Shaya Golparian, an educational developer working on Teaching Assistant (TA) development at the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, discusses how she uses UDL to more effectively engage Teaching Assistants, with hopes that they carry on UDL into their classrooms.
How have you applied UDL to your work?
I facilitate and I also train facilitators. Since engaging more deeply with UDL, I’ve been more intentionally incorporating the UDL principles into my own accessible practices and also supporting the facilitators we hire and train in thinking more about accessibility, student needs, and how we can design and lead activities that present less barriers to participation for our diverse group of participants. Because my role entails training those who train TAs, the hope is that my efforts will have a ripple effect, and the TAs can take what we model for them, and apply it to the classrooms they’ll be teaching in.
Could you please tell me more about and walk me through your project on active learning case studies, as well as the guide that you developed?
Prior to the UDL Fellowship program, one of the things that I’d been discussing with my colleagues since the pandemic was finding ways that we could better support participants with accessibility needs that came to our workshops. Our goal was to engage students coming to our workshops needing particular accommodations to at the same level as all the other students, especially because many of our workshops include active learning techniques like discussions, jigsaw activities, and small group activities and involve a lot of verbal participation and moving around the room. Often times in classrooms spaces, students with accessibility needs who cannot fully participate in participatory activities, would, at best, get a PDF document that says, “This is what this activity is about, and this is what you would have walked away with if you had participated in it.” My project aims to ensure that students who can’t participate in participatory activities get more than a PDF document and feel engaged at the same
level as all the other students. My project engages with accessibility in two parts. For the first part of the project, I draw on the UDL principles to propose detailed steps for the design and delivery of several active learning techniques. These steps draw on the UDL principles to prevent potential barriers to participation in those active learning techniques. For the second part of the project, I engage with how we can support students who need accommodations resulting from an unforeseen situation such as an accident or injury. In this part of the project, I propose a redesign process for active learning to remove barriers to participation without eliminating essential components of the activity which contribute to learning. The project resulted in a website that explains the process of incorporating UDL practices into the design of activities, walks facilitators through active learning techniques step-by-step, and has a guide on how to redesign activities on the fly.
What motivated you to engage with the UDL Fellows program and start incorporating UDL principles in your practice?
The motivation came as a result of feedback from TA training coordinators across campus who shared stories about TAs in situations where a student came to them and said, “I can’t participate in this activity,” and the TA basically didn’t know what to do. This happened often enough that my team, that is tasked with teaching support to graduate students and TAs, formed a small committee in 2020 and lead long discussions about how to offer support to TAs around accessibility in active learning. The UDL Fellows program was a golden opportunity for me to have structured time dedicated to thinking this through further and creating practical resources that people can use with the help of mentors and experts that I didn’t previously have access to.
Did you experience any challenges with implementing UDL, and how did you overcome them?
The website was the biggest challenge, as I realized that the resource I’m developing also has to be accessible, which I hadn’t considered. For example, I was using WordPress blogs and was stuck with limitations of a theme, so I had to work with our instructional designers to ensure that the layout of the blog itself (i.e.: colours, font, etc) would be accessible. I was able to overcome these challenges with great feedback and help from colleagues at the CTLT as well as colleagues at CFA, who were very helpful in identifying barriers that I couldn’t see, and I have been incredibly fortunate to be able to work with them.
Can you share any resources, tools, or practices you found or created that were particularly effective in applying UDL?
The human resources I had access to were the most helpful. I met with AC Deger from the CFA and spoke with Afsaneh Sharif and other colleagues from the CTLT, which was very helpful. The Accessibility Hub that CTLT created was also useful for reference.