DISCUS-IS Research Blog  ·  Post 4 of 4  ·  Series: What Students Tell Us 

Honoring the Friction: Neurodivergent Students and Collaborative Learning

What happens when we stop trying to smooth over the complexity of inclusion (and start listening instead)

There is a temptation, in writing about the benefits of collaborative learning, to make it sound easier than it is. To suggest that if you simply structure the groupwork well, arrange the tasks thoughtfully, and circulate often enough, the friction will dissolve.

The students in the DISCUS-IS project didn’t let us do that. Most of them identify as neurodivergent — with profiles including ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, autism, anxiety, OCD, misophonia, and auditory processing differences, among others. All of them participated in collaborative statistics classrooms. Nearly all of them described benefits. But many of them also described friction — real, sometimes significant friction — and the honesty of those accounts is part of what makes them useful.

What “access friction” means

The disability studies scholar Lydia X. Jackson (2019) uses the phrase access friction to describe the unavoidable messiness of creating inclusion in learning spaces. Friction isn’t a sign of failure; it’s what happens when you try to design spaces that work for everyone, because everyone’s needs don’t always point in the same direction. Jackson asks: “What would happen if instead of trying to smooth out disability, we instead developed the capacity to acknowledge and appreciate the friction of it?”

That question animated our analysis of this section of the data. What friction did students experience around collaborative learning? And what, if anything, did instructors do to honor rather than ignore it?

Pacing and processing speed

Madison’s account was the most detailed on this theme. She found group discussion genuinely helpful for understanding — “it was helpful to get everyone else’s perspective” — but the pace of groupwork created real difficulty:

Madison’s preferred solution was structural: shorter groupwork intervals interspersed with whole-class discussion, and more choice about when to work with a group. She also articulated what responsive pacing looks like from a student perspective:

Anxiety and the assumptions we bring

Heidi came into statistics class anticipating that groupwork would be difficult for her because of anxiety. She expected to feel behind, exposed, and different from everyone else. What she found surprised her:

This is worth sitting with. Heidi’s anxiety was real, and it shaped her expectations going in. But the experience of collaborative learning in a classroom that felt psychologically safe changed what she thought was possible for her. That shift didn’t happen because the friction of anxiety was removed. It happened because she was in a room where that friction was shared, visible, and met with care.

Disclosure and the limits of camaraderie

Selena raised a dimension of access friction that is easy to overlook: the role of prior relationship in whether students feel safe disclosing their needs. She had the good fortune of knowing several of her groupmates already, which meant she felt comfortable telling them she was processing more slowly because of a math learning disability. She recognized that her experience was not universal:

Her practical conclusion: instructors may need to actively help students get to know each other, rather than assuming that shared enrollment creates the conditions for honest communication. Structures that build community deliberately — across the early weeks of a course, before high-stakes collaborative work begins — can reduce the disclosure barrier for students who would otherwise carry their needs in silence.

What “honoring the friction” looks like in practice

The students in the DISCUS-IS project were not asking for collaborative learning to be removed from their statistics courses. They were asking for instructors who stay curious about how it’s working — for them specifically, in this classroom, with these students.

Cole, who offered some of the most direct advice in the entire dataset, put it plainly: “Be prepared to work with students who learn differently.” That preparation isn’t a one-time accommodation. It’s an ongoing orientation toward the individuals in the room.

Universal Design for Learning doesn’t promise frictionless classrooms. It offers a framework for designing classrooms in which friction is visible, named, and responded to — where students who process differently, communicate differently, or need different conditions for safety are not treated as exceptions to the design, but as reasons for it.

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Part of the “What Students Tell Us” series · DISCUS-IS Project · NSF IUSE #2314358