Making participation accessible to all: Evaluating the redesign of a general chemistry lab course from a blind student’s perspective

Lab courses teaching basic experimental skills are an integral part of most chemistry programs around the world. Given an increasing sensitivity toward diversity, minimizing barriers and enabling participation of all students in lab courses is a central goal of educational efforts. So far, however, few manageable approaches exist that support lecturers in planning, implementing, and evaluating lab courses that enable all students to actively participate. This article presents an approach to redesigning introductory lab experiments enabling more participation in the lab. Based on the NinU framework, a framework developed from a German network for inclusive science education (ger.: Netzwerk inklusiver naturwissenschaftlicher Unterricht (NinU)), we illustrate how we adapted experiments to allow blind students to actively participate in an undergraduate lab course. We also present results from a qualitative case study in which the student was interviewed about the success of our redesign. These results reveal that the modifications based on the NinU framework not only largely increased participation but also had unintended effects, such as technical, organizational, physical, and occupational safety issues. We discuss these findings as being of particular value to educators and researchers seeking to increase participation in the laboratory and encourage further research involving all stakeholders.