By Sandi Leonard
As an academic, I have been trained to be at least somewhat critical of anything that describes itself as exhaustive using words like “all-encompassing,” “general,” or “universal.” In many cases, such claims are the result of erroneous thinking rooted in egocentrism and/or a desire to explain away the real complexities of our multifaceted identities and different needs.
Thus, my first impression I was first told about “Universal Design for Learning,” was, as the kids emote, 🚩🚩🚩.
Now, having gone through this training, I can say that “Universal Design for Learning” is, happily, a misnomer. There is nothing universal about it. I had feared that the universal aspect that the title promises would equate to a gimmicky magic bullet; however, all three of its principles begin with the words “Provide Multiple Means of…,” and are, in fact, all about allowing course content to be approached in different ways.
The unifying factor in all of this is an emphasis on our own Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) as the guiding central principles in our courses, as, indeed, they ought to be. This centering means that not all modifications are appropriate in all cases, since doing so would subvert the learning objectives we are trying to achieve.
As an example, I teach a number of composition and English courses where writing is part of the objective of the course. However, the type (or genre) of writing is not always defined. So, in a technology learning community section of my CMP100 course this past semester, I allowed a good deal of freedom of expression in their narrative assignments as it might relate to their own skills and interests.
The course SLOs that my narrative assignment corresponds to are “Write in order to discover and learn,” “Write for different audiences and purposes,” and “Write in a variety of genres used in academic and public contexts.” Traditionally, I had students approach this assignment as a narrative non-fiction story, as a sort of mini-memoir where they might “discover and learn” things about themselves through the writing process. For this assignment, unlike an earlier technical writing assignment, the students were to imagine their peers as the audience, with the purpose of personal sharing in mind. This assignment fell in the middle of the course and had been one of my students’ favorites in that it allowed for a good deal of personal expression, which was, indeed, one of the goals.
In addition to my course SLOs, I also have a more refined set of skills that I teach in order to achieve the students’ familiarity with particular genres and a sensitivity to elements of writing style in the genre of creative writing, which include the importance of building description, the use of dialogue, and plot structure. These are important skills as they scaffold into rhetorical moves and elements of style used in the research paper, and they are key skills that I draw upon to achieve other objectives in the course. For instance, the use of quotation marks in dialogue helps students understand the use of quotation marks to indicate verbatim extracts from their source material in a research paper. And, building description in narrative is not entirely dissimilar to building evidence for a thesis. Attention to plot structure promotes critical thinking and attention to the logic of an argument.
However, within my larger course objectives as well as my more refined set of skills, I have found that there is some space to allow students to practice a wider range of expression without wholly dismantling my lessons. For this assignment, I allowed students to write their narrative in another medium altogether. Though students still needed to use words on a Google Doc to draft their ideas, structure their story, and undergo multiple revisions, their final expression need not be black printed text on a white page. To give them a push (and because this was a technology-themed learning community), I required some—any—use of technology/multi-media outside of the requisite Google Doc in their final expression.
Students came up with a rainbow of creative expressions. One student wrote their personal narrative as a Reddit r/AmItheAsshole post along with fictious outraged replies. Another set their narrative to music playing in the background. Another presented theirs as a visual novel with visual art garnered from friends who were part of their story and wanted a say in their own representation. Another used hidden text requiring the reader interaction to seek out their secret thoughts, which altered the narrative significantly when discovered. Another very poignant one made their narrative into an interactive game that the reader—acting the part of the protagonist—would always lose.
Though these stories were written in different mediums, they fulfilled the SLOs better than the original assignment ever did. By writing in different mediums, students forged a more meaningful connection between audience, purpose, and genre. Indeed, my students know that their peers generally don’t sit down to read a short story or memoir outside of assigned schoolwork. But their peers do read r/AmItheAsshole, interact with visual novels, listen to music, and play videogames. Thus, the students had more authentic attention to audience, considering ways that their peers would or could interact with their stories and how they might perceive them.
Additionally, because their genres did differ somewhat, students became more aware of their own style and how to control it in relation to the genre, particularly in peer review. For example, the student writing a choose-your-own adventure became much more aware of the fact that such narratives, like videogames, are written in second-person and present tense, to give the reader a sense of immediacy in their choices, in contrast to personal narratives written as short stories, which are generally written in first-person and past tense.
Despite—or perhaps because of—the range of mediums that I allowed on this assignment, my assessment of it was also more focused on my learning objectives, and this led to productive feedback that had students really question the what and why of their writing. I was still able to introduce the skills necessary to scaffold into the next assignment, which required a more rigid set of expectations; however, perhaps I ought to question these as well. This, to me, is what (Universal) Design for Learning is all about: centering on our real learning objectives so that students can achieve them in multiple ways. This, like all learning, is a process of questioning our preconceptions.
Dr. Sandi Leonard is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Kutztown University. She recently completed the Basics of Universal Design for Learning course as part of the Center for Engaged Learning Inclusivity Institute.