Responsibility and participation in transition to university – voices of young people with disabilities
By: Lena Lang
Abstract
Students with disabilities are quantitatively under-represented in higher education. In this paper, focus is on access to and processes in transition to the initial period at university. The article is based on an empirical study examining young people's points of view, and the overall aim is to draw attention to experiences regarding responsibility and participation. Four narrative configurations represent the voices of how young people with disabilities experience the nature of the responsibility, the distribution of the responsibility and the timing that emerges. Experiences in the university context are categorized into proactive, ambivalent, reactive and non-existent community structures. Representatives of the universities are perceived as taking various levels of responsibility for the difficulties experienced by the young people. Genuine participation seems to be affected by collaboration qualities involving both the surrounding environment and the individual. This could have long-term consequences for the individual identity of a young person, as well as for society.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15017419.2013.817355 | Journal eISSN: 1745-3011
Language: English
Page range: 130 - 143
Submitted on: Oct 5, 2012
Accepted on: Jun 11, 2013
Published on: Jul 2, 2015
Published by: Stockholm University Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Keywords:
© 2015 Lena Lang, published by Stockholm University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.