Offices for Students with Disabilities: From addressing individual special needs to increasing public awareness towards disability
Offices for Students with Disabilities: From addressing individual special needs to increasing public awareness towards disability

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we aim to analyse in a comparative manner the structure and the activities of two European Offices for Students with Disabilities (OSD), which, although similar in goals, differ at the level of preponderance of their activities: one is assessing and implementing reasonable accommodations for the students with disabilities (i.e. Disability Office of University of Zurich, Switzerland), while the other one (i.e. Office for Students with Disabilities, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) is currently more focused on organizing activities and events aiming to increase the level of awareness towards disabilities and access (social and physical) of the academic personnel and students with and without disabilities. Several factors will be discussed below, such as the legislative frames specific for each country, the level of preparedness of each University in terms of access and education (attitudes and knowledge) regarding disability, history of the OSD, number of students with special needs and types of activities offered by the two Offices. The analysis concludes that the different approaches are comprehensible in the view of the specific legal and institutional contexts. Both OSD work with the human rights approach to disability provided by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilit ies. They use an interactional understanding of disability, offering not only services for the students but acting also to reduce the social and physical barriers. Such an OSD should be operating at each Higher Education Institution that aims to enhance the full participation of students with disabilities.

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