The news last week that an adjunct professor had asked a student with a stutter to save questions or comments until after class highlights concerns about how well the growing cadre of part-time instructors in higher education are, or can be, trained to deal with an array of classroom dilemmas, including how to handle students with disabilities.
Faculty should be trained to deal with tricky and sensitive issues like how to accommodate the needs of students with disabilities in the classroom while being fair to nondisabled students, too, say college disability-rights officials.
While full-time faculty members typically get a reasonable level of exposure to key points of the Americans With Disabilities Act, most four-year institutions offer minimal training for adjuncts, says L. Scott Lissner, who coordinates disability-law compliance for the Ohio State University system.
At four-year colleges, one-quarter of instructional employees were part-time faculty in 2009, according to the most-recent data. Mr. Lissner says limited training of those instructors can be a problem generally, beyond how to handle students with disabilities.
Reliant on Adjuncts
Sometimes adjunct faculty at community colleges are trained better than at other types of institutions, Mr. Lissner adds. That’s because two-year colleges depend so heavily on part-time faculty. In 2009, seven of 10 instructional employees at public, two-year colleges were part time.
The incident that made headlines last week occurred in a history class at County College of Morris, a community college in New Jersey. An adjunct professor sent an e-mail to a student with a severe stutter, according to the account first published in The New York Times, asking him to save his questions or comments until after class so as not to affect other students’ time.
College officials responded to the article by saying that the instructor had acted improperly. Although the administrators expressed discontent with the e-mail the professor sent to the student, they didn’t comment on whether they were taking any disciplinary action.
In a subsequent interview with the Times, the professor, Elizabeth Snyder, said she sent the e-mail partly to try to put the student at ease and also because she was taking into consideration the amount of class time it took when he wanted to answer many questions. She added that she never intended to stop him from speaking and, in fact, that she had told him she would call on him once per class. She also told the newspaper she consulted a speech therapist about the situation.
College officials were not able to immediately answer questions about what kinds of training the institution provides to adjuncts, if any. [See update at end of this article.] Ms. Snyder did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Little Training
Most colleges make little effort to train their part-time instructors, even though research suggests that adjunct faculty members would do a better job if they were trained properly, says Adrianna Kezar, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Southern California who has done research on adjunct-faculty training.
“It’s either not offered to them, or they are not paid to go, so they wouldn’t go,” Ms. Kezar says.
Colleges could help their professors by working with disabilities experts to design professional training that might include things like questionnaires to test instructors’ knowledge of the law and find out where more education is needed, she says.
Sometimes the problem for adjuncts is the timing of any training, she adds. If such instruction is available, adjuncts may have schedule conflicts because many of them have other jobs during the day.
Mr. Lissner says that it’s important for colleges to give all faculty, not just adjuncts, more training in how to work with students with disabilities and to make more information available. Faculty members should seek assistance from the office of disability services on their campus before handling sensitive situations, he adds.
Colleges, he says, could do more to use technology and to come up with creative ways to train their faculty. For example, he says, colleges could offer interactive, online training courses and track which faculty members, including adjuncts, attend. Those courses could offer information about how to respond to an accommodation request and what generally is defined as a disability.
In response to the article about the New Jersey college, the Stuttering Foundation issued a news release listing eight tips to help educators respond to students who stutter. The tips include: “Convey that you are listening to the content of the message, not how it is said”; and “Have a one-on-one conversation with the student who stutters about needed accommodations in the classroom.”
Update (10/17, 4:25 p.m.): In an interview on Monday, an official at the County College of Morris said that it provides training to adjunct professors that includes information about how instructors should respond to students with disabilities, who make up 10 percent of the college’s enrollment.
Dwight Smith, vice president for academic affairs, said that the college requires new adjunct instructors to review portions of the Americans With Disabilities Act that are part of their orientation package. The college’s Center for Teaching Excellence offers a training program for adjunct professors that includes information about accommodations for students with disabilities. The center also offers several workshops about how to work with students who have special needs, Mr. Smith said.