sense yeah that would be brilliant seeing as this last year I've managed to balance stuck a full-time job and a part-time masters I don't see why not but I'm really worn out all of the time so I might have to wait for a bit I think we are linked because there's been lots of area reviews of colleges and now we are linked with Rital University College in Essex so there's a kind of like joint thing there I don't know how many students they've got but I was just thinking it might be a way of starting at the bottom absolutely working out yeah absolutely so thank you very much okay I am running slightly over which is embarrassing because it's my conference so thank you very much for listening thank you very much so we are on to our final session of the day which is the panel Q&A so please can I bring on to the stage Chris Deuce, Bula Samuel Obu, Mandy Taylor, Rory Sheridan and our moderator for the day, Billy Stevens hello everybody my name is Billy Stevens I'll start with a bit of background on myself I'm an experienced master of ceremonies and stand-up comedian I'm going to be the panel moderator today so I'll be taking your questions and posing them to the panel any questions please feel free to pose the questions to the whole panel or an individual if it's for a specific individual then please let me know so I can point it in the right way so let's go through the panel now at the far end we have Rory Sheridan Rory is a socially engaged practitioner and activist whose work engages with the relationship between artistic practice and representing neurodiverse communities recently graduated from the University of Arts London with a BA honours in photography next along we have Mandy Taylor who is vice-chair of the British Stammerers Association has a financial role in an integrated marketing agency both Mandy and her partner suffer from a stammer as well as free of their four children next along we have Bula Samuel Obu Bula studies here at SOAS a degree in English and has recently been elected as the co-disabled students and carers officer for the SOAS Student Union moving along we have Chris Deuce Chris is a staff tutor at the Open University a stand-up comedian as well Chris has also been a tutor on a post-graduate education module and regularly facilitates professional development with events for tutors Finally, nearest me is Claire who you've just seen Claire is founder of Stuck now advises 16 member universities across the UK and recently presented Stuck's work in Japan which was I'm sure quite a fun trip lovely so let's start off by going to the audience please raise your hand if you have a question okie dokie let's start with Slido then so the Slido questions are will be ranked by the most amount of likes so if you would like a question to be asked you can put it on Slido or you can vote for a question that's already been posed we'll start with top one do you have any thoughts on how a person without a stammer can support and accommodate people with a stammer particularly within HE and the workplace would anyone like to volunteer for that one I can have a go please Chris isn't it true to say that everybody is different and there has been a few people have mentioned the topic of acceptance and that was something that I did want to highlight and emphasise because everyone who has a stammer is different and that difference can be in acceptance and how they do personally feel about it as a subject and my own my own understanding of that is acceptance is very much a process and in my own experience it has two aspects of it an intellectual concept of acceptance which is very different from the actual emotional perspective of acceptance so it's easy to say oh yes you should accept but it's harder to actually take that in and live it on a day to day basis so everyone is different so I would mind a comment about that question is how can someone who hasn't got a stammer support someone who hasn't got a stammer is ask them ask them what what would you like me to do but also does an opportunity there to actually tell them so I want you to behave to me in these particular ways I do not want you to complete my sentences I want some help under these situations it's all about having a conversation and opening up a dialogue fantastic anyone like to add anything to that well I just started a workshop called Disabled Students Empowerment Allyship and Ableism and we were talking about institutional embarrassment, reinforcement university and I found a number one complained about what's reinforced a lot of the barriers universities, how a lot of students are not aware about stammering and what's of the causes and what does it feel like to actually have a stammer and a lot of people in the workshop don't actually have any disability just want to understand because either have a friend or family member they want to know like how can we tackle how can you help us help you in that area so we all took all the people who had disabilities kind of talked and understood what it was like to have it and what type of help we actually needed like sometimes I help us up we don't actually want you to help us directly but simply understand or like sometimes not simply just speak for us but speak with us Absolutely great points by Bula and Chris there I'd like to add as well about four years ago I met Claire and we've been close friends since and up until that point I didn't really have, I was quite ignorant about stammering but it was it was quite easy Claire's obviously strong person so she was quite for fright with what she did want help with what she didn't so it might be an occasion where I'd order the food in a restaurant for us both and Claire might ask me to do that for occasions where Claire would ask me to not do certain things so I think it's just about communicating with each other and that's the best way to get awareness of how to support out there as well just my opinion obviously I'm not the most qualified person so moving on to the next question now is the stammering is the stammering area too normal is there benefit, i.e. getting people to come forward to getting people to come forward by making it fun if so how can we do this Claire would you like to start off with this question oh okay in terms of getting people to come forward and by making it fun Naheem you've really really stumped me there I when you say by making it fun do you mean in terms of making activities that people who stammer would normally struggle with more fun or I don't think you should ask me my idea of fun I don't have fun absolutely I think I think it would be down to the people who stammer to put forward those suggestions if someone who isn't as knowledgeable as someone who knows how a stammer might manifest itself they might end up doing the opposite of what they're trying to achieve so I think again it's down to the person who stammers to be able to put forward those ideas which I just think even though some people might not want to if they want that change to be made they need to be the one to say I really struggle with this task is it possible we could adjust it in this way absolutely yeah I shall organise a hiking trip or something next well actually if I could just come in there because I do recall many moons ago when I first looked out for anything to do with stammering and I thought to myself right I'm going to go along to the first BSA conference that I was going to go to and I had this thing in my head that it was going to be all these very serious people and it was a riot it was great quite literally there was social stuff going on so it is about going and attending things and there are lots of them there is open days that you can attend there are annual conferences and in fact there are six members that I'm travelling with with the BSA to Iceland in June and I can say it's not going to be quite a fair I can say it will be quite sociable and I do think though that we need to break those barriers down of it being a very serious thing stammering seen as this dreadful affection and how we do that is managing our own language as well Absolutely, I think that's a really good point about building communities it sort of links back to what Lindsay was presenting earlier about networks Cool Next question we'll go to How can we try and encourage more academic staff to attend training sessions tends to always be the usual suspects that attend and that question is from Sarah Who from the panel would like to volunteer for this? Shall I have a go? I can try In my context at the Urban University the tutors are actively encouraged to attend as many as they they can possibly stomach I think it's a carrot and a stick and arguably if they are fun and interesting then that is a positive draw and and if there's something in it for them and why should they go and if it's fun great but perhaps that could be tied in together with say for example an important aspect of their animal appraisal to show something that they have actively and positively achieved in the Urban University there's a push to make the tutors a member of something called the Higher Education Academy so if they attend some events then that's a good tick in the in the other box of course just having a tick in the other box isn't the same as actually taking on and understanding stuff but I think it is really important to actively engage academics because they are the people who speak to the students and if I could just have a quick anecdote I do remember a range of different instances in my university career there was a set of group work which was quite challenging and interesting there was a tutor who spoke to the girlfriend encouraging me to attend speech therapy and I thought that was a really interesting approach and she said why don't you go that's a whole other story except us, I'm hashtag issue and then there was this other tutor at a university he was a maths tutor and he was absolutely terrible a bit more to the blackboard than he did to his students and his proofs about induction were absolutely baffling and I had the profound misfortune of having him as a project tutor at the dissertation I think he's retired now and I've completely forgotten his name and this is being recorded so I think he's all okay and then he said project meeting with him and he brought up the issue of my speech and he said Chris I think that Jesus could help you and I thought sorry do you mean Jesus a local speech and language therapist apparently he didn't because there wasn't someone called Jesus a local speech and language therapist and him actually mentioning the church was kind of completely well intentioned on his perspective but profoundly wrong in my opinion being a practicing atheist I think I can say that also so an education is really important of the academic staff and that is such a continuum of disabilities and it impends on which stammering is just one of them and it's important to us and the degree of awareness of disability related issues is increasing and it's a changing and there has to be a continuing a professional development for academic communities and it's the responsibility of the universities and I'll be speaking to Claire I'll be trying to speak to some of my colleagues and I'll try to influence them because you isn't a member and they should be yep Excellent Would anyone else like to add something to that or should we move on to the next question Cool that was quite well summed up by Chris there Cool so next question is from Lindsay what do you think is the one action that would make the most positive difference for staff and students who stammer Claire Get them to join stuck Next Yeah Just join stuck because I can help I think and I would say just to ask questions ironically the way to help people who stammer is to communicate and for them to communicate back we just need to ask questions keep asking questions and just to be there for them as stop it as that sounds having someone who understands whether it's a personal tutor or a friend or a staff member if they're able to help that they can change any person's life really so just by understanding stammering a bit I think would be the best way to change how students and staff who stammer to live better lives Very nice points there I think this might be quite a good question to pose to everyone on the panel actually just go through and not no rush but because we're going to ask everyone just go through and each one of you give us one thing that you think would make a really positive impact Chris would you like to go next? I think in terms of a positive impact for staff and students that is a question isn't it I think an awareness of inclusive modular design practice and what that actually means from a student centered perspective and also the understanding that inclusion is something that can positively benefit all students irrespective of not as to if they do have a disability Absolutely Bula I think staff actively wanting to make sure students have a beneficial experience in the classroom I think I must have the best positive interaction with staff members when they actively ask me what can I do to make your year better for you like how do you learn best and those costs I generally do a lot better in because I actively I actually appreciate that you take the time to actually listen to my needs and I actively want to do well because I'm really appreciative but the ones who almost shut you down or almost don't want to listen or just don't actively but don't think a few seconds about it later I think that's the most important I think staff have made an active role to tell students that they understand but they want to make classroom better for them and not just for a one box type of student for every type of student as well Absolutely I really think we all need to have these conversations as early as possible we shouldn't wait until we're at absolute crisis point we should be having these conversations from day one the fact that we stammer should not be really shouldn't be any issue but the fact that most people don't bring it up until there is a problem so I think really we need to have those conversations much much earlier earlier on Absolutely Rory, you have the short straw, I'm sure all the others I think the thing which helped me the most through my my my my my my university career was probably having the support of the disability service so I also think it's kind of I think it's very useful for her staff to also disclose to the disability service some other means of support because people are very useful for me to have an individual an individual support agreements which was actually circulated at all of the tutors and all of the staff I was put coming into contact with so Excellent Some similar themes there around communication support and also sorry communication support and being timely in how that support is delivered also Ben Sorry, we only got time for one more question Are there any questions from the room? Lady in the green jacket So just following on from what you guys said I think everything you just said was really accessible and to a point quite common knowledge and actually it's stuff I didn't know so I'm really sorry What I kind of wanted to say was it would be great if that was potentially more public because our university does have stuck there I'm part of the speech and language therapy cohort and actually the stuff you said I didn't know so I wonder if there is potentially a way to circulate that information I know that it probably is out there if you looked but obviously I know that we're saying that the problem is that there is an unawareness so I think that potentially if there's a way to circulate what you guys just said to more than the people in this room would be really helpful in the wider scheme of things I know that's not really a question but I think that's something that we need to highlight Absolutely, thank you very much Brilliant Do we have time for one more is that? A quick one Okay, one quick question then In what way can the equality act 2010 that does not sound like a quick answer Let's try this one Why aren't university mental health support and disability support teams collaborating more? Shall I begin? I think it might well depend on the individual institution the institution that I do work with I think is very different to others because it's all at a distance and there there are these different types of advisers so there's a mental health specialist adviser there's a visual impairment specialist advisor there's a hearing impairment advisor and so on and so I think so I worry you mentioned the importance of sharing of information and that so each student has got a profile which is negotiated with a person your person in the university a set of information that is shared with the tutors so there is a bit of collaboration between the two but I think it's important to in my bed the expertise not just in the individual people because there's always risks there but to kind of spread it out and there's always risks in institutions there are sets of silos and mini empires and I don't think that's helpful so somehow to break those silos also there's a concept in education and the Clare will know about this called the Communities of a Practice which are basically groups of people who talk to each other just like a posh term and there's this concept of a broker and that is somebody in that group who actually talks to other people and that's really what we do do need academics making really complicated with posh words but essentially it does come back to the thing that I think everyone that's been talking about is sharing but in all this there's the issue of personal a personal relationship with the concept of a disability I only became I only did begin to work on the acceptance when I was about 35, 36 obviously that's two years on isn't it? Thank you for that so everyone addresses it or may address it at a different point to different degrees and so the extent to which those teams are important and are relevant does completely depend on people again it's back to the importance of a communication. I do think times are actually changing people are talking more there is more of a buzz now round wanting to be more open about mental health so I think many more many more groups are actually seeking help and it's becoming much more acceptable to actually talk about disability mental health things like that. Absolutely Would anyone from the panel like to add any further comments? I would just like to add a personal positive comment and I don't know if anyone else from here may relate to it but thinking about my own personal journey and everyone has their own journeys I think my stamina has actually given me a lot and it has given me many things to be thankful of it has given me a new community a new set of friends and also it has given me opportunities in the institution in which I work so I've been invited to speak in different faculties of tutoring a module that does talk about the social model of a disability and so it's given me courage and I think that is a really good thing that some employers should really treasure in us because I think we are awesome and we've got to tell people Absolutely and that's why we should see stammering as a positive trait not a negative one What a lovely positive note to end on everyone can you please show your appreciation for our panellists Please can we also thank Billy Stevens for being our panel moderator for the day Thank you So just before the closing speeches I have been asked by Alistair if he would be able to come and give you a very quick overview of some projects that he is currently working on So ladies and gentlemen Alistair Hello I'm Alistair Now before I send out I'd be speaking at this until about an hour ago and I left for this from Glasgow last night at 11 on a coach and haven't slept for about 36 hours So we'll see how this goes So I'm a first year student at the University of Glasgow I'm here now presenting the Scottish Establan network which is the only network in Scotland that supports everyone who presents I'm actually the young representative of that which means that I present all young people in Scotland who with this I'm actually launching the youth wing of the network in which I'll be touring schools across Scotland raising awareness but I'm also a national officer in the SMP and this has allowed me to meet some very powerful and important people which I will mention in a minute because it will hopefully result in some massive changes So for in national awareness day I made sheets about my own experiences of having a stammer as well as the mental health issues around that I spent 20 pounds of my own money printed off about 300 of them and at 6 am I went to the uni and left them everywhere so hopefully some folk read them I'm also working with my SMP group at the uni to hopefully make Glasgow University the first university in Scotland to work with the network and hopefully they're stuck but as I said through the SMP I've met the first minister herself and the minister for education and I'm bringing a motion forward right now to the parliament this motion calls for a universal teacher awareness and training for stammering I brought this motion to SMP youth in November it was passed and it is looking like it will reach the national conference in October an audience of about 4,000 and news cameras from Sky, ITV the BBC etc if it makes it through that it will be taken to the parliament and hopefully passed and if that is the case then we will have something we've never had before and the nation that actively has universal teacher support and training for stammerers and this is something that I'm sure many of the nations would learn from and introduce but I do need your help I need the support of experts, I need as many retweets as many likes so awareness is spread and maybe I'm too young to realise that certain things are impossible but I will find that out by trying as hard as I can I urge all of you please don't use your magnificent voices and beautiful stammerers as an excuse to live in fear please use it as a reason to help me change the world thank you very much so thank you everyone this is the end of our day and we hope that you've all enjoyed it that you've all got what you'd wanted to from this day I know that I've personally found it really useful really insightful and I've been excited about the new things that I've heard as much as I've been excited about people that were saying what I wanted to say but in much better ways and I think that's been really powerful to hear the fact that actually when we talked about this issue we often came up with a set of approaches that were agreed where we all thought actually this is a really good idea and I was going to say what I thought for me were the three lessons from the day and I wonder if they're similar to the ones that other people here had but I think the first issue is one that Chris Boyle put really well in that panel just now which was helping people generally, so all of us helping everybody understand that wide continuum of both visible and invisible disabilities and so having that wider thinking about actually what are impairments what are disabilities the second for me was the need then to communicate the specific issues for people that stammer and to be doing that in all kinds of ways but those specific issues were all recognised and I think someone made the point in a question actually everything that we've said is so obvious but not well known and the third issue was to get stuck in so to get the stammerers through university that consultancy into universities into the ones that haven't yet become members as an important way to build up that body of knowledge that body of awareness so those were the three issues that I took away from the day and are really important for how I personally will think about the future what's our future work here at SOAS what's the future work we should be doing across the sector I'm going to hand over to Claire now and I'm sure Claire will talk about how you can access recordings of the day and how we can keep this community of people alive how we can keep talking about this issue but I hope that we'll be here for events in the future I hope you'll come back to SOAS for other things as well and I hope that this is the beginning of a conversation rather than the end thank you thank you very much Deborah so as I said earlier earlier this morning there are so so many people that I need to thank for helping to make this conference a reality so firstly I have to thank Deborah for her overwhelming generosity and her dedication and time can we please we'll show appreciation and secondly our speakers who have given up their time to produce some really fantastic presentations for you all today I hope that you'll all be able to take something from this and to be able to make some changes I also need to thank all of the volunteers who have helped today who have given up their time and who have been happy to basically have made me boss them around basically so can we please thank the speakers and also the volunteers I must also thank all of the SOAS staff who have helped put this together with the sound at the live streaming the catering and everything so I must thank them too and finally I must thank every one of you for being here today so to everyone who is streaming this live as well your support by being here today reinforces I shouldn't have put a word that starts with RE should I your support reinforces that the issues that we have discussed today need to be listened to and that changes need to be happen changes need to happen and that our voices need to be heard and we need to truly make a noise about stammering I hope you all have a safe journey home and thank you very much for coming