Transforming Undergraduate Education from Below: How Students Make Disabilities Visible and Universities a Working Space for Themselves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When young people acquire a higher education entrance qualification and transition to university, they experience a biographical turning point. This holds even more for people with disabilities. On campus, students must navigate barriers and discrimination. Many European universities have started to improve campuses, curricula, and social activities and have developed diversity agendas that focus on gender, age, and migration. However, they have rarely reached out to persons with disabilities. To examine how students experience barriers while entering their undergraduate programs, this paper focuses on the experiences of students with disabilities in German and Austrian university undergraduate programmes. We combine the analysis of institutional offers with life stories. Four life narratives of undergraduates in diverse majors at different German-speaking universities give insights into how students with disabilities manage the transition into academic training and undergo subject formation. How they contact fellow students and negotiate with academic staff and administrative bodies depends on their individual circumstances. The analysis shows that high school experiences, family support, knowledge and acceptance of disability compensation, and their willingness to disclose are central. The binding of support to medical reasons is primarily responsible for the challenges students encountered in their studies. The students must develop their sense of belonging and self-identify as disabled. Inclusion-sensitive programmes and measures thus reduce barriers. Accordingly, social factors come to the fore when removing barriers in academic training.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".