Of the 27,000 enrolled at the Autonomous University, ten years ago only five students declared they had an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Today there are 69. In those same ten years, students with learning disorders (Attention Deficit Disorder with or without Hyperactivity, dyslexia, or a combination of both) at that university have gone from 42 to 371. In other centers, the numbers are similar. At the UB last year more than 600 students with learning disabilities were assisted, and that includes those who have a disability certificate and those who do not. None of these numbers is definitive, because they leave out both students who have not been diagnosed and those who have preferred not to inform the University.
But these figures are eloquent: in the last decade, children who were diagnosed in the 2000s began to arrive en masse at university, when the detection of issues related to neurodiversity skyrocketed. They are, in the best of cases, young people who found themselves with schools and institutes dedicated to serving them, with special education teachers and reinforcements outside the classroom, accustomed to having the exam format adapted to them, among other things, and who Upon reaching higher education, with a self-awareness far removed from the stigma of past decades, they have demanded the same rights.
The University has had no choice but to adapt. “In general, the younger teachers are very open to addressing diversity, the veteran teachers find that before the classes were very homogeneous because these boys and girls did not arrive, they were considered academic failures. Luckily, society is diverse and society reflects that diversity,” says Anabel Galán, vice-rector for Students and Employability at the UAB and the person in charge of applying those necessary changes so that careers are not hostile to students with neurodivergences.
For some years now, there has been a figure in that University in each faculty who is in charge of coordinating all students who have special needs and all new teachers who join are obliged to take a specific course in which they are prepared to make adaptations. curricular and to take into account possible situations that may arise in the classroom: from students with ASD who become blocked when making oral presentations or debates to students who may need to wear foam earplugs to isolate themselves from noise or sit away from the door passing by people who, due to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), may not tolerate the presence of a ticking clock in the classroom.
Attending to neurodiversity implies understanding that people, some students, will need a laptop for their exam to avoid writing by hand (the university offers them a special one, without an internet connection) or that students with dyslexia, dyscalculia or dysorthography need hand-printed materials. 12 at least, and with plain typeface. This is apart from the measures that are also already contemplated in the PAAU and in almost all universities, such as giving between 25% and a third of the extra exam time to students with this type of diagnosis.
At the Autònoma they found a higher incidence of cases of autism spectrum in engineering and there a mutual aid group was established, made up of students, who meet and discuss the complexities they encounter. At the University of Barcelona they have not detected this difference in engineering compared to other degrees. But Rosa Albalat, professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, does believe that “people with ASD who have super interests, topics that may interest them with a certain fixation, perhaps they do feel more attracted to engineering.”
Albalat is one of those veteran teachers who has spent decades striving to make the University a more comfortable place for all types of people. “We saw people in the laboratory who function very well, who ask very interesting questions, but who later did not reflect this in the exams due to their insecurities. They are people who sometimes arrive with very loaded backpacks, who may have suffered bullying and who when they have gotten here it is because they have overcome many difficulties. We have to make their lives easier without giving them anything, they get the grade like the rest of the people.”
There are different ways to incorporate these neurodiverse students or students with learning difficulties into inclusion programs: either because they have already presented themselves with their diagnosis (this is increasingly common and is related to the relaxation of stigma), because they They have spoken with a specific teacher or because it has been the teachers who have detected something.
Something like this happened when Albalat met María Dolores González, a student already graduated in Chemical Engineering who came to the faculty with a diagnosis of dyslexia. The teacher noted that there could be something else and recommended a reevaluation, which resulted in a diagnosis of Asperger’s, an autism spectrum disorder. From there they tried to accompany her by seeking extra help from the Asperger Catalunya Foundation, talking about it with her family and, when the time came to do an internship in a company, also with her employers.
“Sometimes we get kids with depression and what they have is ASD,” also points out Albalat, who usually teaches his own classmates so that they understand that sometimes a student with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) can be “exhausting” in a laboratory, that if someone with ASD requires 12 clarifications for the 12 questions of an exam, they are not being annoying but are really having problems understanding an ambiguous statement, or that the Secretariat must allow a student to withdraw after the deadline if the fact of having enrolled Too many subjects generate anguish that is impossible to manage.
In the latter case, furthermore, there was no economic prejudice since he was a student with a recognized disability who did not pay tuition. One aspect that they are working on now at the UB is that of confidentiality: allowing the 25% of extra time that students with recognized diagnoses have to be able to enjoy it in a separate classroom without the need for their classmates to see it and question them about it. that, as sometimes happens.
“If a neurotypical person has had a bad exam and sees that a colleague with neurodiversity has had that advantage, comments can be made, but they are usually specific things, which come from viscerality,” confirms Cristòfol Llompart, a child and adolescent psychologist specialized in disorders of learning. In his years of dedication, Llompart has seen a certain stigma or shame associated with these diagnoses dilute, almost due to a numerical issue: in Primary and Secondary School, there are so many diagnosed students that that feeling different is no longer generated as much. But he still has patients who are very reluctant to ask for curricular adaptations. He cites the case of a boy with dyslexia and high abilities whom he is treating now, who resisted asking for these advantages at his school saying: “I’m not the stupid one.”
Like almost everything, making the University more flexible and making it less hostile requires good will, but also a budget, as both institutions and teachers demand, also taking into account that precariousness among university professors is a bleeding reality.
Núria Gómez Gabriel is one of those mobile teachers, who teaches art subjects in three different centers: Escola Massana, BAU and ESCAC. She has seen it all. “In one of the centers where I teach, they accused me of doing ‘assistance pedagogy’, that is, of giving too much assistance to the students,” she denounces. “I have taken courses on adaptation to neurodiversity and I have found them very interesting, although they have opened up more questions than answers. They mark it as ethical competencies of the teacher, when they are legal-labor issues. What has to change is the philosophy of the universities.”
