New in office: Klaus-Ulrich Guder is the new representative of severely disabled persons
2023-02-28 Bärbel Hitz, Leuphana's long-time disability representative, took her well-deserved retirement last year. A new election was therefore necessary, at which Klaus-Ulrich Guder was elected on 24 October 2022. He then took office on 25 November 2022 - and he is not entirely unfamiliar with the task: he has been the representative for students with disabilities and chronic illnesses for two years.
Klaus-Ulrich Guder's new tasks as a representative for the severely disabled are manifold: "I have been in office since the end of November, since then new things have been added every week," he says. These include participation in appointment and recruitment procedures. There, Guder and his deputies Betina Vieth and Carmen Schneider ensure that severely disabled persons are not disadvantaged. In addition, he provides support to those affected, for example, when they apply for recognition of their severe disability. In addition, the representative body for severely disabled persons works to ensure that the perspective of those affected is taken into account in the design of the campus and the workplace: "New windows have recently been installed in Building 14. With standard windows, the handles are about in the middle - a wheelchair user can't get to them," Guder explains, "with the new windows, accessibility has now been taken into account."
Klaus-Ulrich Guder has already been the representative for students with disabilities and chronic illnesses for one and a half years. "Here, the focus is primarily on topics such as compensation for disadvantages or technical support during studies," he explains. He will continue to take on this activity. Parallel to these offices, Guder works at Leuphana as a research assistant for mathematics and its didactics. During his doctorate in 2001 at the TU Braunschweig, he dealt with the handling of impairment in the school environment. In order to find out how teachers explain and deal with learning difficulties in pupils' mathematics lessons, he conducted interviews with primary school teachers and was thus able to establish commonalities and differences and identify ways of acting by teachers that arose in practice.