Open for Whom? At the Intersection(s) of UDL & Open Practice

‘The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.’

– William Gibson on NPR, 1999

As a member of so-called Generation X and a longtime online educator, I’ve been seeing and hearing the quote above throughout my entire career. But as I watch the academy try to redesign courses and programs for flexible online delivery in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, it occurs to me that I have never seen ‘the future’ move so fast. Nor have I seen such uneven fault lines laid visible in the process.

In this moment of profound destabilization and shift, with institutions and educators engaging in online teaching at an unprecedented scale, pedagogical concepts and approaches that were previously ‘niche’ seem to be gaining traction. It’s exciting to hear the term Universal Design for Learning (UDL) suddenly come up regularly in higher education conversations, and positive to see universities supporting open educational resources (OER). In my own faculty, even concepts like open education and open practice seem to be something a greater number of colleagues are keen to engage in conversation about.

As someone who’s been both a UDL practitioner and an open educator for a number of years, I am glad to see these pedagogical approaches become more visible as more educators grapple with online, remote, and blended learning possibilities. But I want to circle back to the 2019 keynote I offered at the Third Pan-Canadian Conference on Universal Design for Learning in October 2019, and consider how open education and UDL intersect. What commonalities do these two approaches have, other than having been thrust into heightened visibility due to the online learning pivot? And what key lessons does their intersection have for education in this pandemic moment?

Titled ‘Open for whom? At the intersection(s) of UDL and open practice,’ my 2019 talk focused on making open education and open practice a little more familiar to UDL practitioners. It centered on the premise that the core of a Venn diagram between open education and UDL is the concept of ‘access,’ in its broadest sense.

What does access mean in education? I opened my UDL conference blurb with a personal story about how I spent a great deal of my junior high experience out in the hall, one DEFCON level away from being sent to the Principal’s Office. A classic example of a kid with invisible disabilities - and strengths - I was slow to recognize the warning signs of teachers' patience wearing thin, and too quick with smart-mouthed comebacks to be able to coast under the radar of compliance-focused classrooms.

The command "Bonnie, out in the hall. NOW" was a regular refrain. I’d exit the classroom and sit by the lockers...reading textbooks. I didn’t access a great deal of my formal classroom education in those years…nor was I sorry to miss it, because successful access was constructed so narrowly that few of my learning needs could be met, nor my strengths acknowledged.

Yet I loved learning - books opened up worlds for me. Had you told me then that I'd choose to spend my life as an educator, I'd have rolled my eyes, HARD.

Today I've been a teacher - a scholar in the field of education and a teacher of teachers - for nearly a quarter-century. But those junior high years spent in the hall in some ways shaped my career more significantly than any of the years of formal scholarly education afterwards. They taught me that access to learning is a complex thing. They led me initially to pursue certification in Special Education - because I wanted to be the teacher that *I'd* needed, back when the hallway was where I did my learning. Over the last decade, they've led me towards open education and open pedagogy, engaging in networked public conversations with other educators in an ongoing effort to learn from and alongside leaders in my field, sharing ideas and resources.

UDL focuses specifically and powerfully on enhancing access and accessibility in learning environments through emphasis on multiple means of engagement in learning experiences, multiple means of representation in learning materials, and multiple means of action and expression in learning activities. UDL’s focus on access and accessibility assumes difference in any learning population, and enables educators to meet the needs of a variety of learners without those individuals needing to be singled out as being different from an imagined – and perhaps specious – ‘norm.’ UDL practice does not require or assume digital engagement, however, the web offers capacity to engage, represent, and express in multiple ways. UDL focuses on access in learning terms, and can be an effective way for educators to use the infrastructure of the web to design for increased accessibility and equity in a classroom.

Open tends to focus on access differently. Open has many facets – resources, practices, pedagogy – among others, but all emphasize the free and open sharing of ideas. Open education deploys the properties of the web – searchability, scalability, and the replicability and persistence of data – to break beyond copyright and to make sense of the knowledge abundance of contemporary society. While my experience is that open educational practice encourages web accessibility – everything I know about video captions and screen readers and technical ways to make my online teaching accessible, I learned on Twitter – open tends to focus less on access to different learning preferences and neurodivergencies than on navigating geographic and financial constraints. So open education is a story of the web, but also very much a story of human sociality. Open can be an effective way for educators to increase access by opening up the walls of the classroom, and the power relations normalized therein.

My own open pedagogy is rooted in now-ancient – in Internet terms – idea of Web 2.0, or a communal public web that can be contributed to as well as consumed. I came to Web 2.0 not through education but through blogging: I accidentally backed into blogging in 2006, having never read a blog. I thought it would be a convenient way to communicate with friends and family during pregnancy bedrest. But people showed up I didn’t know, and left comments. Their comments linked back to their own blogs, some of which turned out to be compelling. I built a genuine, interactive web of comments and reflection with people I’d never met. In 6 years as a blogger, I had 13,500 comments. From an academic citation perspective, that’s pretty good engagement.

In educational terms, open pedagogy and practices can build connections and communities across difference, opening worlds of affinity and shared interests for individuals whose local contexts may not provide them with like-minded colleagues or companions. The fact that OER are free as well means that adoption of open resources can flatten the financial playing field for students, to an extent.

So, while UDL and open education each approach access differently, it’s a powerful intersection between them: each serves to make some aspects of learning more accessible, often in part by effectively and thoughtfully leveraging the infrastructure of the web to do things that a traditional “chalk and talk” pedagogy might not.

At this particular cultural moment, then, it’s a good thing that UDL and open education are getting circulation in higher education conversations. This year of pandemic and protests makes visible the huge variabilities and inequities baked into our systems of teaching and learning. Removing the four walls of the classroom to go online doesn’t magically create inequities in education…as UDL makes clear, they’re present even when everyone sits together in the same space for the same amount of time. And our bodies and embodied experiences vary as much as our brains, as do the inequitable expectations and assumptions teachers and learners bring with them to the classroom about each other. We all live different realities, and UDL and open education can enable access to learning while honouring difference.

But, for whom? Who is served – and not served – by the ways these pedagogical approaches frame difference? Consideration of access across learning differences, locations, and socioeconomic circumstances is important, particularly as institutions shift to online delivery or restructure classrooms to enable social distancing and flexible delivery. Making the most of what the web offers to address these differences is not enough, because there are axes of difference and systemic discrimination left entirely untouched by the Venn diagram of UDL and open pedagogy: neither is intersectional nor anti-racist, at its core, and the concepts of access framed leave many hurdles for students to cross. Moreover, neither fully grapples with the barriers that the web itself creates to access and equity.

The web is a notoriously toxic space for women and racialized people with opinions, and moreso for racialized women. The web is an increasingly extractive space, with learning and social experiences translated into behavioural data with every click. Every site that open pedagogical practice introduces students to has the potential to both expand their world and invade their privacy, or expose them to trolling behaviours and public abuse. In order to scaffold open pedagogy and practice, educators need to become literate in navigating data and safe participatory practices.

Less dramatically, but insidiously, UDL asks educators to personally select a broader range of materials to teach with than they might have otherwise. But by only foregrounding learning differences as axes of consideration, it fails to frame gender or race or power differentials in the mix for educators. Thus the images and videos and choices educators design into our teaching via UDL principles may nonetheless serve to reinforce dominant cultural perspectives and gender and race constructs, which operates to the detriment of the idea of full access to learning. Students who do not see positive representations of themselves in their carefully-designed UDL learning environments are still, to an extent, ‘out in the hall,’ confronting barriers to their full participation in learning and to recognition of their full humanity.

The fault lines of inequity that our cultural moment makes visible – across axes of learning, neurodiversity, embodied identity, socioeconomic status, and – are not new. They’ve always been with us. As the academy confronts the pedagogical challenges posed by all that the year 2020 represents, it’s important that educators put access at the forefront of learning design. My 2019 keynote asserted that UDL and open education are important steps on the path to making access the centre of an inclusive pedagogy for all, particularly on the web. In 2020, it is important to reassert that while the intersection of the two is a productive and powerful educational space, it is not a stopping place. Rather, it is an invitation to consider access in all its many axes of difference, and a challenge to all educators to keep learning and building our own understandings and practices.

That way, maybe the future can finally become more evenly distributed.

References

Gladstone, B. (1999, November 30). The science in science fiction [Radio broadcast]. Talk of the Nation, NPR. https://edtechbooks.org/-tprB