Introduction

Over the last decade, institutions have increasingly adopted Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practices as a means of addressing accessibility and inclusion but also to create classrooms where high interest, motivation, and tenacity can thrive. There are myriad books, papers, and communities from preschool, kindergarten to grade 12, post-secondary, trades, and tertiary education (for example, Beck et al., 2014; Black et al., 2015; Davies et al., 2013; Kumar & Wideman, 2014; Langley-Turnbaugh et al., 2013; Schelly et al., 2011) exploring how a UDL framework can support learning.

If you were to ask educators what they think of when they think of UDL, they would likely say that concepts such as accessibility, equity, or equal access come to mind. At its core, UDL pivots on the idea that expert learners are highly variable. Learners vary along a vast number of variables: in their interests, their strategies, the ways they use words and pictures, their penchant for technology and art, even the ways they like to work with others, and how they approach novelty and challenge. We know that by teaching to the average means not only that we exclude many learners but also that we miss rich teaching and learning opportunities that grow out of diversity (Takacs, 2019). UDL is a set of design principles that help us build teaching and learning experiences that accommodate the widest spectrum of learners so that as few people as possible are excluded from participation (Meyer et al., 2014).

The traditional core of education is that the curriculum is at the centre of learning. UDL turns this assumption around and puts the learner at the centre. Instead of labelling the learner as disabled, underachieving, or in need of special services, we define the curriculum in terms of how adequately it can accommodate and support the diversity of learners (Meyer et al., 2014).

The UDL framework, grounded in neuroscience, developed by CAST (2018c) researchers, identifies three different brain networks that we can use to provide choice and flexibility in accessible design: The Engagement Network helps us understand the WHY of learning; the Representation Network helps us understand the WHAT of learning; the Action and Expression Network helps us understand the HOW of learning.

CAST (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0 [graphic organizer] [PDF]. Lynnfield, MA: Author

UDL enables the design of schools, classrooms, materials, and assistive technology explicitly for accessibility, but it also supports learner voice, choice, and meaningfulness. Learners will have the best chance of learning and engaging with materials that can be both read and watched; improving engagement can be a matter of offering the choice to work alone or in groups, to write or to talk; having choice in demonstrating learning can be a matter of developing clear, well-articulated expectations to create inclusive learning experiences.

Over the course of its development and the first phases of implementation, of course we wonder about this new framework. Does it work? Is it “just good teaching” or is there something about the design component behind UDL that helps us achieve classrooms that are equitable and engaging?

This pressbook aims to Story UDL from the perspectives of disabled students^[1], and from their stories to reiterate the principles and ideas behind UDL and make them tangible for instructors. We propose that UDL is not “extra work” or “excessive work” (Samuels, 2003; Smith et al., 2021), but rather that it is the foundation of our work as teachers.