Support for Students with Disabilities

Student-centered Support Activities to Nurture Every Student Involved

The main role of supporting activities for students with disabilities is to provide support based on their needs. These activities provide vital experience for both students with disabilities and supporting students.

It is invaluable for students to cultivate supportive mind and skills while enjoying university life with students with disabilities and sharing challenges they face. In addition, students will learn that disabilities are part of unique individuality and campus friendly to the students with disabilities is also friendly to students. This concept is acquired through coexistence of students and students with disability. As a majority of lectures at universities are delivered for students who dominate the lectures, students with disabilities need support according to their needs.

At the University of Tsukuba, students help through sign language interpretation for hearing impaired students, and Braille translation and correcting their writings for visually-impaired students. The university supports for examinations and graduation thesis, but other academic supports are done by students. The students support the students with disabilities as their friends, volunteers, and tutors. Relationship established among these students is not just a supportive relationship. Students learn supporting skills and more through support activities.

Nurturing Individuals with Disabilities

The students with disabilities are also expected to become independent in the process. The university will not offer conventional support that has been provided automatically without being requested by the students with disabilities. It is the university's role to teach students with disabilities to cultivate their independent mind for understanding their needs by themselves, conveying their message around, and trying to get support whenever they need.

The students with disabilities in the graduate schools learn how to study effectively in spite of their disabilities, find what kind of supports they need, and contribute to improving the quality of the supporting activities by playing the central role of the activities. In addition, this concept will be handed down to incoming undergraduate students with disabilities.

Lectures for Supporting Students with Disabilities and Training Session for Academic Supporters

Support activities may require special skills and a lot of time. Support activities consume huge amount of time and energy. There are cases that dedicated students might be exhausted by their activities. It is the university's duty to foster supporting students so that support activities are handed down to incoming students without concentrating the duty on certain students.

To deepen students' understanding toward disabilities, the university has established a lecture, "Coexisting Campus and Volunteering." Training courses with the aim of fostering academic supporters are also established.

Support based on Specialties of Cluster, College, and Graduate School

Academic administrations such as clusters, colleges, and graduate schools, where students with disabilities enroll, play a leading role for the support activities. The university adopts homeroom system in clusters and colleges. It is the responsibility of homeroom teachers to develop a framework for the class to accept students with disabilities. When the students with disabilities apply for specialized courses, the support of the faculty member of the course is of vital importance.