LHU students Jordan Yohn and Jim Fickes are seated in the wheelchairs, while Dean Pettinato and Geoffrey Perkowski stand behind the chairs. All four are seniors majoring in Health and Physical Education.

LOCK HAVEN, Pa. - There were a lot of wheelchairs on the Lock Haven University campus on Thursday, March 24. Students in Associate Professor Brett Everhart’s Adapted Physical Education course got first-hand experience in using wheelchairs to get from place to place on campus as they attempted to accomplish certain assigned tasks.

HPED 312, Adapted Physical Education, is a course designed to prepare Health and Physical Education majors to accommodate for specific learning needs as they teach students with disabilities.

Students were paired with partners to use a wheel-chair to go across campus to a specific site within different university buildings and complete specific tasks while in those buildings. The partners switched roles for the trip back to the classroom for discussion related to the assignment outcomes. For example, one team was instructed to meet with someone on the third floor of Russell Building and another was instructed to check out specific books from the library.

Everhart explained the three-fold intent of the assignment. First was to give the students a small sense of what it must be like for individuals with disabilities who must use wheelchairs to move from place to place. Second was to increase awareness of what others say and do when they are close to someone who is in a wheelchair. The third objective was to determine how wheelchair accessible the university campus is.