Inclusive Field Kit: sharing approaches for including students with disabilities

Inclusive approaches to teaching and learning in the field seek to anticipate and mediate access for students and lecturers with disabilities as part of the standard provision of fieldwork. In practice anticipating the needs of all students and designing a field experience that is universally accessible is very difficult. A more pragmatic approach is to recognise the social as well as technological approaches to inclusion, which can be used to promote a sense of community, respect and support among learners and educators. This can make field experiences socially inclusive, even if not all of the sites are universally accessible. In collaboration with the International Association for Geoscience Diversity, we have been collating approaches to improve the accessibility of fieldwork and promote social inclusion for all students. We are developing a set of resources to share effective practices and enable groups to trial approaches that embed the use of technology that can be of benefit to everyone, including students with disabilities. Examples include the use of media to introduce sites and fieldwork activities prior to a field trip, the provision of mobile technologies for fieldnotes and measurements, tour guide headsets to support aural communication in the field, and photo sharing and video streaming to facilitate remote access to sites