Antoine Coulombe, Assistant Professor of Teaching at the School of Social work, along with CTLT Learning Design Consultant Bosung Kim, participated in the 2023 UDL Fellows Program. They discuss the changes they made to their practice as well as the compatibility of UDL with social work.
How have you applied UDL to your Social Work course?
Antoine: Last year, Bosung and I worked on SOWK 335, a course with around 50 students, where we identified 3 areas of improvement. The first one was the syllabus: we tried to design it so that it was more accessible and provided students with a more holistic overview of the course so they could come into class with the right expectations and tools. The second thing we worked on was making the assignments clearer and more engaging so students could be more independent in their work. We did this by providing step-by-step process of the different layers, reviewing how clearly the assignments were presented, and showing a few examples from previous years. The last thing was implementing discussion guides that students could refer to during their group discussions to reduce any confusion about what they were meant to talk about.
Bosung: We recognized that some students may need more detailed instructions or could benefit from revisiting them, particularly when dealing with complex tasks. To address this, we provided more elaborated instructions within the existing written format on Canvas, along with in-class explanations. Additionally, we enhanced the presentation of these written instructions to ensure clarity and readability. The discussion guides were designed with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for students to rotate, outlined required and optional topics, and suggested time allocations for each topic, enabling students to manage their time effectively. These guides also helped students organize and document their thoughts and discussions.
What motivated you to participate in the UDL Fellows program and start incorporating UDL principles in your courses?
Antoine: First of all, I’m a social worker, so accessibility, diversity, and inclusion are really part of core values of who I am as a professional. I always try to teach in a way that is in tune with my professional values. I’ve always been concerned with ensuring all students in the classroom would have an experience that meets their learning needs.
UDL definitely has a special way of presenting things that I had been missing before.
I’ve been teaching for over 15 years now and I’m still finding new ideas and ways of organizing my information, still meeting new needs that students experience, and navigating a changing and diverse student body.
Bosung: Early in my career as a learning designer focused on accessibility, I recognized that achieving 100% accessibility for everyone, while ideal, can sometimes be challenging due to the diverse needs of learners. This experience highlighted the value of UDL, which offers a powerful framework for navigating these complexities by providing multiple options and pathways for learning. UDL empowers educators to proactively identify and reduce learning barriers, creating an environment where all students have an equitable chance to succeed.
Did you experience any challenges with implementing UDL and how did you overcome them?
Antoine: I had two challenges I struggled with, the first one being time. As instructors, we have so many things to do that sometimes we have ideas, but we don’t have time to implement them. I was worried about the amount of time I was spending on incorporating UDL into my syllabus and rethinking my assignments but what I realize now is that this time is actually saved later. As I’m preparing my courses for next fall, I’m investing time into UDL because I know I’ll get students that are more engaged and autonomous. In that sense, I get fewer questions, fewer emails, and also higher-quality assignments which are easier to mark. So overall, I find the experience of teaching afterwards easier. I think it’s a really good investment.
The second challenge I faced was my understanding of my teaching being limited to my own knowledge – I can only know what I know, so sometimes it’s hard to expand my perceptions of teaching beyond that. What I really enjoyed about the UDL Fellows Program was getting to work with Bosung and other colleagues and engage in dialogue with other people. It was nice to hear others’ ideas and really expand my own perceptions and the way I teach.
How have students benefited from the UDL strategies you implemented?
Antoine: I once had a student come to see me at the end of a class and thank me for organizing this course in a in a self-directed way. I was a bit confused at first, because it was a regularly scheduled in-person course, I didn’t think it was particularly self-directed. I realized that the student meant they had a lot of autonomy and multiple avenues of looking at the course material. They could attend class for the lecture, read the book, look at videos, or listen to podcasts.
Implementing UDL gave such a strong sense of autonomy to the point that a student thought it was a self-directed course.
That’s a pretty strong case, isn’t it?
How do you see UDL benefiting the discipline of social work as a whole?
Antoine: Social work is really interested in questions about accessibility and inclusion, and we have a lot of frameworks and theories, but none of them actually look like UDL. Even when I was working in a hospital, I was thinking maybe we could use universal design in the way we implement social services or health services. For example, when a patient arrives and meets with a doctor or a social worker, are we providing them with different options for accessibility? The healthcare system is not really designed that way yet.
By teaching using UDL, one of the hopes that I express to students is that they also develop a concern for accessibility and think about methods of making their own practice more accessible.
I hope that they see some of my ideas in the courses I teach and repeat them as social workers in a clinic. I think there’s something special about the UDL framework, it’s simple for anyone to use so why not incorporate it into the practice of social work?
Thank you to Antoine and Bosung for sharing their story.