As principles of Indigenization, decolonization, reconciliation, and EDI continue to inform the strategic directions and priorities of universities across Canada, it is imperative the perspectives and aspirations of individuals directly affected by university policy and practice are meaningfully represented. In this talk, Dr. Rheanna Robinson will draw on her experience as an Indigenous scholar that lives with chronic illness and disability to describe how her academic research within Indigenous Disability Studies represents a compelling example of how Indigenous knowledges offer the world meaningful representations of equity and inclusion in diverse and varying ways.

Luke’s talk will focus on the duty to accommodate as it is understood in the university context. He will also discuss some of the barriers that prevent students with disabilities from accessing appropriate accommodation. This will include an exploration of: 1) problematic dispute resolution mechanisms, 2) some the ways that attitudinal barriers can manifest in the accommodation process, 3) barriers associated with medical documentation, and 4) common misunderstandings about the way that human rights law applies in a university context. He will close with a set of preliminary suggestions about how some of these barriers might be addressed, using the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities as a framework to help develop these recommendations.

This student-led panel features undergraduate and graduate students with lived experience of disability sharing critical insights on inclusion and what it is like navigating accessibility and accommodations in post-secondary education. Panelists will reflect on supports and barriers including policy and practice gaps, informal support networks, and. Through storytelling and dialogue, they will offer a student perspective on what meaningful inclusion requires—highlighting the need for flexibility, relational accountability, and institutional responsiveness. The session invites educators, administrators, and researchers to listen with intention and reflect on how student voices can inform transformative change. It concludes with a call to embed lived experience into the design of post-secondary policies, supports, and learning environments.

Since the passing of Bill 82, the Education Amendment Act in Ontario (1980), there has been considerable attention to building accessible and inclusive elementary and secondary school classrooms along with developing pedagogical approaches that are responsive to all students. Throughout their K-12 schooling, many disabled students participate in special education, a system of programs and services intended to support learning. Supports can include instructional, environmental and assessment related accommodations, curricular modifications, access to specialized services and equipment, all of which should be documented on a student’s Individual Education Plan. In K-12 education, many educators are well versed in pedagogical approaches such as universal design for learning, differentiated instruction and culturally responsive strategies to enhance learning. While there is ongoing work in the postsecondary education sector, systems and services are not as streamlined as students and their families might anticipate. In addition, teaching faculty are not required to have the same degree of training in pedagogy as their counterparts in K-12 and, in many cases, hold academic freedom to teach how and what they want. To bridge practice across systems, Dr. Parekh will share key learnings from K-12 education that could be adopted by the postsecondary sector to promote access and equity for all students.

Common mental disorders and problems in young people aged 16 to 25 years have been increasing and now recognized to be a public health crisis.  University students show parallel trends to the general population the same age, especially in females and minoritized subgroups. The causality appears complex related to an interplay of psychological, sociocultural and biological challenges around consolidating self-identity, making new social connections, navigating higher education, and assuming more responsibilities for decisions and lifestyle – all whilst brain development remains a work in progress.  This generation of young people are also facing more economic uncertainty, higher competition for fewer positions and the future burden of the climate crisis.   This presentation will describe mental health outcomes and access to care from the U-Flourish Student Well-Being study, a biannual electronic survey study enrolling and following successive large cohorts of undergraduate students from 2018 at Queen’s and 2019 at Oxford Universities.  In addition, salient targets suitable for early intervention will be discussed and pilot findings informing feasibility, acceptability and potential effectiveness of stepped digital interventions shared.  Finally, opportunities for scalable and sustainable digital solutions to enhance early intervention in the context of a proposed model of student mental health care will be introduced for further discussion.

Higher education has built and enforced definitions of disability that are primarily medical: we see disability all over our campuses, in all kinds of different departments, labs, and initiatives, but it is too often understood as a series of unwanted symptoms, a problem to be solved – not as the positive identity and culture most disabled people understand it to be.

In the history of disability in higher education, a rights-based approach has often meant that disabled students are invited in the door, they are counted and added to diversity statistics, but then the culture of the University makes no changes to account for their presence, participation, and thriving.

On the other hand, we have had an opportunity, over the last five years, to redesign higher education in ways we never have before. What if we allocated all of the energy we spend on adapting to an old educational regime based on timing and testing into building a new one, one in which disabled students don’t always need to ask for accommodations but instead their needs are expected? 

In this presentation and discussion, some possibilities for building a more accessible classroom and campus will be suggested and explored.

In this keynote, I invite us—educators, researchers, students, practitioners, policymakers, and community members—to pause, reframe, and ask: Accommodation into what?

Drawing on my work in critical disability studies in education, critical neurodiversity studies, disability justice, and multimedia storytelling as a site of resistance and decolonizing with diverse neurodivergent youth, family members, and educators, I trace the limits of current accommodation practices in postsecondary education. I focus on centering the experiences and knowledges of multiply marginalized neurodivergent students—Indigenous, 2SLGBTQ+, and others—whose epistemologies and ontologies (Ineese-Nash, 2020) offer powerful alternatives for reimagining neurodivergence, access, and belonging beyond individual deficits and accommodation.

I also share research findings and films from the Re•Storying Autism in Education project (Douglas et al., 2021; Re•Storying Collective, 2022) to explore how storytelling, creative methodologies, and lived experience can expand tested approaches in K–12 contexts, such as Universal Design for Learning, and open new pathways toward inclusive, affirming postsecondary environments—spaces that desire and affirm, rather than only accommodate, difference. 

What emerges through this talk is an argument for a fundamental shift from individual accommodation to ontological and system change grounded in collective care, welcome, relational ethics, and structural transformation that supports belonging and flourishing for neurodivergent—and all—students.