An opportunity for me to move to a lecturer role arose and I began teaching in June 2020.

Thank you, I love this job, I finally feel like I am making a difference. My learners, our learners are made up from all areas of life, age, ethnicity, capabilities. This makes for some challenging days, but everyone one has the right to learn. I will listen and learn, help, and guide, mentor, coach whoever I can, whenever I can.

My colleagues are amazing, we are all very different, we complement each other nicely. I wonder if the teachers I had growing up were the same, or did they work in silos???

Undertaking all these new tasks and duties with my own learning challenge was very difficult and demanding, but nothing was going to get in the way, I will manage, I will ask, watch, and learn, listen, and learn.

Since I was finding these new tasks demanding, what were my students feeling? Were they feeling similar to me, do they? If any of them are Neurodiverse they may have difficulties when it comes to undertaking learning tasks and assignments.

Do they have the same approach to learning challenges as I do, therefore develop work arounds or do they just stop their studies? Telling everyone it just wasn’t for them. I did so maybe other do this to, when learning gets tough and there seems no way out, do we just quit!

Could I change the way I teach to support these learners? Could I teach these learners some of my strategies I have learned through managing my own learning challenges?

After completing my BAppMgt I continued on to complete my GDTE which covered off a range of adult learning theories, tools, and strategies about how adults learn.

I watch and observe my learners of all different backgrounds with a different range of learning ‘disadvantages’, and different process styles, as defined by VARK (2021) some of us are visual, auditory and or kinaesthetic learners; we are monochronic (focus on one thing at a time) or polychronic (do many things simultaneously, very good at multitasking) in the way we process information.

I want to examine what is out there to aid learners who have learning challenges and the many more to come, to be the best they can be.

I would like learners to be comfortable about sharing their learning challenges, learn about how they can overcome them and go on to be successful.

It has now been confirmed after many years that I do have Neurodiversity (Clouder et al., 2020) an umbrella term that incorporates many learning difficulties, on reflection I probably did not realise that I had learning challenges and nor did I seek out support, but rather I became incredibly skilful in utilising “work arounds” and my own strategies to overcome.