Universal Design by Kevin

I love UDL because it cuts through all of my ideas about what school/education should be.  The Providing New Access article says, “once you understand the true purpose for learning, you can use various means, media, scaffolds, and supports to help students reach the goal without undermining the challenge and the learning.”  Well then what is the true purpose?  It’s not about acquiring a specific set of knowledge or skills - what a core curriculum seeks to do.  Shouldn’t it be about empowering learners to set their own goals, widening understanding, practice, and providing safe spaces to test and experiment?

It’s easy for me to fall back into the trap of status quo by thinking that it would be too hard to accommodate everyone in one curriculum.  My time in classrooms has shown me first hand the challenges of mainstreaming.  I need to remind myself that UDL is not about squishing accommodations into a curriculum, but exactly the opposite. It’s about designing flexibility into the learning objective foundations and language of any curriculum.  The ideas of UDL come full circle by proposing that rather than using general assessment, we should be monitoring “individual progress.”  It reminds me of growth mindset.  Of course students fall into fixed mindsets when they fall short or exceed the learning objectives of a core curriculum.  

I also really appreciate the idea “that learners considered to be within a group are at least as diverse along various dimensions affecting learning as are learners considered to be in different groups (Rose & Meyer, 2002).”  I thought of a different analogy: it’s like designing a shoe to fit most people’s foot size. A core curriculum is like making a big shoe that most people can fit their foot in, but actually truly fits only a few people.  Whereas a universally designed shoe would be adjustable.

Right from the Start reinforces the idea that universal access needs to include multiple engagement pathways.  In addition to something being simply accessable, it’s important that it is personally engaging.  “In keeping with UDL principles, the teacher can present concepts in multiple ways, offer children multiple means of expression, and provide a variety of options for engagement with learning (Hitchcock et al., 2002).”  Since it’s impossible to predict the multitudes of ways that people might like to engage with ideas, it seems crucially important to flexibility/possibility/imagination directly into the curriculum.  If people don’t connect with something, they won’t care about using/developing it.  Learning needs to be relevant.  This makes me think about what we do when things are hard (i.e. when they are just outside the zone of proximal development).  Maybe it’s impossible for a student to see how some content will eventually be engaging or useful to them.  What’s the relationship between UDL and motivation?  If things are made more universally accessable, do students still need a push in the right direction or does motivation become more inherent?