Welcome to Episode 155 of the Think UDL podcast: Accessible Initiatives with Carly Lesoski, Courtney Floyd, and Majo Brito Paez. Carly Lesoski is the Learning Innovation Program Manager at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. Courtney Floyd is a Senior Learning Designer in the Learning Design and Innovation’s Learning Lab at Dartmouth and Majo Brito Paez is also a Learning Designer in LDI’s Learning Lab at Dartmouth. In today’s conversation we will discuss the free and helpful resources that these brilliant minds have produced that we can now all use to help our faculty and staff incorporate UDL into our learning environments, including fantastic case studies that anyone can use for their own trainings on UDL in higher education, so that you are not left reinventing the wheel at your institution.
Resources
Practicing UDL in Higher Education: A Workbook by the Accessible Dartmouth Initiative
Accessible Dartmouth Initiative
Transcript
27:52
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Universal Design for Learning, UDL, learner variability, accessible initiatives, Dartmouth College, Learning Innovation Program, Learning Designer, neurodivergent learners, case studies, higher education, virtual workbook, inclusive pedagogy, faculty support, digital resource, accessible format.
SPEAKERS
Majo Brito Paez, Carly Lesoski, Lillian Nave, Courtney Floyd
Lillian Nave 00:02
Welcome to think UDL, the universal design for learning podcast where we hear from the people who are designing and implementing strategies with learner variability in mind. I’m your host, Lillian nave, and I’m interested in not just what you’re teaching, learning, guiding and facilitating, but how you design and implement it, and why it even matters. Welcome to Episode 155 of the think UDL podcast, accessible initiatives with Carly Lesoski, Courtney Floyd and Majo Brito Paez. Carly Lesoski is the Learning Innovation Program Manager at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning at Dartmouth, and Courtney Floyd is a Senior Learning Designer in the learning design and innovations Learning Lab at Dartmouth, along with Majo Brito Paez, who’s also a learning designer in the Learning Lab, and in today’s conversation, we’re going to discuss the free and helpful resources that these brilliant minds have produced because I’ve been following what they’ve been doing, and it’s very exciting and super helpful that we can now all use to help our faculty and staff incorporate UDL into our learning environments, including fantastic case studies that anyone can use for their own trainings on UDL in higher education, so that you are not left reinventing the wheel at your own institution. You’ll find the resources we mentioned and talk about during this conversation in the resource section of this episode, just before the transcript on think udl.org That’s our website. And as always, thank you for listening to the think UDL podcast. I’d like to welcome my colleagues, Courtney, Carly and Maho to the think UDL podcast from Dartmouth College today. I’m really excited about this workbook that I got to sit in on a webinar and learn about, of course, because it’s an amazing UDL tool, so I wanted to get into it and and I know a lot of people will be interested, and I hope that we’ll be able to get a lot of use out of that. So my first question, though, it’s going to go to each of you, but I’m going to start with Carly lisoski First, and ask, what makes you a different kind of learner.
Carly Lesoski 02:42
Yeah, hi. I’m so glad to be here. This has been, you know, a goal of mine as a UDL professional, like, someday I’m going to be on that podcast, and here we are.
Lillian Nave 02:50
Today is the day, and I’m so excited to have you, Carly.
Carly Lesoski 02:53
I’m so excited we all so are as a first gen, low income college student. And even though so before that, I always chalked my struggles up to being lazy or ill equipped, or there’s just something wrong with me. I then was later diagnosed with ADHD, but that wasn’t actually until I submitted my final dissertation edits. Wow. So I have a lot of, I’ll say, less than optimal coping strategies for that, and I keep calling them study skills, but now I guess I am, in fact, an adult, so they are work skills that I’m still working on, deconstructing and building up healthier coping skills, coping mechanisms, study skills, learning skills around and some of that is also breaking down these neurotypical, centric ideas of how work is supposed to happen. I my brain just can’t sit down and stare at a computer for eight hours a day and work consistently eight hours every single day. I have different cycles of some days I will do a week’s worth of work in three hours, and some days I will do 30 minutes worth of work in eight hours. And our brains work differently,
Lillian Nave 04:08
yeah, but you do so much because I work with you before, and I know how awesome it is, so I’m very glad that you have this ability to and the structures in order to let your brain be as awesome as it is. So thank you. Okay, so let me ask Sue. The next is Courtney Floyd, can you tell me what makes you a different kind of learner?
Courtney Floyd 04:31
Absolutely, and I just want to echo Carly and say I’m so honored to be here. I’ve been listening for so many years, and it’s such a dream. So thank you for inviting us. So I’m a different learner for many reasons, one of which is that I was homeschooled K 12, so I really only experienced formal education as an adult, and that’s really shaped the way that I approach it, first as a teacher, then as a learning designer. But I’m also like Carly identified. I’m neurodivergent in a variety of ways. One. And that I like to talk about, because it doesn’t come up that often, is a Fantasia, which means that I don’t visualize things. So if someone asks you to picture an apple, some people actually see an apple, like 3d gleaming, glorious detail. Some people see a sketch. I see nothing, and that impacts the way that I learn in interesting and sometimes unexpected ways, so visual heavy methodologies or even things that that require sort of great recall, or that kind of thing I’ve had to learn to support myself through with narrative based strategies, often, is what really helps me with that. On the plus side, though, I get all the hyper focus from my neuro divergence. So I can go for hours and hours and hours, and I have to remind myself that I have a body that needs breaks.
Lillian Nave 05:49
Yeah, yeah. You have to remind yourself you’re not a brain on a stick absolutely like move around, right? Okay, so the hyper focus is Yeah, again, where you can do the 40 hours worth of work and like, yeah, yes, an afternoon, right? Holy moly, look at what I just made. This is amazing, terrifying. Yes. And finally, Maho, if you wouldn’t mind telling me what makes you a different kind of learner, absolutely.
Majo Brito Paez 06:19
And I’ll also start like Carly and Courtney, just huge. Thank you for having us today. It’s so exciting to be here, and much like Carly and Courtney, I am also a late, identified neurodivergent learner, and like they’ve already mentioned, the deep curiosity, the lack of impulse control, and obviously the hyper focus just makes my ADHD a total superpower when it comes to learning. I also moved to the US as an international student, and have experienced being a learner in five different countries. So embracing that kind of Third Culture kid identity and what it means in these different spaces that I’ve been in just being a multilingual learner has also been an opportunity to redefine what it means to be a different kind of learner in different spaces, all of which I really like to consider superpowers, but acknowledging just the barriers that come with that. So I’d say that’s that altogether makes me a different learner.
Lillian Nave 07:10
Well, this is a powerhouse already, and I’m really honored that all of you like wanted to be on the podcast and and I’m really excited that I get to talk to really brilliant people. It’s quite like the added, like, special, extra special bonus that I didn’t know having a podcast would would do is like, people think you are more special because you have this podcast, and I’m not, but it makes it, makes it so amazing to be able to, like, I will just go, I’m like, Hey, I would love to talk to you. And I never would do that unless I have this podcast. And I can say, hey, I have this podcast. Don’t you want to come on? So I’m very honored to have all three of you. You’re doing amazing work. So let’s get into it. And I think this will be for Courtney. And I wanted to start talking about, what is this practicing UDL in higher education workbook?
Courtney Floyd 08:06
Yeah, that’s a great question. And just to contextualize it a little bit, we started with the accessible Dartmouth initiative, with the sort of very traditional, multi day institutes that are live, sometimes hybrid, sometimes on campus, sometimes completely virtual, but in that process, we realized that we wanted to be more accessible, because those that format is not for everyone. It can be especially tricky at different times of the year for parents or for people who are chronically ill or that kind of thing. And so we started planning a virtual workbook that was really meant as an alternate pathway for the faculty and educators that we work with here at Dartmouth to do the sort of activities that we do in our in person institutes in a guided way, but at their own pace. And that sort of broadened as we began planning it into something that was public facing, meant to translate, again, sort of an institute experience, into an accessible format for a wider range of educators in higher ed, both at and beyond Dartmouth. And one key part of that is that it’s really asynchronous and flexible, so it can be used as a system, a process that you work through, or we’ll talk about a little bit later, sort of in a piecemeal ways, you can sort of dive in and take what is valuable and then dive back out. Because we all know that educators are incredibly busy people, and they might not have 10 to 20 hours to devote to something. They might have 30 minutes while they’re eating lunch. Another thing that I think this is doing uniquely, is providing context for UDL. So it’s not just here’s the framework, let’s apply it, but sort of grounding it in different pedagogical practices, activating that prior knowledge that faculty might bring to the space to sort of get them to see what they’re already doing. I think you had Chris and. Lillian on talking about accidental UDL, always back, and we really thought about how to leverage that in a meaningful way with this resource. Excellent.
Lillian Nave 10:09
Yeah, I loved that episode too, because so much of what I do, and I’m sure what all of you all do is like, we have a lot of fantastic faculty members who are practicing UDL, and they just didn’t realize, oh, that really matches up with the research. That really matches up with what the guidelines are. You know, are asking us to think about over and over again, and then, if it’s it’s just like, You know what? This is a really great thing. You’re doing a fantastic job. Look at how it connects. Yeah?
Carly Lesoski 10:38
Carly, yeah, that’s a really, that big thing that we’ve been building on for with our faculty, I think the term universal design can be really intimidating for faculty, and so being able to show them you’re already doing these things you have a foundation to build upon, can be so powerful for them. They don’t have to tear everything that they’re doing down and restart. They can start with a really strong foundation that they’re they’re already working with.
Lillian Nave 11:06
And what I love about this workbook is that it was so easily accessible, like I just saw it pop up and I was like, oh, I want to find out about this. Let me go. So why did you do this as a public facing virtual workbook, I think, is the next question, and I’ll go to you.
Carly Lesoski 11:25
Carly, yeah, I think from the very beginning of this initiative, we recognized that we had sort of enormous privilege. We were very lucky where it’s a donor fund. It began as a donor funded initiative, the accessible Dartmouth initiative did, and we knew that we were very lucky to have the donor funding to start this work. And not all institutions have an initiative dedicated to providing resources and support for implementation of UDL. And we knew that we wanted to support people in successfully implementing UDL so much of our knowledge about UDL has been supported through other resources that other folks have created, whether these are open educational resources, the work that people have presented at conferences, things that people have shared with us. So this part, in part, was giving back to the community. It’s also just an important sort of Tenet, I think, of all of our approaches to our work is building access in many different ways, and that also means bringing down the financial barriers. There are some other resources that sort of served as a foundation for us, like Northwestern has a really great OER Darla Kearney wrote a really great OER and the book UDL University, and I’ll make sure we have all these links in the show notes for listeners. Each of these had really great approaches. UDL University is a great book. It’s for purchase as well, but we took all of these and wanted to pull the best from these and create something that was a public facing, virtual, free workbook, then we also wanted it to be something that provided context and support to faculty on that instructional piece, that even if the faculty member was the only person at their small institution or their small community College, or wherever they are thinking about UDL, they would still have what they needed to implement it. They didn’t need a full instructional design team there to do this with them.
Lillian Nave 13:29
You know, I have found in working with those a lot of small colleges, or just less resourced colleges, right, that there are so many fantastic faculty who are really interested in this, right? And they would love to have gone to your four day or, you know, or two day in service, or whatever they want to call it. But again, they didn’t have either the they didn’t have it at their college. They didn’t have it at their place. And so having these resources and then also making them known. Hence, let’s have a podcast about it so people all over the world can find out about it. It’s going to be so helpful, especially for all of the, I think, faculty, who are starting out and maybe don’t even know that they might have a center for teaching and learning, and then they or they might find out they don’t have one. And so this is such a great resource. So okay, great. All right. So, Courtney, I think the next one I’ve got is for you, and it’s an interesting layout, so I wanted to ask about this work. But And can you explain the layout with its chapters and reflection sections? Because I looked at it the first time, and it’s not just chapter one through 10, it’s chapter and then reflection, almost like flip flop almost every
Courtney Floyd 14:46
chapter Absolutely, yeah. And so we think about this in a couple of different ways. One is sort of as a grab bag, where you might go in and read chapter one and jump back out. I. Or you might do a reflection in JAM packet, or it could be a system, and that structure that you describe is really meant to support a system. So by the time an educator works through this, they should have a plan for how they will be implementing UDL in their classroom, and that happens by chapters that provide context. So there’s background about disability in higher education, the creation of UDL as a methodology, there are practical applications, considerations about limitations and barriers that one might face while working with UDL, and these are meant to really support educators in sort of getting grounded and what’s a pretty overwhelming at first glance graphic organizer or framework, there’s a lot going on there, and we really want to answer the why before we get to the how. Then those reflections help sort of break that down a little bit further. So thinking about who your learners are, what barriers they actually face based on your own past experience with them, based on what you know about your institution, what sorts of things you’ve tried to do to address those barriers in the past. Maybe some of them are UDL, and you don’t even know it yet, and then ways that you can sort of work with the UDL guidelines to address those barriers creatively but sustainably as well going forward. So those reflections are really meant to help you put a plan together by the end of the workbook, we think about it as a sort of choose your own adventure situation. And in particular, with chapter five, which is really special because it has all of our case studies, there are a few different pathways through those,
Lillian Nave 16:43
yeah, and I was able to participate in the webinar kind of or as a zoom, and we got to kind of choose our own adventure there. And so I could definitely see it as something that not just individuals could use, but a center for teaching or an instructional designer could host, like we could host a workshop and then say, All right, let’s, you know, try this case study. Let’s use these to help faculty to understand what might be a way to think about redesigning a course, or you have a particular problem, and that’s also really helpful too, because I know a lot of the time that it takes to kind of set up a workshop, or to think about what a case study is, or have personas, or have you know, all of these things, and you’ve all done an incredible amount of work to make it so much easier for Not just a faculty member, but also maybe someone who wants to implement UDL in a larger scale on their campus could be spreading the word with this really fantastic resource. So yes, it’s I’ve already seen that it can be used in some really great ways, and you make it so easy. So let’s think about that, right? Let’s talk about what are these awesome resources? What are these case studies? And Maho, I’m going to direct this next one to you and ask if you can give some examples of how faculty and staff might approach the case studies in various ways. Absolutely.
Majo Brito Paez 18:17
So one of the main things we wanted to do with these case studies is to give concrete examples of how real world faculty have used UDL in practice. So on one hand, we were able to get a lot of those from what we’re calling external case studies, so external to Dartmouth that we were finding in books and just like stories that people were telling online. But we also recognized that there were a lot of stories that we could tell from the work that our faculty at Dartmouth were doing, at least the faculty who had come to our institutes or who had collaborated with us to design a UDL implementation and put it into practice. And what was awesome about those stories, because they were so close to home, is that we were able to hear from them and their reflection about how it went, how students reacted to it. We had awesome stories just collected in our drive, and we wanted to share those stories, and that’s where the idea of case studies came up. So what we love about this is that, again, there are real world, world examples working within the known constraints of implementing UDL in higher education. So we’re hoping that’s a context that listeners might relate to, the other faculty might relate to as well. And they’re also all focused on barriers, a specific barrier that you know, that they, as a faculty, were facing, that maybe another faculty could might just relate to. Another thing that’s important here, and how people might interact with the case studies and engage with them, is that, you know, maybe it’s the barrier that they feel connected to, but maybe it’s the discipline they teach. So one thing that we did in the workbook is we split up the case studies by discipline. If you’re someone who’s teaching a STEM course, you might go look at STEM courses. If you’re someone who’s in social studies, you might look at social studies, case studies, and just finding those different spaces that could serve as a source of connection or maybe inspiration, whether it’s Oh, like this time. Faculty member was facing a similar challenge to me, or maybe the implementation that they did is similar to something I’ve done in the past. So maybe you know that that’s something I could build upon just finding opportunities to invite other people to try out UDL and understand what it looks like in practice. Because it’s not usually just like magical fireworks. You work into a classroom, you walk into a classroom and all the students are just doing these like crazy things. So it’s it can look it can be a very small change that has a very big impact, if it’s done intentionally. And we wanted to make that, make that noticeable through the case studies. So one thing that’s great about this is that we still have faculty members who are working on implementing UDL in their classroom, so we’re constantly just getting more stories that we’d like to tell, and we want to focus on continuing to tell that story. So we’re expanding the cases, and we’re really hoping to make this work like a living a living resource. We know that this work is never done, and we want to keep sharing these stories with the world. So it’s one of those places that we’re hoping. You know, right now, we’re doing this with our Dartmouth faculty, but our big dream for the future is, you know, as other people use this workbook and implement UDL in their institutions, maybe we could at some point have an open call for cases and then start telling other people’s stories too. So that’s something that’s been really exciting for us as we consider how we can connect with just the broader community of people excited about making their courses more accessible, and how we can elevate their stories as well.
Lillian Nave 21:22
You know, I really appreciate that this is a digital workbook too, because of exactly that, you know, you’ve mentioned some of the other resources, like a book. You know, the folks at Goodwin College, Randy lace, they’ve done a great job with the UDL stories. It’s wonderful. It’s a book, but it’s also a book, which means you can’t go back in and say, Oh, here’s another addition to that, or here’s like a kind of a playoff or spin off on that case study. And with a digital resource like this, it’s really well put together. It’s easy to find it’s also something that could be added on to. So I’m excited to hear. I didn’t know that that there might be, yeah, more case studies, or more folks that might be able to add to this, and then we can really have this continuous living kind of experiment document and see how it’s going. I know, years and years ago, we had case studies in College STAR, where I started out with the podcast, actually, and so we would have kind of really small, like little implementation pieces. But it would be great to have a much larger higher ed focused on only higher ed focused UDL case studies. So, oh, that’s really fantastic to hear. Thank you. What happens if somebody is, let’s say, listening to this podcast, and it’s like, this sounds amazing. I really would like to learn more about this. How can I find out? What should they do? And I guess that’s going to be a Carly question, yeah.
Carly Lesoski 23:03
So as the program manager, I’m sort of the main contact here. Of course, we want you to dive in, check the show notes for the link to the workbook. Spend some time clicking around. Use the grab bag approach, use the system approach, whatever feels right. Check out some of the case studies, see where things are at right now, and spend a little time there and then. If you have questions, I will also include my contact information. You can feel free to reach out. We would love to hear your thoughts, your questions, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can on those but we would love to hear from you.
Lillian Nave 23:43
That’s awesome. Yeah, we’ll be able to find it in the resources, but it’s also just like freely available, which is really fantastic. And there’s no paywall, am I correct?
Carly Lesoski 23:55
No pay wall, and there never will be, it will always exist out there.
Lillian Nave 23:59
That’s so fantastic. Yeah, and so even if you lose your your edu email address, you can get to this.
Carly Lesoski 24:10
Yes, this will always exist. There’s never a login for it. It just exists as a WordPress site.
Lillian Nave 24:15
So, yeah, that’s so fantastic here, because I hear that also. You know a lot too about how much, how expensive is to get to databases or resources or things like that. So this is really fantastic. So Wow. Thank you very much. This was really concise, I must say, but very full of great information. Because I think it’s a fantastic workbook, but it’s just a fantastic resource. And I really do think it seems like you could hit multiple levels, like if somebody is absolutely new to UDL, this is going to give them the background that they need. But if it’s someone. Who has been working on UDL for years and years, I definitely, as someone who’s done that, I definitely felt that this was a really helpful resource, and it sounds like you’ve just kind of met a bunch of different needs in that area.
Carly Lesoski 25:14
Yeah, that was definitely one of the things that we wanted to reflect from our work on the institutes, because that’s something we have to think about when we build out the Institute, is we do have faculty who are brand new, faculty who are coming to our institutes, and for the second time, the third time, who want to learn more and more. So being able to reflect that and give options on going through different sections and digging through so as you work through the workbook, you might skip over some of the inclusive pedagogy section and then come back to that later and dig in a little bit deeper and learn a little bit more about a different pedagogical approach, or a way to think about UDL that you didn’t think about it before. You know, I’m a humanities person, so diving into the ways to apply it in STEM has been really, really valuable for me. So I definitely hope that there’s something that people at all levels and all institutions can take away. And we’re really excited to hear sort of general feedback outside of our institution and see the ways that we can improve it for for the implementation beyond where we’re at. Great.
Lillian Nave 26:22
Wow. Thank you so much so Maho and Courtney and Carly. Thank you so much for being on the think UDL podcast with me. I really appreciate it.
Majo Brito Paez 26:34
Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Lillian,
Lillian Nave 26:40
thank you for listening to this episode of The think UDL podcast. New episodes are posted on social media, on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and blue sky. You can find transcripts and resources pertaining to each episode on our website. Think udl.org, the the music in each episode is created by the Odyssey quartet. Odyssey is spelled with two D’s, by the way, comprised of Rex Shepard, David Pate, Bill Folwell and Jose Cochez. I’m your host, Lillian Nave, and I want to thank Appalachian State University for helping to support this podcast. And if you call it Appal-ayshun, I’ll throw an apple at you. Thank you for joining. I’m your host. Lillian Nave, thanks for listening to the think UDL podcast.