Anthony Gartner was five weeks into a brand-new job at La Trobe University when campuses in Australia closed for the COVID-19 lockdown.

He’d come on board at the Melbourne-based institution to manage disability services for students. And as La Trobe weathered the pandemic’s upheavals and pivoted to online learning, Gartner saw a window to open discussions about his team’s work, too.

“The question that I asked the team was: what does education look like in 2050? And how do we get there?” he says. “This was a real opportunity for some blue sky thinking about how we could deliver service that empowered students to be independent learners and better able to participate in the workforce.”

AccessAbility is La Trobe’s support center for students with a variety of often overlapping identities: from autism and neurodiversity to dyslexia and learning disabilities to brain injuries and physical disabilities—along with refugees, student caregivers, students from foster care, or veterans. AccessAbility’s team of 13 works with 2,000 students to help them overcome a variety of learning challenges, based on the philosophy of what students can do, not what they cannot.

“We ask: ‘what training can we give that actually enables you to access and express your own unique abilities?” says Gartner.

Here’s how—and how that approach fits into broader conversations about inclusion and diversity.