Inclusive design in a health technical program

I stumbled upon the world of universal design for learning purely by accident, while looking for guidelines for how to integrate a physically disabled student into a physically demanding course.

What I discovered was a new set of lenses through which to look at teaching and learning that will benefit all of my future students, by helping them to be less impacted by barriers in the classroom and pedagogical design.

Why UDL, and why now?

Not only do we have increasing numbers of students coming into our programs with various learning difficulties, our students face a wide variety of other challenges. Some have children, many have full or part-time jobs, others may have a 2 hour commute each day. Some have language barriers, others just graduated from high-school and have not experienced the latitude and accompanying responsibility of studying at college. Many have not yet mastered the academic skills that will carry them through.

One common challenge for our students is time. Our students struggle to keep up, to prioritize, and to “get it all done”.

Project overview: video version @left (click on video)

This video was created with my department colleagues as the intended audience. It describes interventions to a target course that I designed to address a couple of specific learning barriers, however, the design principles now permeate everything I do as a teacher.

Universal design for learning is based on the principles of universal design for designing spaces in the physical world, which are illustrated below, and throughout the other pages of the site. I like analogies, so I chose to use this model to frame the changes I made to my course:

Initially, one point of confusion was the difference between the accommodation model and UDL and how the two fit together.

On the LEFT is the traditional model where everyone gets the same thing. The MIDDLE represents the accommodation model, where individual students are provided special/reasonable accommodations in order to help them overcome particular difficulties and help them succeed. The image on the RIGHT depicts the UDL model where barriers are simply removed in order to provide access to everyone.

Once I started learning about UDL, I thought if you have #3, then why do you need #2?

The answer: this is an analogy; analogies have limitations, and UDL can’t solve every access issue for every student. According to Assistive Technology expert Roch Ducharme, “you will still always need the boxes”.

So ideally the two systems will coexist and complement each other.

The goal:

Enabling our students to become EXPERT LEARNERS, whom CAST describes as:

Steps

Providing access
- Key: adjustability, separating means from the ends
Scaffolding skills for success
- Key: formative feedback
Building independence:
- Key: practicing meta-skills

AHA! moments

How I think about CONTENT has changed. Content is rapidly changing in today’s world; students need to learn how to access it and analyse it from it’s various organic sources, not only from a teacher’s slides or a textbook.

Being a true EXPERT at something is more than knowing a lot of things; it is knowing how & where to access such knowledge, how it is useful in the real world, and to internalize the ability to renew and expand that knowledge.

Students do not arrive at CEGEP with these skills, and they don't magically appear.

They are not included in most of our courses ministry learning objectives.

They are nonetheless as important as the theoretical knowledge and hands on skills that we tend to focus on; time and effort must be devoted to guiding our students to become life-long learners.

Next steps:

Iterative design: keep on keeping on

The flipped model freed up space and time in the classroom; I would like to focus now on creating more structured and relevant collaborative learning activities in the classroom. I would also like to activate and shorten my modules, based on student feedback. I will be participating in a mentoring program with another teacher at Dawson this Spring and Fall to help accomplish this goal.

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