The potential for teacher/student empathy models of pedagogic practice to alleviate neurodivergent learner shame in the higher education classroom

This participatory research study will phenomenologically explore the manifestation of neurodivergent learner shame in higher education and investigate the potential for pedagogic teacher/student empathy models to alleviate stigma-based barriers to learning.

Numbers of university students with specific learning disabilities or social communication conditions are increasing rapidly. New nationwide priorities embedding greater educational inclusivity mean universities are giving strategic weight to these students' needs. While belonging is increasingly seen as the critical variable in improving student retention and success, and a key part of inclusion policy, there is little understanding of what 'belonging' means to neurodivergent students. Research is urgently needed to break down barriers to success for all.

Neurodivergent students are at higher risk of non-continuation: lack of academic integration and poor academic experiences impact their decisions to remain at university. For students with ADHD and other learning differences, intrinsic emotional factors such as academic self-doubt may moderate success. Moreover, as neurodivergence is widely experienced as integral to identity (Shaw and Anderson, 2018), the additional psychological impact on
emotional well-being is profound. Willingness to engage with support services may be affected, with many dyslexic students for instance preferring to reject the opportunity to receive support to avoid further stigmatisation. Through impacting changes in practice to alleviate such shame and foster belongingness, this research has potential to keep more neurodivergent students in higher education, thus contributing to the diversification of people who go on
to be researchers.

To date, no research phenomenologically explores the manifestation of neurodivergent learner shame in higher education. Further, while interest is growing in teacher-student empathy models for positive student outcomes, no research investigates the potential for these to overcome stigma-based barriers to learning. Finally, although autism research has begun to move away from deficit-focussed studies and increasingly adopt the neurodiversity paradigm which values the diversity of all minds, other forms of neurodivergence remain mired in research pursuing a normalisation agenda. This participatory study would liberate all forms of neurodivergency from that pathologising frame.

This study positions participatory research as paradigm not methodology, embedding the epistemological expertise of neurodivergent students from the outset. The research questions are grounded in symbolic interactionist conceptualisation of the self as constructed subjectively through interactions with others and the environment, and the interpretation of those interactions. This lends itself to a qualitative, phenomenological research design which explores experience on its own terms.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a flexible and idiographic frame which attends to every nuance of behaviour and expression to capture that interpretative meaning-making in action. Best practice frameworks for participatory research in the neurodiversity field emphasise the need to adapt language and methodology to allow the meaningful engagement of participants, both attributes of the responsive IPA process. One-to-one in-depth interviews will follow the participants' direction of focus to understand the complexities of lived experience and elicit rich data from non-verbal cues and gestures.