Transforming Higher Education Through Universal Design for Learning

An International Perspective

Seán Bracken, Katie Novak, Seán Bracken, Katie Novak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815354734
• eBook ISBN: 9781351132053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Providing insight into the background, theory and practical applications of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Transforming Higher Education through Universal Design for Learning: An International Perspective examines and shares best practice in UDL implementation worldwide to provide strategies for strengthening student accessibility, engagement and learning outcomes through the development of flexible learning environments.

Drawing upon insightful, research-based contributions from educators and student service specialists in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Israel, Norway, South Africa, Spain, the UK and all across the USA, this book:

• considers diversity in the form of disability, minority ethnic groups, gender identities, first generation university students and varying socio-economic backgrounds;
• brings together key thinkers and actors in the field of UDL and expertly maps its practices to the higher educational domain;
• explores the multiple means of representation, expression and engagement that combine to create a successful UDL framework.

Each chapter not only provides a different perspective of how UDL has helped meet the needs of all students to ensure that education is accessible, culturally responsive and socially just, but also considers how this can then be implemented into higher education environments the world over. This book is a crucial read for those who want to make a positive difference in higher education provision and outcomes.

Section 1

UDL and strategic leadership

A whole university approach to inclusive practice

Chapter 1

Universal Design for Learning – license to learn

A process for mapping a Universal Design for Learning process on to campus learning

Elinor Jeanette Olaussen, Ann Heelan and Kjetil Andreas Knarlag

Case study

Kari Haugen, a disability officer at a Norwegian University, was asked by the vice chancellor of education at her institution to coordinate a project where academics, administrators and colleagues in management were all going to work proactively in order to reduce disabling barriers and create better learning environments for all students. The project was given to Kari by the vice chancellor of education who wanted a quick solution to fulfill demands of inclusion, universal design and disability as stipulated in the Act relating to universities and university colleges (Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, 2005). However, many stakeholders expressed skepticism about the project requirements and colleagues frequently voiced concerns about perceived high levels of work commitment that would go along with the project.

Some academic staff were skeptical arguing that they did not have any students with disabilities in their classes. Others could not find any time to develop new course material and did not see any barrier in a traditional lecture because “it has always worked that way”. Management was worried about additional costs and how to prioritize competing concerns. Meanwhile, support staff from student services, who were used to working in an ad-hoc way to provide advice regarding adjustments in lecturers and for assessment methods to support individual students with disabilities, were worried they might become dispensable if this project became successful.

Despite their skepticism, the project continued and brought with it more student active learning. The students were assessed using a wider variety of assessment options during the semester and they had an increased focus on group work, in line with what is seen as pedagogical recommendations for a diverse student population.

Some students applauded the developments, while others, who preferred traditional lectures where they could listen to professors talk, were less convinced that the changes resulted in deeper forms of learning. In the new learning environment, they had to use more time to prepare for their classes and it also became more evident who participated in group work. Kari had to ensure that all of these stakeholders understood the reasons for the changes and that the project met its aims to embed a more inclusive experience for all.

Introduction

What are the mechanisms that assist educators to implement the philosophy, values and practice of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) among Higher Education colleagues, be they teaching staff or administrative staff ? Why is it not seen as a priority when there is increasingly a significant diversity of students in higher education challenging the system? These are the questions that concern staff working in disability support offices and their students across Europe. This chapter will give some insight into how one ERASMUS+ funded project, Universal Design for Learning: A License to Learn (UDLL), tackled these questions.

ERASMUS+ is a European funded initiative that supports education, training, youth and sport in Europe. It provides a unique opportunity for organizations to work together on specific issues and develop their thinking with a view to exploiting their learning across borders. The partners in the project were Universell (lead partner and national coordinator for an inclusive learning environment and universal design in higher education in Norway), AHEAD (the Association for Higher Education Access and Disability in Ireland) and SIHO (Support Center for Inclusive Higher Education in Belgium). The three partners each have a national role in their county and share the objective of promoting full access and participation in further and higher education for students with disabilities. In collaboration with key stakeholders in higher education, the 18-month-long project from 2014 to 2016 aimed to develop a road map of Best Practice Guidelines for higher education staff (https://udll.eu) and a practical toolkit for introducing UDL for students (https://studenttoolkit.eu/).

Addressing disability in higher education in Europe

As UDL originally developed in an American context in the primary and secondary school level for pedagogically trained teachers (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014; Novak, 2014), the UDLL project aimed to adopt and develop this learning into a European context and the higher education sector. According to recent European research, the number of students with disabilities in Europe varies substantially. The Eurostudent survey states that that the amount of students with impairments ranges from 7% to 39% of the student population (Hauschildt, Vögtle, & Gwosc˙, 2018). According to this investigation, around 5 to 8% of students are severely affected and their condition may be compounded by the lack of inclusive environment and individual support.

There is little doubt that student cohorts engaging in higher education across the EU today come from a diversity of backgrounds such as economic, cultural and linguistic affecting the way they learn, the way they best demonstrate knowledge and the way they are motivated to learn (HEA, 2015). Each learner is affected by different experiences, strengths, age and abilities, and while they have different perspectives and preferences, they all come with the expectation of learning.

In many universities, there is an ongoing cultural paradigm shift from a traditional teaching culture with a focus on lecturing and passive learning, towards a culture focusing on the learning itself. In this transformation, a significant challenge for universities is how to select, combine and implement different learning activities, into an optimal learning environment where each student reaches far beyond what is achieved through the individual and realizes the collective development of both students and faculty. In practice, we observe a development of modern teaching methods. An example is the “flipped classroom”, where students are supposed to meet prepared to the teaching activities, and the teacher’s role is more like a coach developing new learning and cooperative skills in a partnership with the students. Success presupposes a certain amount of personal efforts from both sides, and opens up for better learning for students with difficulties with traditional (passive) learning methods. Nora Tomas, a Norwegian student with only 30% vision, experienced increased learning outcomes and better grades when her teacher flipped his teaching practice. Suddenly, she was able to learn at her own pace and not limited by disabling barriers in her learning environments (Tomas, 2016). In this cultural shift teachers have an essential role and the choices they make will affect students’ learning. However, the UDLL project revealed that many of the academic staff in higher education have limited pedagogical training as part of their education.

The current teaching format found in many HEIs is deeply embedded in the organizational culture, and individual teachers place much pride in the way they have taught over the last 20 years. Traditionally, individually incentives to change and improve teaching methods has been limited (NTNU & UiT, 2016). By culture, we mean the common belief systems and entrenched practices throughout the totality of the system and evidenced within different departments within the institutions. Organizational culture is enacted all the way from management to facilities; it includes the work of administration, academics and the behaviors of students (Kegan & Lahey, 2009).

As illustrated in the case, many factors may combine to make it difficult to stimulate change in a teaching environment that has remained unchanged for decades. The first mechanism for overcoming these challenges is to recognize that the main competence for identifying effective approaches lies outside the primary change actors, as this is an interdisciplinary problem (McClure, 2005).

From the UDLL project, we understand teaching culture in higher education as the combination of stakeholders’ behaviors, beliefs, and interactions that affect learning. When addressing teaching culture, it is essential to keep in mind that within the different stakeholder population, people are highly diverse. One of the aims of the project was to acknowledge and embrace this diversity as a source of creativity and differing viewpoints. Further, we needed to be aware that the population within the different stakeholders would react differently to teaching and learning activities and efforts to improve teaching and student culture. In the EU project, we used the UDL framework (Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014; Novak, 2014) and theories about “immunity to change” to address this aspect (Kegan & Lahey, 2009).

Immunity to change is an organizational development method, which describes how individuals and organizations may fail to change because of hidden commitments (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). The theory refers to how individuals’ beliefs along with the collective mindsets in an organization create a natural but powerful immunity to change. As long as individuals have hidden commitments working behind the scenes, it doesn’t matter what they try to do achieving their goal. They will continue to meet intransigence until they discover what mindsets are producing their behavior and unlock their immunity to change (Kegan & Lahey, 2009).

The UDLL project set out to challenge traditional academic thinking about how education can be designed to include a diversity of students (UDLL, 2016). It recognized that there is already a body of good inclusive practice emerging throughout the sector, but it acknowledged that this is happening in silos (Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development, 2011). The project actively engaged with key stakeholder groups to explore their views, ideas and perspectives on moving from a traditional culture of teaching and “one approach fits all” to a culture of inclusion and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The goal was to provide a model that institutions could implement when introducing UDL onto their campus.

The key stakeholder groups were compounded of people from each of the three countries. The groups were:

• Students in Higher Education.
• Policy makers and senior management.
• Academic staff and other faculty members.
• Student support staff/administrative or teaching staff with that function.

The following section will describe the process of engagement and learning with each stakeholder groups, and discuss a holistic approach to how institutions must collaborate internally and interdisciplinary to ensure quality for all students in the teaching and learning process.

The process of engagement with stakeholder groups

The process of engagement with each stakeholder group was based on Appreciative Inquiry, a process designed by systems thinkers such as Argyris (2008), Senge (1999), Kegan and Lahey (2009) and others. In systems thinking, cycles of behavior repeat themselves time after time, making situations better or worse. Traditionally, higher education was available to a largely homogenous elite group of high achieving students for whom didactic teaching appeared to work. Now however, a larger proportion of the student population has become more diverse and this includes students with multiple and variant forms of disability. For these students, traditional pedagogy embeds many barriers to learning as evidenced by high dropout rates, poor evaluations and the high proportion of individuals who require adaptations to overcome impairments and meet learning needs.

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) could work as a helpful tool in order to transform traditionally cycles of behavior to match todays’ educational landscape. AI is a method for studying and changing social systems, such as groups, organizations and communities, where the strengths of people working in the organization are identified and strengthened. AI “advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling” (Bush, 2011). When it comes to using AI as a tool for engaging the academic community in educational development, the most valuable part is probably the unconditional positive questions and its ability to engage, enthuse, energize and enhance learning communities (Ludema, Cooperrider, & Barrett, 2001; Kadi-Hanifi et al., 2014).

In approaching the stakeholder groups, both in the recruitment process and during the four focus group meetings, appreciative inquiry was the fundamental strategy. For three of the four stakeholder groups, there was an open invitation to apply for participation announced through the project partners’ national websites and social media. This way, most participants had an intrinsic motivation to take part in the project. Participants applied to participate in the focus group meetings by answering an entry question. These questions were tailored to fit different stakeholder groups, all of them focusing on their strengths and success stories. The Appreciative Inquiry approach also had a huge effect during the workshops, when we asked questions that challenged the ‘status quo’ and focusing the group discussions on taking a ‘Universal Design for Learning Approach’ that would enable a greater diversity of students in their institutions.

The process of engagement with the stakeholder groups was an important and deliberate choice, supported by theories and research from Deci and Ryan (1985). They claimed that people’s need for learning and development are related to whether a person is extrinsicly or intrinsicly motivated to engage in an activity. According to Deci and Ryan, external motivation is affected by external influences and the reward comes from the surroundings, such as the recognition one gets from others. When a person is motivated from within the activity is self-determined and the reward is in the activity itself. Research has shown that an inner motivation is important for people to engage in their own learning and development. Deci and Ryan believe that the inner motivation is spurred by interest and desire, but in order for it to last,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Universal Design for Learning: a global framework for realizing inclusive practice in higher education
• Section 1 UDL and strategic leadership: a whole university approach to inclusive practice
• Section 2 Working in partnership with key stakeholders to engage all students
• Section 3 Facilitating multiple identities and student engagement
• Section 4 Transforming learning: redesigning curriculum, format, content and practice
• Section 5 Providing access to learning for all: enabling inclusive learning through digital literacy and technologies
• Index