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SPECIFIC \u2013 GENERAL \u2013 UNIVERSAL\n<\/b>What\u00a0<\/b>Brought<\/b>\u00a0Me\u00a0<\/b>To<\/b>\u00a0UDL<\/b><\/h2>\n
SPECIFIC \u2013 GENERAL \u2013 UNIVERSAL<\/p>\n
<\/b>I came to UDL wanting to learn design techniques and principles to improve the accessibility of my courses.<\/strong><\/p>\n My\u00a0specific<\/i>\u00a0concern<\/strong> as a teacher has\u00a0been to help students<\/strong> from low-income backgrounds, students from the BIPOC and LBGTQ+ communities\u00a0feel invited and comfortable in the\u00a0general<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong>(i.e.,\u00a0<\/i>conventional) learning environment.<\/strong> With that in mind, I targeted one\u00a0philosophy\u00a0course to improve, titled\u00a0Thinking For Ourselves<\/i>,\u00a0<\/i>in which students range from well experienced in philosophy<\/strong> (some students have taken four philosophy courses by the time they take mine) to the complete novice<\/strong> (some students have never taken a philosophy course). This seemed like a\u00a0perfect opportunity to apply\u00a0some of the lessons\u00a0I\u2019d\u00a0learnt from UDL\u00a0to my specific concern about\u00a0attainability gaps.<\/p>\n When I\u00a0created\u00a0the\u00a0philosophy\u00a0course a few years earlier, I had the benefit of using lessons that\u00a0I\u2019d\u00a0learnt from WID in the\u00a0designing\u00a0process. The result was that my course\u00a0was\u00a0well\u00a0scaffolded, used a variety of evaluative methods,\u00a0emphasized\u00a0the revision process of writing, and offered many opportunities to use different\u00a0writing genres<\/strong>. It is my\u00a0favourite\u00a0class to teach and it is a successful course!\u00a0Nevertheless, I could see the attainability gap between the two groups of students (those with a philosophy background and those without), so I began tweaking things according to universal design principles. What\u00a0you\u2019ll\u00a0see in\u00a0the second part of\u00a0my portfolio is a description of the changes I made from Winter 2019 to Winter 2020.<\/p>\n Quite as a surprise, the coronavirus hit in\u00a0Winter\u00a02020.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0now Fall 2020 and we are still in its throes!\u00a0In anticipation of an online\u00a0Fall\u00a0and probably an online Winter,\u00a0I created a new Humanities 101 course from the\u00a0ground up using UDL principles.<\/strong>\u00a0This course,\u00a0in particular,\u00a0owes everything to the conversations I had with Laure\u00a0Galipeau\u00a0and Catherine Soleil and to my UDL cohort\u00a0members\u00a0Ahmad\u00a0Banki, Ian Cuthbertson, and Jeffrey\u00a0Zeidel. It felt like the course wrote itself\u00a0thanks to all of you. A\u00a0description of my\u00a0design process for this course\u00a0can be\u00a0found\u00a0in the third part of my portfolio.<\/strong><\/p>\n Another outcome of\u00a0my UDL experience is that I reframed the\u00a0UDL principles into four\u00a0basic tools. I did this so that I could have quick guidelines to follow in the future, and decided to include\u00a0the four\u00a0basic tools\u00a0in the first part\u00a0portfolio.<\/p>\n The result is that my portfolio has three parts:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u2022 third, an example<\/strong> of applying the tools to create a new course<\/strong>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nI wanted to learn\u00a0ways to improve my courses\u00a0so that I was decreasing the educational attainability gap between students. From the beginning, UDL helped broaden the\u00a0scope of my concern and reframe\u00a0my specific interest in more\u00a0universal<\/i><\/strong>\u00a0(i.e.,\u00a0<\/i>inclusive) parameters.<\/strong> I realized very quickly that fitting students into the conventional learning environment was the wrong approach. A better,\u00a0more universal\u00a0method is to\u00a0reconfigure\u00a0learning environments<\/strong> such\u00a0that\u00a0they are\u00a0accessible and inclusive from the\u00a0outset.<\/p>\n\n
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