Column Guest Editor’s Introduction: A Tactic for Clarifying the Teacher’s Role in Universal Design for Learning

Readers with an interest in universal design for learning (UDL) will recognize the fundamental challenge presented in this month’s guest column, “Classroom Menus for Supporting the Academic Success of Diverse Learners.” That is, who is responsible for preparing the UDL environment before students enter a classroom?

Is UDL a design intervention that should be the responsibility of publishers and instructional designers as they create curricula and instructional materials? Can publishers and instructional designers be expected to use the principles of UDL to design effective instructional materials for students they have never met? Or is UDL a pedagogical practice that is the responsibility of those closest to the student: (a) the teacher, (b) instructor, or (c) college professor? Is UDL a proactive design intervention if a teacher must first meet, and get to know their students, before they can develop UDL-inspired lesson plans, learning activities, and assessments? To date, the literature is unclear on this very fundamental construct that is essential to clarify if UDL interventions are going to successfully scale (Ok et al., 2017).

The authors are known for their perspective that UDL is a design intervention. They have developed software for creating accessible, tiered, and multilingual web-based curricula to illustrate that accessibility features can be built into digital containers to support diverse learners (Edyburn & Edyburn, 2012). They have argued that current instructional design methodologies are inadequate because accessibility and usability are not fundamental considerations and that universal design engineering could offer an alternative methodology for the design, development, and evaluation of UDL claims in the same way material science tests various materials for meeting project requirements (Edyburn & Edyburn, 2018). In addition, they developed a taxonomy, known as design for more types, that provides a methodology for operationalizing the active ingredients in UDL interventions that involve multiple means of representing content through text (Edyburn & Edyburn, 2015). Design for more types represents a developmental approach to UDL that is conditional upon a designer’s knowledge and skills. Furthermore, this model is important for UDL researchers interested in measuring the dosage of UDL interventions to understand the efficacy of various instructional designs.

In this new work, the authors describe three essential knowledge and skills needed by teachers, instructors, and college professors: (a) acquire UDL philosophy, (b) create a toolkit, and (c) create choice menus. They offer practical resources and tools for educators interested in each component. More importantly, after this baseline has been established, they argue that it is necessary to evaluate teachers’ UDL knowledge and skills. Toward this end, they propose three UDL design challenges and provide a rubric for evaluating a teacher’s claim that they have designed an UDL intervention for their classroom. This model could have significant applications for UDL research and help address the classic question: “Would you recognize UDL if you saw it?” (Edyburn, 2010).

Vanderheiden (2000), one of the original developers of universal design that resulted in accessibility controls on all personal technology devices, recognized the importance of profiling special needs to design products that were usable by the greatest variety of people as possible. Yet, as the vision of inclusive education has become a reality (Loreman, 2017), teachers’ time and ability to adapt and implement personalized interventions (Johnson et al., 2016; Parsons et al., 2018) has remained limited. As a result, new tactics are needed if the potential of UDL will be achieved by waiting for teachers to (a) meet their students, (b) observe their academic challenges, and (c) create new interventions that enhance access, engagement, and outcomes.