This article is adapted from Disability in Higher Education: A Social Justice Approach, published by Jossey‐Bass, A Wiley Brand.
While community colleges enroll high proportions of disabled students, limited research exists on considerations that college personnel should account for in meeting disabled students' varied needs and strengths. This article explores the impacts of policies and processes on disabled community college students and presents five policy-related issues and recommendations on how various community college agents with the power to inform and enact policy, including administrators/staff, researchers, and instructors, can best serve disabled community college students.Community colleges enroll the highest proportions of disabled students in postsecondary education. Throughout the article we use the language of disabled students rather than students with disabilities in recognition of the environmental forces that serve to disempower and disable individuals. This language is in line with social justice, activist, and identityfirst models of understanding disability. When referencing existing literature and research, we defer to the language used by the original authors as language preference regarding disability can differ based on location, population, and participants.During the 2011-12 academic year, 12.7% of first-time postsecondary students in 2-year colleges identified as having a disability, compared to 10.7% at 4-year institutions (Snyder, de Brey, & Dillow, 2019). Nationally, disabled students experience lower rates of postsecondary enrollment, degree attainment, and post-educational employment outcomes (Kessler Foundation & National Organization on Disability, 2010;Newman et al., 2011). However, Newman et al. (2011 noted that for disabled students, community college completion rates are nearly twice that of their non-disabled counterparts (41.3% compared to 22.4%). Bolstering disabled students' persistence in community college may also yield dividends in enhancing the quality of their experiences.Enrollment of disabled students in postsecondary education is likely to continue to increase based on trends from the past decade (Aquino & Bittinger, 2019;Snyder et al., 2019). Ensuring that these students possess equitable opportunities for engaging in college and obtaining their desired outcomes is of pivotal importance. Enacting clear policies and strategic plans are crucial for supporting equitable opportunities for disabled college students. Here we will examine policy issues related to five topics (entrance,
Dominant ideas of student success, such as grade point average (GPA), persistence, and graduation, are constructed as desirable and normalized within educational systems. However, research with minoritized populations, such as lesbian, gay, trans * , bisexual, queer+ (LGTBQ+) students or Native American students, demonstrates that students' definitions of success may not align with normative frameworks. Disabled students represent over 19% of undergraduates in the United States. Although disabled students are an important and growing population, their definitions of success remain unexplored. Existing research indicates that academic definitions of success are likely to reflect the ableism woven into postsecondary institutions and thus practitioners or researchers who are socialized into normative paradigms of success may have difficulty supporting disabled students' learning and development. In this study, we used cripistemological frameworks and narrative methodological approaches to explore 24 disabled students' stories of success. Students' definitions differed from those of their institutions; students focused on social integration, being and staying healthy, learning new concepts, and building communities. We found that disabled students "cripped" success by resisting normative definitions. Although students held academic goals, those goals were substantively adapted to fit with crip time, crip trying, and creating community. One student in this study demonstrated crip gain by viewing their disability as an advantage, while others directly challenged the ideological systems that are used to construct smartness. When interpreting these findings, it is important to understand that they represent predominantly White-lived experiences. Future research must include perspectives of disabled students of color.
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