Coping in the time of COVID-19: Insights from university students with intellectual disabilities

For almost two decades, students with intellectual, developmental and multiple disabilities have attended undergraduate classes at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada as part-time auditing students. They are supported by the Campus Life program. Campus Life employs graduate and undergraduate university students as academic tutors and social role models because they too are immersed in university life.

We chose collaborative autoethnography as a research method because we believe in researching and writing with individuals with disabilities, rather than about them. Three student tutor dyads elected to participate in this study. In the context of the pandemic and the switch from on-campus in-person learning to off-campus online learning, we were interested in learning about the changes, challenges or unanticipated benefits they experienced. Each dyad engaged in tutor-led conversations, guided by open-ended questions, and wrote their story.

The stories from the three dyads were received and analysed. We found three emergent themes. The first was centred on worries about the health risks of COVID-19, the difficulties they experienced in adapting to online learning and their development of better skills in listening and communicating. The second theme was about the dramatic reduction in their opportunities for social engagement. With respect to the third emergent theme, they recounted some advantages of online learning, noting that it was more accessible, more convenient and safer during a pandemic.

For the study participants the shift to online classes and tutoring sessions was surprisingly successful. They became more independent and improved their online communication, time-management and organisational skills. Social engagement was sorely missed, especially studying and socializing with classmates at university and participating in extracurricular activities. The students also noted some advantages to online learning such as accessibility, convenience, feeling comfortable at home, avoiding transportation to the university and learning to use new tech tools. The tutors began sharing and learning from each other. This was facilitated by online tutoring roundtables. Our first insight from this study is the realisation that we now have a new medium for tutoring Campus Life students. A second is the need to better understand student social engagement in the online world.