Originally published here.
Science education has many inclusivity and diversity problems. Recent years have seen headway made in tackling some of these, but it is still very much work in progress. And one significant subsection of society remains largely ignored: people with a disability. This cohort makes up 7% of children and 18% of working age adults in the UK.
It isn’t the case that no progress at all has been made to improve access to science for disabled children and young people, explains Katherine Sparkes, chief executive of the UK charity the Lightyear Foundation. A number of people are now doing grassroots-level work, but to increase momentum everyone involved now need to start pulling together, she says.
Not enough is being done yet to break down barriers to including disabled students in science education by ‘any stretch of the imagination’, Sparkes adds. The Lightyear Foundation was established to run sensory science workshops for children and young adults with special educational needs (Sen), but has since branched out. In 2018, for example, it set up a network to share best practice in educating disabled children and young adults in the Stemm (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) subjects.
The roundtable, called Sen in Stemm, has representatives from 21 major UK science associations including the Royal Society, British Science Association and Sense About Science. ‘It’s really motivating to see that the wheels of momentum are starting to turn,’ says Sparkes.
School outreach
All senses engaged
US chemist Hoby Wedler also believes it is vital that children and young adults are shown that a disability ‘doesn’t need to hold them back’. During his computational organic chemistry PhD, Wedler ran organic chemistry camps for school students who were visually impaired or blind like him . ‘We used hands-on organic chemistry as a lens to show students that they can do whatever they want,’ he explains.
The participants, aged 12 to 18, were paired with blind science mentors. Growing up, Wedler ‘had opportunities to go work with other people who are blind or visually impaired who happened to be scientists’ and he wanted other blind students to have the chance to be inspired too, he says.
The camp participants ran two experiments, both using the sense of smell: a titration to re-protonate the smelly thiols in onions and garlics and a synthesis of a floral ester such as the banana aroma compound, isopentyl acetate. The students used accessible tools such as disposable pipettes in which liquid levels can be felt and talking pH meters.
Smell is an underused sense, Wedler says. In 2017, after finishing his PhD at the University of California, Davis, he set up the consultancy Senspoint together with a childhood friend. They offer scent marketing strategies, advising companies on how smells could boost sales. The use of freshly baked pie aroma to sell kitchen appliances is a classic example. Senspoint also provides diversity and inclusion coaching.
Blind or visually impaired chemists
In a traditional chemistry lab, of course, sniffing a reaction flask could be a potential hazard. How does a blind or visually impaired chemist stay safe in an undergraduate teaching lab? Just fine with the right support, explains Wedler. ‘All the way through undergraduate school, I took all the same lab courses that my colleagues took,’ he says. A lab partner was always on hand to help, he explains.
There are assistive technologies for blind and visually impaired chemists, but most would argue that more are needed and that not enough blind and visually impaired students have access to the ones that are commercially available.
The University of Birmingham’s chemistry department has hosted a couple of ‘very hands on’ blind or visually impaired students, and consequently have invested in devices such as a talking burette reader that is slid up and down to find the meniscus point, a braille label maker, to mark volumes on glassware, and magnifying tools. ‘You want students to do as much as they can possibly, while keeping your safety hat on that they’re not doing something that’s going to be potentially dangerous,’ explains Ian Shannon, director of undergraduate laboratories in this UK department.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is not the practicals but the associated paper- and computer-work that blind and visually impaired chemistry students can find the most challenging. Birmingham uses software able to speak an electronic lab manual. It also used an embossed printer to translate IR and NMR spectra into braille. Wedler also had reaction schemes converted into braille. ‘I can feel them and walk myself through organic chemistry mechanisms,’ he says.
We tend to think of organic chemistry as a highly visual discipline with lectures full of chemical structures and curry arrows, but Wedler views being blind as an advantage in these classes. ‘When I travel around as a blind person, I am visualising everything: where the streets are, where buildings are. The exact same skills are needed to think about organic chemistry spatially. I think being able to think about molecules that way is an advantage that my sighted peers don’t have,’ he explains.
Specific learning difficulties
For most chemistry educators, the disabilities they will most frequently encounter are specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia and dyspraxia. One in 10 people are thought to have dyslexia, for example, and one in 20 students in UK higher education have disclosed a specific learning difficulty to their institution.
Joe Reddington, a disability awareness consultant from Luton, UK, says that science poses specific, sometimes unnoticed, challenges for students with learning difficulties. ‘In the first year of GCSE chemistry you will learn more new words than you do in the first year of a French GCSE,’ he explains.
Edinburgh’s Seery is currently heading an RSC-funded project called Chemclusion, looking at best practice for supporting undergraduate chemistry students with various types of disabilities, including learning difficulties. The first, ongoing, step is to talk to current (and past chemistry) students that self-identify as disabled about what approaches they have found helpful.
Answers so far have fallen into two broad areas: assistive technologies such as those discussed above, and giving students multiple ways of accessing lecture content. ‘Most universities’ protocol disability adjustments require academic staff to post notes online in advance of lectures. This is crucial for people who have reading difficulties or people who take longer to process information,’ says Seery.
Other popular – but, so far, less utilised – responses that Seery has received include posting recordings of lectures or captioned videos online, providing well-structured reading lists, prompting students to use mind maps to see how different concepts fit together, and adding image descriptions to PowerPoint files.
These are all examples of best practice that have been shown to help all students, not just disabled learners. ‘These are not extra chores lecturers have to do for just one person in their class; giving students multiple means of representation is very beneficial to everybody,’ says Seery. In addition, most adaptations are not big undertakings. ‘Part of my goal with this project is to alert lecturers to the obvious things that they are able to do without much extra work,’ he adds.
Regardless of the amount of effort or expense involved, it is high time that chemical education was finally opened up to all children and young adults regardless of whatever disability they may have. Progress, such as that described above, has been made in recent years. But large numbers of disabled students are still being excluded from experiencing the joy of science (and subsequently from potential careers) simply because the current system is not set up to educate them. As scientists we are problem-solvers by definition, and it’s high time we all pulled together and figured out how to fix this.
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