In today’s third meeting of the “Inclusive Lund University” course, Linda Stjernholm talked about “neuropsychiatric disabilities and inclusive teaching”. Continue reading
This afternoon, we had the second seminar in the “Inclusive Classroom” course, this time on “learning support for students with disabilities at LU”. Emma Carlsson and Philip Johansson visited us and told us about their work at the Disability Support Services (which are a unit at the Study Support and Learning group within Lund University admin). Here is my summary!
New academic year, new courses starting! Today, the “Inclusive Classroom (UDL)” course, that I am involved with together with Lotta Åbjörnsson and Håkan Eftring. My role is mostly to give guidance and advice for projects and reports towards the end of the course, but I’m attending the other meetings, too, just because it is always interesting and a great opportunity to discuss with other teachers.
Now that we are back to (the new?) normal after the pandemic, it seems that something has changed regarding how student physically attend teaching. Why is that? That’s what Kevin L. Merry and Tom Lowe are exploring on the “Talking Learning and Teaching” podcast.
I have written about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) before, and from those posts it is clear that I did struggle with the concept quite a bit before I got the point and it slowly grew on me. Before I came across the “office analogy” for brain functions, I found it difficult to understand the structure of the UDL framework, and many points seemed redundant. That they show brain areas to make the point of “there are different processes involved in learning” is still weird to me, it looks like something I would expect in one of those magazines the pharmacies give to you, or an ad for headache medication; very pseudo scientific. Anyway, instructors struggling with the framework is very common in my experience as instructor and as academic developer, and also Cumming and Rose (2022) find in their review of current literature of UDL in higher education that that is one major obstacle. They also find, however, that UDL is well supported by theory about how learning works (something that I often hear questioned, even though nobody can actually point to where it goes against the currently accepted understanding of learning), and also that implementing UDL leads to very high satisfaction in both students (who don’t have to disclose disabilities any more, and aren’t being singled out) and instructors (who don’t have to spontaneously and individually accommodate students). So reading this review, I feel even more confident that we should continue working with UDL (at least until we find something better, and if you find something, please let me know!) and that we need to put more effort into “selling” the framework to instructors.
Cumming, T. M., & Rose, M. C. (2022). Exploring universal design for learning as an accessibility tool in higher education: A review of the current literature. The Australian Educational Researcher, 49(5), 1025-1043.
I have been part of running a course called “the inclusive classroom” this fall. I learned a lot of new things both from other instructors (for example Louise’s excellent “office” metaphor for brain functions) and from participants (for example Damien & Rhiannon’s “design for the edges” below, a very inspiring read!). And now at the end of the course, we asked participants to share one paragraph each about their best tips, which I compiled into an article we will present as a roundtable discussion at LTH’s conference on teaching and learning in December. Read it below or here.
(Featured image: diversity of seasons observed when I left the office yesterday)
In last week’s seminar on inclusive teaching, Louise Morreau, psychologist at the student health services at Lund University, gave an inspiring presentation and used such a great image to talk about how we can think of the brain’s functions, that I have to adapt it for myself right away (because that is how MY brain works).
I recently watched “the myth of average” by Todd Rose, and he makes the most convincing argument for not designing teaching for “the average student” in hopes of that making it work optimally for all students, but instead looking at the extremes and making it work for everybody (you see where we are going here — Universal Design for Learning ;-)). I really enjoyed watching it and I think I might make it “recommended watching” in all upcoming courses. Check it out! Continue reading
I have again been chewing on the “Universal Design for Learning” idea for the last couple of days. This was prompted by us agreeing that we want to let participants in an upcoming course play UDL Bingo, where participants check boxes if they notice that we are doing something to make the course more accessible, and we can then discuss what we did do and what we could and maybe should have done. In order to improve the old bingo (which I am not linking to here, because the new one comes below!), I went back to the UDL guidelines (http://udlguidelines.cast.org). I still find them slightly overwhelming, but here is a version that now makes sense in my head (I always have to re-compile complex information in order to process it…) and that I think I might be able to teach in the 45 or so minutes that I have available in that specific course.
There are a ton of things on my to-do list for this week before I go on vacation, but I really don’t want to do any of them right now, and so much not so that I, instead, just put together a “UDL bingo” that we can use to challenge ourselves! (Procrastination is best when you still do something useful, right?) Of course, the goal would be to do more than what is suggested on the bingo card, but this is at least a start!