Journeys from discomfort to comfort: how do university students experience being taught and assessed by adults with intellectual disabilities?

From 2016-17, academics at a leading Irish university collaborated with a group of self- advocates with intellectual disabilities to co-design, co-deliver, and co-assess an entire disability module for third-year undergraduate social work students. There are few, if any, reports of university modules of this type, involving adults with intellectual disabilities, in the existing literature. Alongside and after the module, our group of academics and self-advocates conducted inclusive research regarding relevant stakeholders’ experiences of the initiative. This paper relates to university students’ experiences of being taught and assessed by adults with intellectual disabilities. These experiences were overwhelmingly positive with reported benefits including increased comfort around disability and greater empathy with people with people with disabilities. This said, some aspects of being taught and assessed by self-advocates with intellectual disabilities also provoked considerable anxiety among students.Points of interestFrom 2016 to 2017, academics at a leading Irish university collaborated with a group of self-advocates with intellectual disabilities to design, teach and mark a disability module for social work students.The group also conducted inclusive research regarding people’s experiences of the moduleThis paper explores how university students experienced being taught and marked by adults with intellectual disabilities.Students’ experiences were generally very positive. They said the module led to more empathy with disabled people and reduced their discomfort around disabilityAt the same time, some aspects of the module, particularly the idea of being marked by adults with intellectual disabilities, made them very nervous.We hope that our research might encourage others to employ adults with intellectual disabilities as university lecturers and markers.