Texts influencing the accommodation process of students with disabilities in professional rehabilitation programs: an analysis of discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Students with disabilities have lower enrollment and higher attrition than their non-disabled peers. They identify negative attitudes from educators in their accommodation experiences within professional programs, such as occupational therapy and physiotherapy. Educators in these accredited programs must address a myriad of requirements through curriculum delivery. The documents or "texts" containing program requirements include discourses or dominant understandings of reality. The purpose of this study is to identify these discourses and the resulting positions of educators, to better understand the tensions in accommodating students with disabilities. METHODS: A critical discourse analysis study was conducted. Key informants and inclusion criteria led to the collection of 9 texts, which were subsequently analyzed using Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional conception of discourse. RESULTS: Three discourses were identified. "Rights and responsibilities" was the most salient discourse, followed by "normative assumptions" and then "inclusion and equity." The associated educator positions are "navigator," "gatekeeper" and "advocate," respectively. CONCLUSIONS: The discourses and resulting educator positions are varied and in conflict with one another. There is a potential for change in the social practices related to accommodating students with disabilities. However, these changes need to be conscious and deliberate to ensure inclusivity within the occupational therapy and physiotherapy professions.Implications for RehabilitationCritical discourse analysis is a methodology that can raise awareness of implicit assumptions embedded in texts that reflect and potentially perpetuate inequities and power imbalances.Conflicting discourses in the accommodation process provide a valuable opportunity for educators to critically reflect on personal and professional values and beliefs.Critical reflection on unconscious bias while writing policies and practices could ensure a more diverse pool of applicants for professional programs, thereby enriching rehabilitation professions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".