From Vantage College, Academic English Instructor Weaver Shaw and Curriculum Manager Brian Wilson participated in the 2023 UDL Fellows Program. They discuss the importance of a robust accessibility statement as well as the ways that UDL can improve the ease of course delivery.
How have you applied UDL to your course?
Weaver: Brian and I worked with LLED 201 last year, which is a science reading and writing communication course. We really hung a lot of the UDL work on the accessibility statement that we wrote for the course. Brian and I went back and forth on seven drafts of the accessibility statement and even though it seems like only a small paragraph, it really sets the tone for the entire course. I told myself “This is the paragraph I’m going to hang this year on and I’m really going to mean it.” If you tell somebody that you’re valuing their mental health and their decisions in their own education, you really have to show up and actually do that. It was challenging but I’ll never go back. It’s great, I love it. It’s changed my practice fundamentally.
Brian: As we were going through the UDL Fellows Program, it became apparent early on that the scope of possible work was enormous. It was really tempting to change everything right away and redo the entire course, which may be good over time but is just overwhelming and unrealistic in the short term. What I really liked about the accessibility statement was that it established the foundation. It would go on to impact how Weaver delivered the whole course and how we would support the UDL principles at every step. Because it was such an important foundational piece, it took up a lot of our efforts.
What motivated you to participate in the UDL Fellows program and start incorporating UDL principles in your courses?
Brian: Accessibility has been on my radar for quite a while from my days working at the CTLT where I had started hearing about things like alt text in its early days. The UDL Fellows Program seemed like a good chance for me to try to improve my knowledge and skills about accessibility and really bring that to Vantage. It was a great opportunity to bring forward the idea of language as a core accessibility item for course material, especially for multilingual learners. At Vantage, it’s in the program’s nature to ensure the students have the best educational experience possible. The faculty members are always driven by student well-being.
Weaver: I’ve been moving through the journey of decolonizing the way that I deliver courses and UDL seemed like a really practical way to do some of that important decolonization work. I was kind of surprised with the accessibility statement and how it made me feel to lean into it. It really pushed those colonial buttons because to offer different choices to students, you have to give up some control and make things accessible, you must be willing to open doors that have traditionally been closed.
Did you experience any challenges with implementing UDL and how did you overcome them?
Weaver: I found the flexibility quite difficult to wrap my head around. I grew up going to military boarding school and it doesn’t get much more rigid than that, so when it came to things like having more open deadlines or getting rid of penalties, all those kinds of things really challenged me. But I’ve had some amazing experiences over the past year that have shown me how worthwhile it is. I told the students “This is the learning outcome, this is what you need to show me that you can do, but I’m going to leave it up to you to decide how you’re going to show me” and they blew me out of the water. The results were phenomenal. Before, they all would have just written 300 to 450 words, but when they got to express themselves with their medium, they delivered much higher quality assignments.
It seems very counterintuitive that if you’re giving choices, you’ll end up with less work for yourself – you’d think that having to mark all of these different types of assignments will take a lot longer. But it’s the same rubric, the same learning outcomes, they’re just showing it to me in different ways. So actually, it’s great for me because I don’t have to mark 60 of the exact same thing, and I don’t get all of them at 11:59 on Sunday. I don’t have to wake up Monday morning thinking “Oh my God. I have so many papers!” I just marked them over the course of the week as they came in and my mental health has been great. I think UDL really saved my workload this past semester.
How have students benefited from the UDL strategies you implemented?
Weaver: I don’t think I had any negative feedback from the students about anything UDL-related. What I did have was some skepticism at the beginning of the semester with students not believing that I was really going to drop their lowest grade or be flexible about their assignments, but I did my best to build that trusting relationship and follow through. The resulting student feedback was overwhelmingly positive, a lot of people mentioned accessibility and how much they appreciated the freedoms we gave them. They said they felt like we were treating them like adults.
Brian: Trusting the students to make their own decisions is moving us towards the autonomous learners that we desire, but I would also hope that we can use UDL to shape the way they interact with each other. Weaver had a student who had an incredible opportunity that she needed to take but this meant she was unable to attend a group presentation with less than 24 hours’ notice. The rest of the group was thankfully very understanding, and I think this is more likely to occur when there’s space for them to be more aware of accessibility for their fellow group members. This year with the accessibility statement, I’m thinking maybe there’s room to give students some responsibility to think about it intentionally and be more aware of their roles and build that into the course early on.
Thank you to Weaver and Brian for sharing their story.