Kari Marken is a lecturer in the Entrepreneurship, Sustainability & Innovation Group at the Sauder School of Business. She discusses her project of turning her classroom into a ‘learning lab’ where she embraces movement to enhance learning her class.
How have you applied UDL to your work and approach as a lecturer?
I bring my background in experiential learning—in the arts, design, community-based projects, and outdoor education—to my role at Sauder, where I teach the “Creativity in Business” course for both undergraduate and graduate students. My teaching uses Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles through movement-based strategies that enhance student engagement. My classroom functions as a lab where movement forms part of the learning experience.
Could you please walk me through your project on how movement can be conceptualized as a normal and beneficial part of the learning process and how your classroom functioned like a ‘learning lab’?
My UDL Fellows project investigated how movement could improve learning for students, with a particular interest in building academic spaces that harness the contributions of students (and faculty) with ADHD. We examined how movement affects engagement, concentration, and group performance through data collection in classroom settings.
The premise of our project was that education often defaults to students sitting still, while movement creates more inclusive learning opportunities.
I implemented movement activities in my classes:
- The “Look Around You” lesson illuminates the power of ‘noticing’ through seated visualization and then walking through the building and across campus;
- The “Observation with Intention” lesson draws on notions of critical observation through drawing (again, while moving outside of the classroom);
- The “Creative Collisions” lesson transforms the classroom into an atypical networking event within the classroom walls.
How have/will students benefit from the UDL strategies you will implement?
Students initially can be surprised to engage in such interactive exercises in a graduate school course. Their confusion often arises from disruptions to ingrained habits shaped by past teachings and conventional ideas of what success and serious study “should” look like in a classroom.
What motivated you to engage with the UDL Fellows program and start incorporating UDL principles in your practice?
My motivation for the UDL Fellows program stemmed from my interest in movement as a valid learning and teaching approach in higher education. I draw on the sociological and educational research I was steeped in during my PhD in Curriculum & Pedagogy, namely the research seeking to understand the cultural dynamics of movement in educational settings. For many of us as learners, we’ve been conditioned by our teachers to ‘sit still,’ and for many of us as teachers, we’ve been trained to view a quiet, still classroom as the epitome of deep thought and scholarly contemplation.
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you noticed at UBC? How does UDL help address these barriers?
I’ve observed that “still” classroom environments can create barriers for students and faculty alike, especially those with ADHD. Our project addressed these barriers by:
- Providing options for informal movement during lectures
- Creating means of physical engagement with learning
- Incorporating multiple modes of expression in the classroom
- Challenging assumptions about what university learning (and teaching) should look like
Can you share any resources, tools, or practices you found or created that were particularly effective in applying UDL?
As a UDL Faculty Fellow, the value of this project came from co-designing it with my Sauder educator colleagues at Learning Services—Siobhán Cook and Erica Hill—and learning alongside my student colleague, Kiran Dhanda, in her role as our project’s undergraduate research assistant. I also received support from Dr. Sunah Cho and Natasha Pestonji-Dixon at CTLT. Our UDL project team is still in the process of analyzing data from focus groups and surveys. The analysis will help us understand the range of student experiences with movement-based learning in the class. We’ll share our experiences with faculty colleagues in the upcoming academic year.
Is there anything else we haven’t talked about that you would like to mention?
Being in an educator community with the project team strengthened my confidence to teach in ways that embrace movement as essential to learning, despite academic traditions that stigmatize physical activity. Neuroscience confirms that whole-body engagement enhances cognitive processing for all students, while being particularly valuable for those with ADHD, who often face shame for their natural learning needs. Our project challenges the notion that stillness equals seriousness, instead creating spaces where diverse neurological approaches are valued rather than suppressed.