Dive into UDL: Immersive Practices to Develop Expert Learners

by Kendra Grant and Luis Perez (ASCD, 2022)

UDL as a Long Game

Dive into UDL encourages professionals to embrace UDL by first reflecting on our identities as professionals and as learners. Adopting UDL is a "long game," not a one-time retrofit to meet accessibility requirements, so faculty must get comfortable reflecting on their practices and embracing incremental change.

Technology Shifts

The authors make an interesting point about video captioning. Captioning was once a major difficulty for online materials, but a technology shift means fairly accurate captions are no longer hard to obtain. Today there is a similar concern about PDFs that screen readers cannot interpret. It seems reasonable to predict that within a few years, AI-based technologies will be able to "read" the meaning of images with fair accuracy.

Removing the Fence

The book traces an evolution in UDL's focus, from making materials accessible to students with disabilities toward "access, ownership, and expertise" for all students. The authors take a famous visual a step further. In the well-known version, three figures stand on blocks to watch a baseball game over a fence. In the first panel, equal blocks lift only two viewers high enough, illustrating "equality." In the second, each viewer gets a block tall enough to see, illustrating equity of outcomes. In the authors' new panel, the fence is transparent, so no one needs an assistive device at all. In a nutshell, UDL seeks to "provide equity for all learners in a proactive and systematic way." The transparent fence and the captioning story make the same point: the long game of UDL is removing barriers at their source rather than working around them one learner at a time.

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