Follow us on Twitter to find out about our latest videos, publications, news and other resource updates.
Chemistry is the self-styled 'central science' and laboratory work has always been considered central to its study. So deeply enshrined is laboratory work that the chemists' professional body, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), prescribes a certain minimum quantity of it when accrediting degrees. Here, I provide a personal perspective on the challenges faced by a typical chemistry department (the Department of Chemistry in York) when attempting to provide a safe and effective experience of laboratory work that can also accommodate a range of student disabilities. This will tend to gloss over the general offices of the University and the Department (through its Disabilities Officer). Their considerable efforts and established procedures already provide day-to-day support for disabled students, and deal with central issues such as special arrangements for assessment and other aspects common to disabled students in all departments. Laboratory work (also referred to here as practical work, experiments, and labwork) is a specific concern of the sciences and, it might be argued, a particular consideration for chemistry where the handling of hazardous substances has traditionally been part and parcel of the training process.
The provision of a safe and rigorous training in practical chemistry for disabled undergraduate chemists presents particular challenges for chemistry departments. Many of the issues - widened doorways, ramps, emergency exits, signage etc. - are shared with all public buildings. Others are more specific to educational institutions such as the equipping of teaching spaces, Information Technology (IT) facilities and libraries to provide a wide range of facilities for a variety of disabilities. But it is when it comes to labwork that chemistry departments find themselves jousting with really crucial issues of health and safety, and fundamental questions about the cost effectiveness and practicality of allowing for genuinely effective participation for disabled students. It is not simply a case getting disabled students into and out of the laboratory - that's the easy bit - it's how you facilitate participation safely in the experience of practical work and the impact this makes on other students.
I was surprised to learn the extent to which staff in Chemistry at York have had to go back to first principles to decide what changes they need to make in order to support disabled students. I had fancifully imagined that guidelines on an idealised 'laboratory for disabled chemists' might exist somewhere, along with a list of suppliers of specialist fixtures and fittings. Instead, York has taken a very empirical approach to making improvements. Here, user testing was central to our approach and involved two graduate students with a physical disability (one a wheelchair user and the other a shorter person) in the process of reviewing the Department's facilities. Both have been able to help the department by touring the laboratory facilities and demonstrating all the areas where their performance and participation is compromised. Whilst this process has been invaluable, it has clearly raised as many questions as it has answered.
Firstly, the problems encountered by any disabled student are inextricably linked to the nature of their disability. A different pair of students might have come to quite different conclusions; there is no pretence that these particular students can provide any insights into how a visually impaired student might cope here, for instance. So the planners still find themselves imagining how other potential users will cope with the laboratory challenges. The Department now performs a full assessment of each new student with a disability at the point at which they join because of the crucial relationship between the precise nature of individual disabilities and student performance, especially in practical work. This involves the student, their personal supervisor, the departmental Disabilities Officer and the Safety Officer. At present, significant disabilities amongst chemistry undergraduates are sufficiently rare and diverse in nature that an ad hoc approach to dealing with each case is adopted by necessity. In general, whilst taking heed of published recommendations and expert advice where it can, this Department is taking a pioneering approach to improving provision for disabled students tackling laboratory work.
The second issue that emerges is whether or not it is practical to provide a laboratory where disabled students can do everything that their non-disabled peers can. The chemistry laboratory is littered with specialist equipment, some of it associated with only one part of a single specialist experiment. It is soon evident that some element of compromise has to accompany the process of improving disabled provision, and this compromise comes in choosing a level and nature of disability for which to cater and deciding which activities cannot reasonably be catered for at all.
So, what is going on in Chemistry at York? Firstly, there's the easy bit, getting in and out of the laboratory. The main access points to the building and the main thoroughfare between the lecture theatre, small group teaching rooms and the laboratories are being upgraded with new doors that have the necessary width and automatic opening facility to enable wheelchair and disabled access. A policy of linking the department's fire doors to the fire alarm system is also being investigated. This will see fire doors permanently open during normal office hours but triggered to close upon activation of the fire alarm system. This will not, of course, preclude temporary opening by a disabled, or other, student for evacuation purposes. Particular attention has been given to access to fire escapes. However, throughout the department there are still rooms where the nearest fire escape is down steps. Within the laboratory area, there are various zones and side rooms that will be fitted with modified doorways. These include scientific instrument rooms and the computer classroom.
The traditional chemistry laboratory is known for its imposing hardwood benches, porcelain sinks with high clearance taps, and benchtop gas taps. Increasingly, chemical manipulations are carried out in fume cupboards (fumehoods) where experiments releasing harmful vapours are conducted and where reinforced glass shields can be pulled down to provide additional protection for the experimentalist. Traditional benches and fumehoods are simply too high for use by wheelchair users, shorter people or anyone with restricted reach. A number of benches and fumehoods are now being replaced with ones whose operating height can be adjusted to suit the user. Taps will be placed closer to the front and may be made even easier to use by the addition of activating levers of the type found in hospitals. This will massively improve access to bench, fumehood and sink facilities. In the past, laboratories have taken a rather ad hoc approach using ramps and platforms. The risk associated with slipping off such elevated surfaces is clearly removed by these more sophisticated facilities. It doesn't end there - some of the routine instrumentation crucial to basic chemical manipulations will be made available on benches of adjustable height. Typically, the sensitive balances used for weighing materials will be made available as will a selection of instruments used to analyse chemical samples.
Similar access issues are being addressed within the Department's computer classroom. The structural modifications associated with the improved doorways will also include installation of more reinforced windows to improve the low-level visibility around the laboratories. The supervision of laboratory work by trained technical and demonstrator staff is a crucial part of laboratory safety so improving the visibility of students below the traditional bench level is an important consideration. The special bench/fumehood facilities will also be located close to accessible fire escape routes to aid emergency evacuation. Navigation around the Department, and the laboratories and fire escapes in particular, is being aided by new colour schemes designed to significantly increase the contrast for the visually impaired. Monochrome photography will be used to highlight areas in need of improvement in this regard.
As I spoke to the head of laboratories, it became clear that he and those colleagues involved in improving disabled access to Chemistry had thought at length about how many disabled students to cater for. One concern was that if, as they hoped, the quality of their provision for the disabled became a feature of note that they might then attract a disproportionately high number of applications from disabled students. In other words, that they might end up with an insufficient number of tailored facilities. On the other hand, an over-provision (for a demand that never arises from disabled students either because they go to other possibly better equipped chemistry departments or because the status quo is preserved and very few disabled students pursue chemistry) stretches an already limited budget, spreading it thinly on an excess of facilities rather than providing one or two high quality places. (And I have seen this argument applied to the whole disability in chemistry issue - that a selection of HEIs across the country could provide 'Rolls Royce' disabled facilities for the minority of students who are disabled, rather than spreading the budget thinly over all departments and ending up with no single one that is truly satisfactory.)
As well as deciding where to draw the line on the number of students to cater for, another issue is where to draw the line on what disabled students can reasonably, and safely, be asked to perform. Even with an unlimited budget, adapting all equipment for disabled access is simply not practical and certain topics and techniques will remain off limits to disabled students. This restriction can be offset significantly if disabled students are paired up with an able-bodied partner and, in fact, practicals are traditionally done in pairs anyway. In this way the disabled student gets to experience directly as much as is practically possible and is on hand to witness the other processes carried out by their partner. However, it might be difficult to persuade a non-disabled student to partner someone who might slow down their progress through practical work and perhaps detrimentally affect their marks (regardless of whether there is any evidence for this). Pairing for practical work has historically allowed some disabilities to be accommodated into the laboratories almost without comment. Reassuringly, our experience with students who have need for greater support, where a practical partner has been paired with someone for whom they will inevitably have to compensate (e.g. some cases of visual impairment), has never yet resulted in any such conflicts. Some institutions may find it preferable to pay suitably qualified support staff (typically graduate students) to work with disabled students and this is currently happening with a student in York. This would also help with project work, which is usually undertaken individually by our students. Our laboratory staff have experienced first-hand a number of situations where the commendable independence of disabled students has made them reluctant to debar themselves from certain aspects of laboratory work. It is well to remind ourselves here, that whilst safety is always uppermost in our mind, that the disabled students’ will continue to carry their own significant burden of responsibility for safety when it comes to their conduct in the laboratory.
There are those within the chemistry education community who have questioned the pre-eminent value of laboratory work within the subject. This standpoint is based on the fact that relatively few chemistry students use these skills subsequent to their degree, and the slavish following of recipe-like practical scripts hardly helps to develop real scientific skills anyway. If it is accepted that laboratory work is not crucial to the future of many chemistry graduates then an alternative path for disabled students may be offered. Since the physically disabled chemist is likely to prosper in those (many) areas of the subject that don't require demanding manipulative skills, they can spend time allotted to practicals doing other related things. For instance, there are many experimental simulation packages accessed via computer that teach all the same skills of experimental design, data handling and interpretation that real experiments do. There are strong arguments that they actually fill this role better than conventional practicals. The issue then is ensuring that the user interface associated with these packages is compatible with the disability of the student in question. Thus, with a bit of imagination, a university course can accommodate as much real practical work as a disabled student can sensibly manage and use other means to develop higher order scientific skills such as experimental design. However, this approach needs careful management as a degree awarded through this route may fall foul of the Royal Society of Chemistry's current accreditation requirements, though these are already the subject of ongoing debate amongst chemistry educators.
In summary, this Department is thinking long and hard about what to do for the best to support disabled students who wish to join us to study chemistry. It is backing this with infrastructure and financial support to the extent that it is available. It is trying to find the best compromise but is struggling when it comes to three areas: how many students to cater for, what level of participation in the course to expect/require (and how to match this to the expectations of the disabled students themselves), and what level and nature of disability to accommodate.
"The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, unless otherwise attributed, and do not necessarily reflect the central policy of the Department of Chemistry or the University of York. The author would like to acknowledge helpful conversations on this topic with Mike Anderson (Departmental Laboratory and Facilities Manager), Dave Bettany (Head of Teaching Laboratories), Anna Duhme-Klair (Disabilities Officer), and David Lindsey (Senior Laboratory Technician)"
Nigel Lowe is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York and a member of the university's Forum for the Enhancement of Learning & Teaching
 |
 |
|
