Inclusive university teaching
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities specifies that persons with disabilities have a right to unrestricted and equal access to higher education. TU Dortmund University is committed to this obligation and is continuously developing structures to enable the exercise of this human right. A decisive role is played by the teaching staff. In the sense of inclusive higher education didactics, it is on the one hand their task to design teaching and examination situations in such a way that students in the most diverse life situations can participate without discrimination and show their potential. On the other hand, they should show openness to students' individual needs and, if necessary, make individual adjustments in the sense of reasonable accommodation. DoBuS supports you in the implementation of inclusive university teaching with an advisory service, various workshops on university didactics and the provision of information materials.
Do you have students with health impairments or disabilities in your course and are not sure how to respond? You wonder if performance problems or unusual behavior of a student could be related to a health impairment? Are you unsure how to respond in these situations? Are you allowed to approach the student regarding the matter? Do you possibly even have to grant a disadvantage compensation? And if so, how does that work? How can you make your course as barrier-free and inclusive as possible?
DoBuS is able to advise you on these and all other questions. We support you in clarifying your questions, reducing uncertainties, jointly developing strategies for designing discrimination-free and inclusive teaching situations, or reflecting on your role in designing inclusive teaching.
The advice provided is based entirely on the respective needs. Often, just a few helpful suggestions about support services and information materials are enough. Sometimes, however, an intensive clarification process is necessary, in which we work together with you as an expert for your subject, with us as experts for possible solutions and, if necessary, also with the students as experts for their individual impairments to find ways to design teaching and examination situations. Even though such an approach may initially seem time-consuming, experience shows that such a clarification process and a joint search for solutions usually lead to the further course of a course becoming much easier.
The main focus of DoBuS is to raise awareness of the extremely diverse learning and study situations of students with health impairments or disabilities. The aim is to increase consciousness of the social processes of disability and to stimulate reflection on discriminating and exclusionary experiences. In addition, teachers are given the opportunity to expand their methodological-didactic repertoire so that they can proactively design barrier-free teaching-learning situations. Among other things, workshops will be held
- on the inclusion-oriented design of courses,
- for assessment without discrimination,
- the design of accessible (PowerPoint) presentations and study materials
All workshops are subsidiary and complementary to the general offer of university didactic and in-house training, i.e. they take place within this framework and deepen it with regard to the topic of disability and study.
If you are interested in our workshops, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will then give you concrete information about which workshops are currently planned or we will discuss whether it is possible to make an own offer for your work group in the sense of an in-house training.
Contact:
Dr. Carsten Bender
as well as dobustu-dortmundde