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Some neurodivergent students may require more support to navigate the move from home to university, or more guidance with extracurricular aspects of campus life and the transition from post-secondary education to the workplace.
The first step to successfully navigating university as a neurodivergent student is understanding your own neurodiversity. This involves recognising your strengths, identifying potential challenges, and developing strategies to leverage your unique learning style.
The Neurodivergent University Experience. Every neurodivergent student will experience university life uniquely. Below, we discuss a few challenges that research and lived experiences have shown are common among neurodivergent students:
Current approaches to supporting neurodivergent (ND) students at university are predicated on the idea that they need to be ‘fixed’ so that they can exist within a system designed for neurotypical people.
Supporting neurodivergent students is vital to cultivate an inclusive and fair educational environment, which can have a positive influence on all students by fostering understanding, empathy, and a culture of inclusiveness.
Efforts to make university education more inclusive have recently increased their focus on support for students with neurodivergent conditions including Autism or Dyslexia. Several practice guidelines have been published.
By making small adjustments and genuinely listening to our neurodivergent students, we can create a more inclusive university experience that benefits everyone—not just neurodivergent students, but the entire learning community.
Instead, autistic children should be treated with recognition and support in educational settings. These recommendations aim to address and overcome the barriers that neurodivergent students may face in the education system (Hamilton, 2023).
Leading-edge scholarship on neurodiversity presents a new paradigm for supporting neurodivergence, reducing the onus on neurodivergent students to take extra steps to achieve the same learning outcomes as neurotypical students by (re)shaping educational contexts to create learning environments in which the widest possible range of learners can thrive (Luchs, 2021; Hamilton and Petty, 2023 ...
University administration and community members are increasingly recognizing the importance of creating equitable opportunities for neurodivergent students, faculty, and staff. This includes advocating for the centering of neurodiversity in college campus DEI initiatives (Kuder et al., 2021).