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Lynne Bejoian, Director of Columbia's Disability Services
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Recognizing the need to promote awareness of invisible disabilities among undergraduates, the U.S. Department of Education's Post-Secondary Division has awarded Columbia's Office of Disability Services an $800,000 grant to help educate professors on how to approach and instruct these students.
Lynne Bejoian, director of Disability Services for Columbia, will serve as primary investigator for the project, which she hopes will begin a new trend. "We've been in a reactive mode," she said. "We now want to create a proactive approach."
The effort will involve participation from Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard. Together, the schools will focus on developing teaching and learning workshops for faculty to help them devise new methods of educating students with invisible disabilities that might include psychiatric disorders, learning disabilities and chronic illness.
"Faculty members are often not sure how to approach teaching students when they cannot see their disorder," said Bejoian, who wants to equip professors with a "variety of new teaching methods, including how to present and how to engage."
In the past, students with these disabilities have often hidden them from their professors because of fears of prejudice, discrimination and a general stigma,
"It's very easy to pass if you have an invisible disability," said Bejoian, who added that she hopes to put an end to those feelings "We want to create an atmosphere where students can get the maximum educational experience."
Bejoian is optimistic that professors will respond well to the workshops because "a lot of faculty are already using new teaching techniques." She noted that adjusting to students is something always required to keep a professor current in their field. "The type of student is very different now than ones from 10 years ago."
Underlying the effort, Bejoian insists her objective remains to "support the academic mission of the institution." She wants the process of educating teachers to be interactive. "This isn't a recipe," she said. "We have to be engaged in the process together. The idea of education is that we're all students."
Another important focus of the project will be to create a web site or CD Rom that will provide service to others after the grant work has been completed. "Our ultimate goal is to have some kind of tool that can live on beyond this to provide a teaching strategy or resource," said Bejoian.
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