Designing Inclusive Post-Secondary Education

Joeita Gupta:
I am Joeita Gupta and this is The Pulse. When I was at university, no one talked about student mental health. If you were struggling, it was largely seen as a failure and as a private matter. Of course, there was a student counselling service. I remember covertly making appointments, cringing with shame, slipping into the office unobtrusively, hoping no one had seen me. Why was I failing? And why was I struggling when everyone else around me seemed to be doing just fine? Why did writing essays suddenly seem like an insurmountable problem? Someone once told me that the world's smallest minority is an isolated individual. The absence of dialogue, even acknowledgement, about student mental health and wellness plunged me into a very dark place. Today we discuss student wellness. It's time to put your finger on the pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm joining you from Accessible Media Studios in Toronto. Today my hair is pulled back in a bun, I have my usual headphones, the black headphones that are over the ear, and I'm wearing a shirt with a square neck and cap sleeves and it has layers to it. The shirt is orange blending into a red. It's really a favourite shirt of mine. Don't be surprised if you see it show up on the show many times. I feel really good when I wear this particular outfit, so it's a spring, summer, even a fall favourite, and you'll probably see a lot of this particular one on the program. But you're not as I often say here to talk about my fashion choices. And so I'm really excited to bring in a wonderful guest that I've wanted to talk to for quite a while now.
Patricia Douglas was recently appointed the Inaugural Chair in Student Success and Wellness at the Faculty of Education at Queen's University. And she joins me today to discuss some of her previous work, but also what this new role entails. Patricia, hello and welcome to the program. It's so nice to finally have a chance to talk to you.

Patricia Douglas:
Hello. It's great to be here. And I've been wanting to talk to you too, so this is wonderful to be here today.

Joeita Gupta:
First of all, congratulations on the new role. I think it's a wonderful achievement, but just for those of us who aren't in the know, what is it that you do exactly in this new capacity?

Patricia Douglas:
I am the Chair in Student Success and Wellness in the Faculty of Education at Queen's University. It's a research-intensive role, but it's also got an administrative aspect to it. And it's really a role that is looking at historically marginalized and excluded groups in education and in life, and asking the question the way that I'm occupying the role, asking the question, what are the conditions in which all students can thrive and belong in education and in life, where students or learners are understood and a broad sense? So it'll be liaising with the community as well as graduate and undergraduate students and faculty to do the research and the community engagement and programming to answer that bigger question, what are those conditions in which we can all thrive? So examples like you gave in the introduction are a thing of the past where stigma is reduced and all bodies and minds are welcome.

Joeita Gupta:
Your position is nonetheless, I believe the first of its kind in the country. What is it about the zeitgeist at Queen's University that made this the right moment and made you the right person for the job?

Patricia Douglas:
I think that this is the original vision of the Dean, Rebecca Luce-Kapler, who is somebody who's had years of experience in education and started to observe, was observing over and over again despite all of the efforts to support student success and wellness, students struggling and not okay. And so she had that original kind of vision from her perspective and I share it. So I came into the moment, the zeitgeist, as you called it, with a similar vision. So coming out of my own experience as someone with an invisible disability, someone who's neurodivergent as well as a mom and a former special education teacher and from a family, in fact, that is full of disability advocates right back to my grandmother.
So my vision has been to create the conditions in which all students, all learners, all people can survive or not just survive, but survive and thrive. And I think it was the moment that we connected, I think COVID and being post-COVID, in which those exclusions and marginalizations were really laid bare is another factor. The faculty at Queen's is a tender and kind faculty that are invested in making this question their legacy, quite frankly.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, you're right. I mean, we've come such a long way from students having to grapple with feeling isolated on their own, dealing with burnout and stress on their own. And really, I'm trying to think back as to whether I'm exaggerating at this, but I don't think, because I went to university about 20 years ago, I don't think we were having those conversations on campus. What is it that you think has brought about this, I'm going to call it a sea change frankly, because it's very different today than it was when I started university in 2004. What has brought about this massive change in not just how we talk about student success and wellbeing, but also brought in a great deal of determination to do something about it where people are saying it's not just enough to talk about it, we've really got to change the system?

Patricia Douglas:
I think there's been a lot of us working on these kinds of areas for a long time. I really credit the activism and innovation of disability community, of the autistic community, and of that discourse and those insights and that lived knowledge and experience really making its way into the academy. I also do think that COVID had a lot to do with it in terms of galvanizing where we cannot any longer ignore these exclusions and these kinds of marginalizations. Either we ignore them at our own peril or we have to take them up. And so I think really the moment is a converging of all of those kinds of influences. But I always credit even on my teams, I lead the team, but it's really the team members who are in community, who are the innovators and the drivers of this change, I think.

Joeita Gupta:
For all that things have changed and I will venture to say change for the better. Again, if you'll permit me to draw on my own analysis and on my own experience of being a university student, there are things that haven't changed because I think back to when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and I was looking at these really frightening statistics about employment rates for people with disabilities, which coincidentally haven't changed all that much either in the 20 odd years and thinking, "Oh geez, am I going to have a job which will pay off all of my student debt?" And at the time as an 18-year-old, I thought that the cost of education was prohibitive. And I have to tell you, I've gone back to school now 20 years on, and it's only gotten more expensive.
And I have had conversations with people younger than I am Patty, maybe people who are now in their 20s who are really overwhelmed and struggling and feeling like student success is really far out of reach for them because they're so concerned about the cost of education and that the longer they wait, the more expensive it's going to be, the fewer years they'll have in the workforce to try and offset the massive debt they've accrued, not just for a professional program, but I'm talking about somebody who wants to get a BA for example. How can we realistically have a conversation about student success and wellbeing without also having a very concrete conversation about some of the tangible structural barriers and systemic issues like fees and tuitions and the need to graduate, this enforced idea that you have to get it done in four years, three if you're really exceptional, to try and rack up the number of years you have in the workforce? So how do we have a genuine conversation about student success and wellbeing? And is your research going to talk about some of these issues?

Patricia Douglas:
Absolutely. And in fact it already does. So I think that this is what was laid bare even more so during the pandemic. So exactly what you're articulating. And the fact, so when I pitched this in my job talk at Queen's, one of the bottom lines for me was I've been doing this work for over 20 years in various capacities and what I see, what I saw back then and what I experienced and what I witnessed has not ... It's sort of more of the same despite all of this activism, despite inclusive education, despite more sort of grassroots activism from disability community. And so yes, we have to have these frank conversations, and I can't pretend that we can change the entire structure of society as it is, but we have to do what we can within institutions to make bridges, to advocate within institutions, to change processes, to collectively organize, in order to put pressure on institutions as well as government.
We are in a very conservative kind of context within Ontario in which student lives, on the one hand we have the neoliberal discourse that's student success and wellness is supported, et cetera. And it's supported in an individualistic sense in terms of here's a course you can do in order to be well and succeed, which like you say, does not address the structural inequities. So my role, my research is all about addressing and sort of mapping out those structural inequities and intersectional inequities as well as how do we push forward together? How do we move together forward in order to challenge them within our local context? And that's a very challenging ... It implies a theory of change. And for me it's about changing mindsets for sure, but it's also about changing structures and systems and processes. So my current work is sort of scaling up in that way in terms of asking the question, how do we make those changes? It's a really, really big question, but absolutely vital to my work and to the role.

Joeita Gupta:
You'll have to forgive all the reminiscence because I think a lot about my universities now, but you have the benefit of hindsight. I remember a conversation with an older prof and he said, "I don't understand why students are quibbling about tuition. When I was a student, I could work a summer job and pay my tuition for the year. So we had to go into debt too, and it's more or less the same thing."
And I said to the person, "I'm not sure you're understanding how different the situation is. It's nothing alike. There is no summer job in the world that will give you enough money to pay the next year's tuition anymore. That's just not the way student jobs work. That's just not how a reasonable tuition is." And the reason I bring this up is because you talked about being a change maker and changing processes and that theory of change, and I think what we change and how we change is so intrinsically tied up with who is the change maker. And so I want to go back to sort of your discussion of being a mom and some of your experiences in the special education field and how those experiences, especially your experiences as a mother and filling that role in a very personal way might shape some of your research in this role.

Patricia Douglas:
I was a special education teacher and the mom of an autistic son at the same time going through the public system. I observed all sorts of exclusions, inequities, power systems in both of those roles, including violence. So I observed restraints, there were kids who were taken out of the school, eight-year-olds in handcuffs, and it lit fire in my belly that was already there based on my own experience. So when I was a post-secondary university student and undergraduate, my invisible disability was very visible in terms of I was a scooter user. So I had had that experience as well. And as a mom, what started out as me wanting to advocate within the system for my son has grown into a much larger desire to see change in the system because at this point in the work that I do, I've heard thousands of stories both from family members, educators as well as most importantly from autistic young people.
And the stories are the same because the systems are so similar, whether I'm talking to someone in Canada or Aotearoa which is New Zealand or United Kingdom, they're different obviously. But they're also similar because the systems are so similar. So I kind of have become this holder of stories, of systems that are exclusionary and at times do violence to bodies and minds that are different and that don't fit, and that still are looking to individually fix sort of students. I do think there is a shift, a sea change happening as you kind of highlighted as well, that at least in the language and perspective and some processes I see change unevenly starting to be made. So that's hopeful.

Joeita Gupta:
The other facet to this is I think about a conversation I overheard when I was at the registrar's office. They were talking about me and about how much I had struggled in university. I was on the verge of dropping out. They were lamenting the fact that a bright student had become a statistic, that they had fallen through the cracks. And the reason I bring this up is not to solicit sympathy, but to talk about what the loss of students from the university means. When you have students from marginalized communities who may get the opportunity to come to university but don't get the support they need to succeed if they disappear from the university, if they don't get to make their contributions, what does that mean for a scholarship, for pedagogy, and for what universities actually stand for? Are they genuinely places of learning where we share ideas when some people may not really be able to engage in the process in the same way?

Patricia Douglas:
I think you've asked two different questions so there's two parts. So the first thing for me, whoever is not there, we need everyone in order to go forward in the world, we need all of the perspectives and experiences to face what we're facing in a more global sense. So climate disaster and economic disparity and all of those things. So if somebody is missing, we're all not going to be okay. Maybe that 1% that can protect themselves, but we're not, okay, so we need everyone.
The second part of your question, are universities actually places of learning in which everyone belongs? I think is essentially what you were asking. And I think that the answer is both yes and no. So there are legacies that education systems are grappling with that are very entrenched. So that is in our taken for granted assumptions about who belongs, about what rigor is, all of those kinds of questions, what Jay Dolmage calls, "the steep steps of academia," where even in its architecture but also in its sort of symbolic architecture, there are only certain bodies and minds that can get up those steps or navigate the steps.
So I think the answer is both yes and no. There are lots of people working within the academy and there are lots of legacies that are still yet unsettled, yet to be unsettled. I think that decolonizing is part of this conversation and there are many conversations taking place in many different parts of many different post-secondary institutions around ableism, around decolonizing, but it's in a moment of transforming that is both hopeful but also both deeply concerning because of the exclusionary aspects that continue despite the kind of conversations and changes that I see being made. So for example, I'm on a PhD committee where the comprehensive examination is being done by email because that is a sensory-affirming way to do a comprehensive examination in sort of [inaudible 00:19:41] time or slower time with an autistic individual, a student. Then that sort of face-to-face, very, very often anxiety-provoking kind of structure that's in place. Interesting, and yet again, just sort of both yes and no in the moment.

Joeita Gupta:
It's funny, I sometimes feel like, and I say this to guests sometimes on the show that they're sharing a brain with me because I was about to ask you about decolonization and creating space for discourse that is hopeful. How would you say, because you have now this opportunity in your role as the chair for student success and wellness, you have an opportunity to do some very focused research on some of these intersections. What direction is your research going to take do you think?

Patricia Douglas:
Over the last few years I've really been leading autism, critical autism studies and research into a decolonizing direction. So I've been working with Maori colleagues in Aotearoa and I've been working with Indigenous partners in Manitoba in order to understand what it would mean to decolonize A, research, and B, the meaning of disability, neurodiversity and autism because they're very western concepts in a sense that began in deficit. And though reclaimed through autistic pride and disability movement, still remain somewhat moored in a Western ontology that understands individuals as sort of bounded beings, where there's this universal understanding of development as sort of developing toward autonomy and independence. Which in one sense it's of course, but in another sense completely erases the relational and sort of more collective understanding of what it means to be a human in relation with our whole environment, including the non-human.
So I'm already headed in that direction as well as bringing sort of more and more to the center, Black autistic experience, queer autistic experience. So that's the direction I'm heading and that's the direction I'll keep going. And applying for more funding to keep the Restoring Autism Project, sustain it over another 10 years or so.

Joeita Gupta:
That would be really powerful. What advice would you give to other universities or colleges? I know it's still early days for you, but if they wanted to implement a similar model and implement more research that if not mirrors yours and certainly compliments your research, do you have any thoughts or advice on how they might go forward with such an endeavour?

Patricia Douglas:
I think for each context, I really think it emerges out of the context. I think there are critical disability studies and decolonizing disability studies, scholars already all across different institutions doing amazing things. So I think that reframing the question from how do we support individual students, which of course is an important question and needs to be resourced really well to how do we create the conditions in which all learners belong here and who isn't here? So I think it begins from the questions you're asking, but there's examples. Ellen Martino has the disability sexuality lab. Katie [inaudible 00:23:34] is doing spatializing care. [inaudible 00:23:37] has a decolonizing disability studies lab. There's many examples. Carla Rice has the ReVision Center. There's all sorts of examples, including this brand new chair that universities can look to that are really beginning in that same question. And another way to sort of state the question would be how do we affirm difference? Difference is fundamental to life, to the world. And that's part of decolonizing the way that we're doing things in post-secondary.

Joeita Gupta:
Patty Douglas, the time has flown by because you've allowed me both a chance to reminisce on my university days, the good and the bad, but also given me a chance to think about how much things have changed. Congratulations again on your new appointment. I think you'll be brilliant at it and I hope as your research progresses and takes shape, you'll come back and chat more about it on the program because we would love to hear what you've been up to.

Patricia Douglas:
I would love to do that. And thank you so much for inviting me and talking with me today. It did fly by, I agree.

Joeita Gupta:
Patty Douglas is the Inaugural Chair in Student Success and Wellness at the Faculty of Education at Queen's University. Well, folks, speaking of time flying by, we've got to run. As you can imagine, we are right up against the clock. If you have any feedback, if you'd like to share your impressions of university or if you have any feedback about my conversation with Patty, please send us an email, write to feedback at ami.ca. You can also pick up the phone and give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. And don't forget to leave permission to play the audio on the program. You can also find me on Twitter at Joeita Gupta. And of course you can find the show on Twitter at AMI Audio. Use the hashtag Pulse AMI so we know that the tweet corresponds to this show so you can reach us a couple of different ways. And I hope to hear from you.
I know there's always a lot of chatter about post-secondary education, the barriers and the opportunities for people with disabilities. So please feel free to be generous with your feedback. My videographer today has been Matthew McGurk, Marc Aflalo is our technical producer, Ryan Delehanty is the coordinator for AMI Audio podcasts, and Andy Frank is the manager for AMI Audio. I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.