Student Disability and Experiential Education

As a significant percentage of students in higher education today have one or more disabilities, it is important for instructors to be aware of what disabilities, and how disabilities, impact student performance. Students with a wide range of disabilities can encounter significant obstacles when experiential instructional methods are implemented assuming that learners are disability-free. This article presents a taxonomy of disabilities and illustrates how experiential instruction can place students with disabilities in situations where they may not do well. The article also evaluates Universal Design, an approach to course design and management that attempts to address a range of student disabilities and learning styles. Finding that this approach does not fully address the problems of the experiential classroom, three strategies are proposed that increase the likelihood that all students, including those with disabilities, will have satisfying and successful experiences in courses using experiential methods.