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Increasing Interest in using UDL to Develop Inclusive Provisions for Indigenous Students, International Students, First Generation Student, and Culturally Diverse Learners
There is increasing awareness that UDL is pertinent when it comes to creating inclusive provisions for International students (Fovet, 2019), Indigenous students (James, 2018), culturally diverse students (Kieran & Anderson, 2019), LGBTQ2S+ students (Daniels & Geiger, 2010) as well as first generation students – this happening mostly at community college level. There is also growing interest in UDL to support racialized students (Fritzgerald, 2020), and students facing socio-economic challenges, mostly at K-12 level thus far, and it is hoped that literature in higher education will soon address these issues. This exponential growth in initiatives is critical in the development of UDL across campus. Thus far, indeed, it has possible for faculty to dismiss UDL as a minority discourse mostly only associated with the needs of students with disabilities. The emerging literature indicates that the wide appeal of UDL to all diverse learners; it also highlights that diverse learners now collectively represent a clear near majority within the student population. There is therefore urgency in addressing the barriers this large percentage of learners are experiencing, and UDL can now be seen as a majority discourse. Growth of UDL Implementation in Graduate Education There has so far been an assumption that because class sizes are smaller in graduate education, the instructor is better able to focus on individual needs (Lee, 2019). It is also frequently thought that the graduate student population is more homogeneous. It is also often presumed that because graduate education is selective, students will have by then developed appropriate strategies for success (Wong, & Chiu, 2019). Many of these perceptions about graduate education are perhaps in fact unfounded and need to be debunked. Graduate education as a sector is facing many of the challenges identified in undergraduate courses. There are considerable issues with accessibility in graduate education, according to the literature (Rose, 2010; Nature, 2019; Perry, 2019). Even if classes are generally smaller, graduate students report accessibility issues with resources and uploads to the LMSs. Student also report a very limited diet of assessment, within which presentation and group work compete with formal paper writing, but little further flexibility is offered (Fovet, 2017b). This lack of flexibility in assessment format, together with extensive workload and tight deadlines, leads to significant barriers for many diverse learners. Graduate programs also play a key role in the granting of professional qualifications, and field placements often make up part of these programs; practicums are rarely designed with diversity in mind and create significant barriers for non-traditional students (Kiesel et al., 2018; Ozelie et al., 2019). For all these reasons, UDL shows a promising potential in addressing the needs of graduate students through a whole class approach to inclusive design. Rich Reflection around Assessment using the UDL Lens There is growing frustration within the post-secondary sector with traditional summative assessment (Sewagegn & Diale, 2019). UDL is beginning to play a key role as a lens within this reflection, which seeks to replace conventional assessment methods with student-centered formative assessment (HEA, 2017; Morris et al., 2019). When instructors explore UDL, assessment has the potential of becoming less teacher-centric and of meeting the actual needs of learners (Tobin, 2019). This reflection has begun on many campuses and there is growing literature documenting the use of UDL in the redesign of assessment. Growing Interest for UDL in a New Set of Disciplines There has been a significant growth in the literature on UDL implementation in higher education but most of these initiatives have been situated within specific disciplines (Oliveira et al., 2019). These initiatives have included humanities (Chanock, 2008), social sciences (Arendale & Ghere, 2008) and some science courses (Kumar &Wideman, 2014; Coleman & Smith, 2019). There are still, despite these initiatives, some sectors that seem resistant to the exploration of UDL and it will be important in the next decade to see UDL implementation work being developed in these disciplines. Law in particular is a sector not much work on UDL has taken place to date (Miksch, 2003). Language Education is also a field where UDL is getting traction. Visual Arts as a sector has so far been resistant to UDL (James & Kader, 2008), but field initiatives have begun in Canada. Medicine, Management and Leadership are sectors where one would hope to see more efforts deployed soon towards UDL implementation. It is difficult to get buy-in from many of these academic disciplines before the literature itself can offer evidence-based outcomes that justify the adoption of UDL. However, in a vicious circle, it is also unlikely that evidence-based literature will ever emerge in these fields before some practitioners take the blame, experiment with UDL, and report their findings. It will be important in the years to come to break this cycle and to convince scholar-practitioners in these remaining disciplines to implement UDL and to publish an analysis of their experiences. Osmotic Connection with other Pedagogical Approaches This lecture has already highlighted the degree to which it is essential to present UDL to faculty as the convenient repackaging of long standing theoretical stances on accessibility, inclusion, constructivism, and active learning, rather than as a new framework or a recent trend. There has been encouraging scholarship in the last few years which explicitly highlights these connections between UDL and other important school of thoughts related to pedagogy (Fovet, 2020). A growing and key overlap is the intersection of UDL and culturally responsive pedagogy (Kieran & Anderson, 2019). The close connections that exist between critical pedagogy and UDL are also increasingly being explored, particularly in respect of the ‘multiple means of engagement’ principle (Warner & Dillenschneider, 2019). These developments are crucial to the growth of UDL in higher education, as they consistently reassure instructors that UDL is not a self-standing innovation, but rather a significant and unavoidable link in the historical progression of collective reflection on pedagogy. Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the closure of most physical campuses around the world through 2020-21. It has caused an overnight pivot to online and blended instruction and assessment (Crawford et al., 2020). This has led to remarkable opportunities for discussion and reflection around the objectives of assessment in HE; UDL has frequently been discussed – either implicitly or explicitly - within the redesign efforts that have occurred throughout the post-secondary sector during this tumultuous period (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2020). The pivot has indeed led many schools and departments to abandon the summative ‘one size fits all’ assessment in favour of rich, and more sophisticated formative assessment that allows the demonstration of rich analytical reflection and of complex skills (Jensen et al., 2019). There have also been well documented failures during the pandemic, but overall the urgency of the situation has placed UDL at the centre of considerations (Rosenbusch, 2020). Video version of this section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrlGEabZTtQ• |