Rayna Friar is a 4th year undergraduate student studying COGS and working as a UDL Student Facilitator for the UDL Fellows Program. They share the ways that flexibility and UDL are important in the classroom and how they can help improve the university experiences of students with physical disabilities.
What motivated you to become interested in UDL and apply for this position with the program?
I heard about this position because I was working with the advocacy committee of the Disability United Collective (DUC). I thought that this was a cool way to continue the advocacy work I was doing, since what we were trying to do at the DUC was kind of related to the Centre for Accessibility and trying to get them to update their policies a bit to make things better for disabled students. It seemed like a good way to be able to help with that even more and share my ideas. I had heard about UDL a little bit before. My high school and elementary school district had some posters, and they would talk about it here and there. It wasn’t anything too specific, but I knew about it going in.
What accessibility and inclusion barriers have you noticed, in your own experience or in the experiences of your UBC student colleagues? How does UDL help address these barriers?
I’m a physically disabled student – I use mobility aids and I feel like there is quite a lot that UBC misses when it comes to having students or staff members that are disabled. It’s down to the way that some of the old buildings are designed, for example, some of them don’t have elevators. More specifically though, in the classroom, the instruction materials and learning resources that are being given out are not super accessible to people who have seeing difficulties or learning disabilities – stuff like that is not always considered. So, I think UDL is great because it teaches professors who have submitted stuff to be reviewed by us, it gives them a chance to see how they can adapt their learning material to make it more friendly by using the UDL practices and incorporating different learning styles.
Why do you think the UBC community, particularly instructors, need to use UDL? How is it benefiting all students?
In my mind, UDL introduces different ways that you can learn the same material, whether it’s visually, or through reading, or watching videos, or just learning through experience. But so often, in university settings, it’s just a lecture where you sit down and listen and take notes, which is not super universally beneficial because not everybody absorbs information that way. I think UDL can be beneficial if the professors can adapt different modes of learning into their courses, that can help people just be more engaged and understand the material better.
There was one discussion-based class I took where our professor would immediately take so many of our suggestions on how to adapt her lecture material to make it more engaging for us. It made a really good impression because she was so willing to put through our feedback right away. I think that the flexibility is so important. It’s kind of the bare minimum, but when professors are like, “we’ll do a recording of zoom so you can miss a class” or, “we’ll tell you where the elevators are in the building,” small things like that just really make it so much easier to exist as a disabled person.
As a student consultant, what resources or information resonated with you that you want to identify for instructors?
What really resonates with me is stuff that I find in my own personal reading. I think it’s really important to find resources that are not strictly academic just because: A, not everyone can understand academic language and B, it’s completely different and just as valuable to read about a set of lived experiences versus reading studies. I have two books that particularly come to mind. One is the book “Disability Visibility” by Alice Wong, which is an essay collection, and the other is “The Future is Disabled” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. “Disability Visibility” is a very general introduction to accessibility, which is a good start, and “The Future is Disabled” is very much about how people can work together in community to make things more accessible. Those are the two books that I feel really inform what I try to do.