Using Universal Design for Learning as a Lens to Rethink Graduate Education Pedagogical Practices

Introduction And Context

Inclusion has become a growing concern in Higher Education (HE) over the last two decades (Collins, Azmat & Rentschler, 2019). Legislation protecting the rights of students with disabilities has triggered a progressive rethink of teaching and learning with learner diversity in mind (Delar 2019). Differentiation, as a result, is increasingly discussed in HE pedagogy (Melese, 2019). While originally much of this refection focused on retrofitting, more recently the social model of disability has begun to be more prevalent in this landscape (Mole, 2013). This lens argues that disability is a social construct, and that it is essentially a perception which arises out of the friction between individual embodiments and environments that are usually not designed to address the diversity of these embodiments. It therefore places the focus on the redesign of the environment – or the learning experience – rather than on the individual diagnostic exceptionalities of learners. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework that very seeks to translate the social model of disability into classroom practices. As a result UDL has grown increasingly popular and implementation initiatives are emerging on campuses, in most global north countries (Dalton, Lyner-Cleophas, Ferguson & McKenzie, 2019). UDL is transformative for the HE classroom, and radically revolutionizes both delivery of instruction and assessment (La, Dyjur & Bair, 2018; Schreffler, Vasquez III, Chini & Westley, 2019). More recently, the potential of UDL beyond the field of disability has been noted, with studies examining its use with International and Indigenous students (James, 2018; Fovet, 2019).

This transformation of teaching and learning has, however, been mostly limited to undergraduate courses. There is currently very little interest in UDL in Graduate Education (GE), and often the argument are that (i) students at this stage of their process have gained the skills to navigate any format of teaching and learning, (ii) graduate courses are more focused on content than on pedagogy itself, (iii) there is less learner diversity in GE – particularly with regards to neuro-cognitive diversity, and (iv) classes are smaller and instructors are able to adapt easily to address individual needs. This chapter will deconstruct these assertions as mere myths. It will argue that GE faces many of the same challenges with regards to learner diversity that Undergraduate Education (UE) has been addressing for the last two decades. It has not, however, embraced change with the same consistency. As a result, GE – it is argued - will need to face urgent pressures to address the need of non-traditional students, and UDL is likely to play a key role in this transformation.

The second part of the chapter will use UDL as a lens to propose a vision of what this transformation of graduate classroom practices might look like. It will use specific vignettes to highlight barriers students may be currently facing in GE, and ways UDL may offer solutions to widen access. The author will be using phenomenological insight: he has worked for a period of four years as director of accessibility services on a HE campus, and has supported instructors with the implementation of UDL. He has worked in concrete ways with faculty in graduate courses to rethink the design of delivery and assessment.

The third part of the chapter will examine the wider outcomes of this reflection. It will question the way GE is currently being categorized in a very distinct way that sets its radically apart from UE; it will be suggested that teaching and learning concerns in fact span both sectors in very similar ways, and that it is perhaps time to consider the transformation of pedagogy horizontally in terms of trends and overarching challenges, rather than vertically in terms of structural categorization in terms of undergraduate/ graduate level.