How to Tailor Veterinary Curriculum For Students With Disabilities

When working with students who have disabilities, the most important thing is to work with them directly, listen to them, and recognize what their needs are, says Joseph Taboada, DVM, DACVIM, professor and associate dean at Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine.

“So the important aspects of working with students with disabilities—and this is something that is really important to me from a personal standpoint, because I have a son who is blind. And so, I've had to deal with that, my wife has had to deal with that, and my son has had to deal with that his entire life as we've been going through schools and school systems. The most important thing, I think, when you're working with students who have disabilities is recognizing that you don't understand exactly what they need to do to be successful, because you've never experienced that disability before.

And so, you know when I'm working with my son who is blind, I have never been blind, I have observed him for 25 years so I have a good picture of some of the struggles that he has had, but I can't really put myself in his shoes. So, I have to listen to him to understand what his needs really are. And so, when we're working with students who have disabilities, the most important thing is to work with them directly, to listen to them, to recognize what their needs are. And then obviously you have to work with the experts that are in your environment. At most of our universities those are gonna be the office of disability services—or whatever the equivalent would be at other schools—and work with them to understand what's the best practice relative to helping that student to succeed. And honestly, each student is gonna be different, whether they have the same disability or not, each one of them is gonna be different in terms of what their needs are going to be, because they all have different skill sets just like any students that we have.

And again, I come back to the blindness because of my son, but there are skills of blindness that blind people develop and some people develop those skills much better than others and you have to work with that whole spectrum. Within our veterinary students, it's not blindness that we're dealing with very often, but it's learning disabilities, it's anxiety disorders are the biggest set of disabilities that we see. And working with those students each one is gonna be different and you have to listen to them as you're trying to figure out what is that we need to do to help that student succeed.”