Your UDL Network Will Change the System with Matt Brett

Welcome to Ep 167 of the Think UDL Podcast: Your UDL Network Will Change the System with Matt Brett. In this episode, Dr. Matt Brett and I discuss how leadership in UDL often shows up through organizational knowledge flows rather than through formal authority. Instead of thinking about leadership as something executives hold, we talk about how influence moves through relationships, conversations, and shared problem‑solving. In the episode, we explore how networks, conferences, hybrid participation, mentoring, and even storytelling help people advance UDL from wherever they sit in an institution. It’s a very human, very practical look at how ideas spread.

We also get into the realities that shape that influence — the institutional context you’re working in, the power dynamics that can either open doors or close them, and the ways gender bias can affect whose leadership is recognized. The conversation is really about how UDL change happens through people connecting with other people, and how being intentional about those connections can shift an entire system.

Resources

A few resources referenced in this episode:

Managing without leadership: Towards a theory of organizational functioning (2010) Lakomski, Gabrielle

Overview

Matt Brett and Lillian Nave discussed how Universal Design for Learning can move from grassroots practice to institutional strategy in higher education.

UDL Foundations

Matt described growing up with two profoundly deaf parents, using sign language as his first language, and developing a strong commitment to learning, equity, and social justice.
He framed UDL as a way to support everyone’s potential, addressing disability alongside socioeconomic barriers, caregiving responsibilities, and other factors that limit educational opportunity.

Institutional Leadership

Effective UDL leadership does not depend solely on positional authority; it depends on knowledge flows, networks, mentoring, and intentional engagement with institutional power structures.
Matt’s Australian national capacity-building project is connected to a fourfold increase in government funding for disability in higher education and the newly permissible use of that funding for UDL.
Practitioners were encouraged to understand their institutional context, build networks, document impact, and use evidence to position UDL as a strategic advantage rather than only a moral or compliance issue.

Evidence And Access

Matt’s research reviewed Australian university websites, policies, strategic plans, annual reports, disability action plans, admissions pages, and support pages.
The core digital architecture of 93% of universities met the benchmark used, but 0% met accessibility standards across their strategic plan, annual report, and disability action plan as a group.
Only about 14% mentioned disability on their main admissions page, about 14% mentioned UDL on disability support pages, and 0% of overarching policy frameworks mentioned disability.
All universities referenced reasonable adjustments, highlighting a system focused on accommodations rather than proactively designed learning environments.
The speakers emphasized that UDL can reduce unnecessary accommodations without eliminating the need for individualized support, and that assessment design should remain accessible and credible amid concerns about generative AI.

Outline

Personal And Professional Context

Matt explained how his deaf parents, sign language background, and early interpreting responsibilities shaped his learning identity and social justice commitments.
His experience motivated a broader concern with untapped talent and barriers affecting disabled and socioeconomically disadvantaged learners.

UDL Implementation

The Australian capacity-building project supports universities in using expanded disability funding effectively.
The masterclass focused on navigating university governance, budgets, policy, strategy, and organizational complexity.
UDL implementation was presented as both a bottom-up movement and a potential top-down institutional priority.

Networks And Leadership

Leadership was described as participation in organizational knowledge flows rather than authority held by executives alone.
Networks, conferences, hybrid participation, mentoring, and storytelling can help practitioners advance UDL without formal authority.
Institutional context, power, and gender bias must be considered when developing UDL influence.

Measurement And Policy

Matt’s report measured how universities publicly represent disability, UDL, accessibility, and support.
Key findings included 93% digital homepage compliance, 0% accessibility across the three document types reviewed, 14% disability references on admissions pages, and 0% disability references in overarching policy frameworks.
Future research may examine learning environments systematically across countries, including a proposed Brazil-linked comparative project.

Accommodations And Assessment

UDL can prevent some accommodation needs by embedding flexibility, captions, accessible technologies, transcripts, and varied assessment options.
Automatic extensions illustrate how universities can reduce bureaucratic friction.
The speakers cautioned against reverting to restrictive, supervised assessment practices in response to generative AI.

Transcript

1:05:41

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

UDL practice, disability, higher education, leadership, accessibility, policy, networks, student outcomes, knowledge flow, social justice, institutional strategy, strategic advantage, learning environments, neurodiversity, academic governance

SPEAKERS

Matt Brett, Lillian Nave

Lillian Nave 00:00

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. I was delighted to be a keynote speaker at the Australian Universal Design for Learning Symposium in late June, and this was a great opportunity to explore the best of what Australia has to offer, particularly Hobart in Tasmania and the picture postcard sites of Sydney, New South Wales, which I enjoyed after the conference. And what I was most impressed by, of course, was the people. There are so many incredible people working at the frontiers of UDL practice, and it highlighted to me how strong and interconnected the global movement towards UDL is. And one of the people I met at the symposium was Dr. Matt Brett, and I knew pretty quickly that he was someone I’d like to chat with on the podcast, and so I grabbed him afterwards, and here we are. And Matt is currently director of academic governance and standards at Deakin University, and also has been serving as project director for a national project on capacity building for disability in Australian higher education, hosted by Access, the Australian Center for Student Equity and Success at Curtin University. Through this project, Matt has authored an interesting report on how Australian universities engage with disability and universal design for learning on their websites, and this report shifts attention from UDL practice in institutional settings to how we might systematically assess the implementation of UDL across education systems. At the symposium, Matt also delivered a master class on leading the implementation of UDL, and I’ve spoken to a lot of folks who attended that. I’ve seen his slides, and I was really intrigued and inspired by his approach. So, I wanted to talk to him about that and some other things. So, welcome to the podcast, Doctor Matt Brett.

Matt Brett 02:32

Thank you, Lillian. It’s delightful to be here. I’m a long time listener and a big fan of your work.

Lillian Nave 02:38

I’m really, really glad we get this chance to chat. I got to know a little bit about you at the conference, but my listeners didn’t. So I’m going to start with the question I ask all of my interviewees, which is, what makes you a different kind of learner?

Matt Brett 02:52

Well, I promise you, with this, I’m not going to give you the the full six hour live story, but but I do need to start with my birth, my upbringing, etc. So both my parents are profoundly deaf, and I was born in England. And there’s it’s an interesting backstory around that, which we won’t go into today. But that means that sign language was my first language. That’s how we communicated within the family. And well, I live in a hearing world, and I can speak English as you can hear. But my deep-rooted early sort of cognitive, kind of neural connections were sort of based in that sort of grammatical structure, that way of sort of thinking about the world. So that that makes me a different kind of learner. But it’s not just the language side of things; it’s the upbringing, it’s the kind of experiences that you have as a child. And both of my parents are really smart people, really, really intelligent. But they didn’t get the educational opportunities that would have been available to them had they been hearing, and I navigated through my childhood the extent to which the hearing world to quite often exploited my parents, quite often discriminated against them quite overtly, etc. So I have this kind of deep-seated kind of social justice that’s associated with that, and I was also kind of called in to be an interpreter from a very young age, yeah, in very kind of adult kind of situations, whether it be legal, taxation, government, you know, bureaucracy, etc. and I’ve got to say, still have a this visceral allergic reaction when I see a form that I need to fill in, and it just sort of takes me back to when I was like six or seven years old, trying to look at this form, trying to say, what if I fill it in wrong? Will I make a mistake? Will my parents be in trouble, etc. There’s that element to it, but with that, and I think from a learning perspective specifically, my father in particular had a love of learning, and he really instilled that in myself and my brother. And we would often have competitions as our kids in the family as who had the best general knowledge. And around the time of my dad’s passing, I authored a piece which was originally titled “What Is the Capital of Bolivia, which was really a bit of a nod to those experiences as a child where we were learning. So I’ve got all these things sort of intersect that make me a curious learner. I’ve got a value orientation towards learning, which is important. It’s useful, and it plays a really important role in us. Side and there is a strong equity and strong fairness dimension within that, and I’ve got those genetic characteristics from my parents, which is, I think I am a little bit smart as well. So you know, I’ve got this. I think so. Yeah, I’ve got this need to learn, and I’ve got an ability to process the world around me. And it’s a complex world we live in, and it’s a complex sector that we’re both working in as well, which I think has meant that my career in higher education has been so rewarding because it gives me this complexity to deal with, and it gives me an opportunity to bring my values and my kind of social justice commitment to bear. But at the same time, all processed through this cognitive wiring, it’s very, very different to most people given the sign language background.

Lillian Nave 05:39

Right. Wow, it’s so interesting to me to see how many of the people I talk to-it’s such a family value that education and that that we learn so much from our birth culture or you know wherever we were. That’s those deep-seated values that maybe we couldn’t pinpoint or put our thumb on. That’s happened to me much later in my life to understand how deeply rooted that love of education is. And my father had also said that nobody can ever take your education away from you. That’s one thing you could nobody can ever take away. And so he provided that for my. There were five. He had five children. I’m the youngest, and we all benefited from that ability to go into higher education because he came from very, very humble roots in Appalachia, actually in Eastern Tennessee. And I didn’t realize because you just grow up in that water, and you don’t realize that other people didn’t grow up swimming in that water, and it it just changes your vision, doesn’t it?

Matt Brett 06:41

Yeah. One of the other things, which which I think is also quite instrumental in my career, my approach, etc. is that by virtue of not having the best education, the kind of labor market, economic opportunities, my parents sort of meant that they were sort of funneled into employment that was maybe more kind of magical or semi-skilled, etc. And if you don’t have a great job. You can’t live in the best neighborhoods, and therefore I went to school in neighborhoods that went sort of steeped in sort of prestige. I was I was around kind of other kids, kind of growing up that were from very diverse, also very sort of humble sort of backgrounds. And again, I see that sort of pattern repeated, where really smart kids, really smart sort of peers in my cohort, yeah, maybe made choices to sort of exit education earlier, or maybe didn’t fully take advantage of of the educational pathways that that were open to them. And again, that that’s just another kind of underlying sort of motivation that this is not just about how do we do better for for deaf people in in higher ed. It sort of extends to disability more broadly and the sort of social and economic circumstances that kids around the world are sort of going through, and there’s so much talent out there in humanity that’s underutilized, untapped, etc. And this is where, to my mind, kind of UDL is provides a really useful framing to sort of say this is about everyone. How do we how do we support everyone to be their best? And it’s such a powerful message, which I think it’s time to come globally. I think which is kind of fantastic to see.

Lillian Nave 08:01

Yeah, and those barriers, those are all barriers you mentioned that are really outside the learner. The learner is amazing. Learner is very capable, but then you’ve got that socioeconomic issues or caretaking responsibilities or whatever else that have squashed that, you know, and and not let that fully develop. So, okay, great. So let let me get into the questions that I have for you, and it’s going to start with that really great masterclass that you delivered, which was really fantastic at the AdSet symposium. So could you just give kind of a summary version of what the masterclass focused on and how it came about?

Matt Brett 08:40

So you mentioned before the national project called the Capacity Building Fund project that’s funded by the Australian federal government that coincides with quadrupling of government funding for disability in Australian higher education. Wow, it’s pretty it’s pretty rare that you would hear sort of budget allocations sort of increase by a factor of four, but that’s the backdrop. And I think the government, to its credit, recognize that by increasing the amount of money available for this so quickly, there is a risk there that universities may not know how to spend the money in the best possible way, or might sort of spend the money on things that were less impactful. So they’ve given some of that money to the Australian Center for Student Equity and Success Access, as we call it, and Access has approached me to provide leadership to that project to support the way in which we can support the broader sector to understand what are the things we need to build capacity in, and how do we know if that capacity building has been successful? So that’s the key focus. A technical element of the policy change was also to normalize or to make permissible that universities could spend money on UDL. Previously, that was a discretionary thing that universities may or may not want to choose to spend money on, but that was not something that the that specific funding stream allowed. So all all these things intersecting, and what I would say with that to make really clear is that there’s been a community of practice around UDL that’s been. For many years, so this is independent of this funding, and they’ve been running a series of conferences on an annual basis. So, with this money, with this project, with this network of amazing people that are working towards embedding UDL across Australian higher education, we just put the two together and said, okay, well, let’s sponsor the conference, make sure that more people can get along to that than would ordinarily be the case. Let’s sponsor some awards to be able to provide some recognition for people that are doing some really amazing things across the sector. And part of that, I’m being a bit self-deprecating and kind of humorous here. Yeah, part of the the ticket of sponsorship that people get to listen to me for a period of time, and I’ll I’ll well worth the

Lillian Nave 10:40

price. Well worth

Matt Brett 10:42

it. I’ll get a slot in the the conference to to talk about things, and my day to day work does not put me the coal facet around sort of UDL practice, etc. I’m more policy standards sort of governance in my day to day sort of practice. So I’m coming at this from a lens of how might universities be equipping their staff to navigate the complex political spaces that universities are to elevate the priority afforded to UDL as a top-down and bottom-up issue, opening the doors, creating the spaces, equipping staff with an understanding of how to navigate these things. Because because I do think UDL has been more bottom-up; it has been a groundswell movement rather than a strategic prioritization. And whilst the the top down government funding is sort of saying you can do this, there is a sort of quite a significant gap to my mind in that layer around understanding how universities operate and understanding how internal budget allocations operate, understanding how ideas get embedded in policy and strategy, etc. To equip those people that already have a passion or already leading in this space to take advantage of an understanding of how how universities work to progress this in a way that allows it to be deeply embedded in the fabric of universities. That’s how it came about, and the focus of the masterclass was not one of here’s the magic ingredient. Like I’ve got the special source, I know how all these things work, and if I give you this this wisdom, you’ll just be able to go forward and do things. I’ve been working for 30 years in universities now, and they always surprise me. There’s a complex organizations doing complex work, and as a result of that, my take is that one needs to develop an appreciation of your particular context and its complexities and its intricacies, and use some frameworks to understand the ways in which your specific context is constructed and how it operates, and then using that understanding to find ways and pathways in to be able to promote UDL as an idea to share evidence of how UDL is being impactful, and ultimately deliver better outcomes for students because this is what universities are all about. This is the kind of key purpose of higher education. It’s about students. It’s about learning, and UDL, to my mind, should be a prominent sort of feature of how universities understand how they can deliver better student outcomes.

Lillian Nave 12:54

Right. Yeah, it’s peripheral at the moment, and I think that’s why I have the podcast. Is if it were right in the middle, we wouldn’t need this, but I’m trying to bring light to so many opportunities for folks to see how they are, and they’re mostly, as you say, bottom up. Like it’s all these individual practitioners. How are we going to kind of make a large difference if it’s not the major policy? And that’s what I was really excited to talk to you about because that’s what you do is policies, procedures. So, thinking about how it happens now, and in your masterclass, you made the point that people are already leading UDL, even if they don’t realize it sometimes, or they’re in roles without positional authority. So, what does that effective UDL leadership look like at the practitioner level,

Matt Brett 13:42

yeah, yeah. One can get quite abstract here and be thinking about what is your definition of leadership and what do you understand leadership to be before one thinks about how that’s applied, etc. And this is a bit of a detour which I wasn’t necessarily thinking about, so going down, but it’s just kind of sprung to mind. But earlier in my career, I was managing a disability service at a at a university, and I was thinking I need to get a PhD. I want to do a PhD. It’s always been a niche that I need to scratch, and I thought I would formalize some of my knowledge around disability and and turn that into a sort of PhD, and enrolled in a graduate certificate to kickstart the process. And I had a guest lecturer sort of came in talking about their book, which was the intersection between knowledge and leadership, and the book’s title is “Not Managing Without Leadership, which is a bit of a play on words to say that leadership is a, as a term, is problematic. It has all of these associations around the great person, the historic kind of figures, and all sorts of other things. And what is better to focus on is the way in which knowledge works its way through organizations. This that book mentioning without leaderships by a scholar called Gabrielle Lakomsky shared the link to that. So it’s a really deep, dense book. But that took me on a different pathway, and I think that, to my mind, is still a critical way around how I understand leadership and the role by which. People, no matter where they are in an organization, can play a role in delivering better outcomes by being part of this knowledge flow process. So it’s not just the leader, the president, or the vice chancellor, whatever the fancy job titles that universities have for these leadership roles. But it is about how knowledge flows, and knowledge flows don’t happen top down. They don’t happen bottom up. They are happening in all of these. It’s like that recent Oscar winning movie. Everything, everywhere, all at once. Coaching, it’s all happening, and everyone has an ability or has a role to be part of this dynamic knowledge flow within organizations. And depending on how they engage with that, their ideas make it more or less sort of traction or be taken on by more and more people. Which is a not something I spoke about in masterclass, but it’s something that’s sort of come together now. And I think that, to my mind, is a sort of critical framing of what leadership can look like. It’s being part of this really dynamic, knowledge-based institution. One thing that I did refer to within the masterclass was a recent book by Marcia Devlin, who’s an Australian education leader, and she’s put out a book a few years ago called “Beating the Odds, which is a book about practical guide to navigating sexism in Australian universities. And whilst the symposium was a fantastic event, you just needed to look around to sort of recognize that there was a gender bias there in terms of the proportion of attendees who are female, the proportion of attendees who are male, or even non-binary as well, and I think there is also a sort of question there that we need to grapple with in the UDL space around to what extent is sexism and the gender biases around who who gets to positions of power, who gets to make decisions, is that intersecting with the role that people might have in leading UDL within their context, and it’s Markia’s book that makes the point really clearly that I drew upon that what’s critical is not positional authority, but it’s the networks that you have. It’s the networks by which you are enmeshed within that allows that knowledge to flow through organizations. And to my mind, as a bottom-up idea for people that may well be marginalized within the institutional settings, or are trying to promote an idea that’s running counter to some of the dominant institutional narratives. The network becomes critical, and everyone’s got a network. Everyone has the potential to grow their network. Everyone has the potential to utilize that network to advance ideas in particular ways. But it takes an intentionality to be able to do that, and it takes time, and it takes conscious effort to to think about how one might use that network to advance an idea. I think everyone’s doing it one way or another. But my encouragement to people at the masterclass was to be really focused on your context to understand the way in which it is constructed, to understand the networks, to understand the way in which power is kind of realized within that context, and then work within that with intentionality, in in whatever shape and form. And different people at different levels, different levels of positional authority will have different networks, different ways of engaging. But everyone has the ability to engage in this, and that was the call to action for the people that attended. And I was really, really pleased that there were people still coming up to me at the end of the conference saying, “Yeah, I love that, and can we keep in touch? Yeah, can you mentor me? Kind of moving forward, etc. And it was just, yeah, that’s what I live for. I love supporting others to do great work.

Lillian Nave 18:12

Yeah, you mentioned this. The network is very much mentoring. It makes me think of mentoring, but not in the traditional dyad. Like, there’s an older person or more experienced and a less experienced. That’s kind of an old version of mentoring for me. And we do we do a lot actually at our university about mentoring, and it’s these networks, and you’re co-mentoring, and sometimes you’re the mentor, sometimes you’re the mentee, and you know even with the same people. But it’s so important to recognize, as you said, recognize those networks, and I definitely see in the disability community, especially that you’re right. There’s less authority, positional authority, and so it’s almost as as it’s getting squeezed out the bottom, and so everybody’s going sideways out with networks, right? So other conferences, like going networking at conferences or other blogs, or ways to get out a message or to communicate that aren’t necessarily the stated authoritarian or set standards, but looking for all these different other ways to communicate and doing it for free a lot of the times, you know. Or also, what I loved about the ad set conference, I’m going to sing their praises because it was amazing. Was how open it was for hybrid; everybody could participate. So if you couldn’t travel, you know, so maybe you don’t have any budget, right? Maybe there’s no authority that you have, that you can get into a budget, you can you know participate in those ways. I think you’ve really shown a light on that’s a lot of power that we have, and we have to take advantage of it.

Matt Brett 19:52

Yeah, and this network, this this mentoring. Can’t recall how many episodes you’re up to now, but you’re in the the high

Lillian Nave 19:58

yeah 100 and. Yeah, yeah. The

Matt Brett 20:00

network is global. The mentoring is global. The the way in which you are drawing upon and putting a spotlight on the good work that people are doing around the world in various in various ways is it’s incredible. And there is a lot of prestige kind of wrapped up in Harrod. And we we spoke about this kind of briefly at the conference as well. That is it only the Harvards or universities of Melbourne’s or whatever the case may be that that have got the right to to sort of say this is the way in which things can be done? It’s like no, like the good work that you’re doing, and I know I’m going to get this is my English as a second language kind of thing, and I’m going to you’re going to throw an apple at me here when I sort of say Appalachian, Appalachian, yeah, Appalachian. Well, we say it in

Lillian Nave 20:43

this area of the country, Appalachian.

Matt Brett 20:44

Yeah, to be kind of leading, kind of UDL, kind of globally in the way that you are, it kind of shows that the ability to form a network, the ability to connect, can can happen anywhere. Yeah, and it doesn’t necessarily need to come from, as said, the sort of Harvards or the offices or the or the Cambridge, etc. and at some point, I would say that once UDL can reach its kind of critical mass, you will see maybe some of these other more prestigious universities or seemingly kind of prestigious universities maybe kind of jumping on and sort of saying, “Yeah, we were here first when this came from somewhere else. And I think that analogy of global systems, institutional systems, kind of local campuses. The same logic applies at all of those levels around networks and understanding sort of context and thinking about how we can work with each other without this massive kind of power imbalance based on institutional hierarchy, etc. And say, how do we do the right thing for learners here? And the right thing for learners is not to set up our curriculum in ways that only a narrow sliver of the population can excel in. We need to set up our curriculum in ways that allows everyone to meet their unique potential. And for a long, long time, yeah. And I think back to my parents here, the education systems were not able to, yes, structure the way in which they were designing and delivering their curriculum in ways that allowed my parents to get the best possible education.

Lillian Nave 22:08

Yeah, it strikes me that so many of us who do this position ourselves or think ourselves as outsiders, and so coming from something that was the system wasn’t planning for, and even in my positions, I’ve always been a very contingent faculty member. You know, like I kind of clawed my way back in after having children, and even before that, I’d never had a tenure track position. You know, none of that. And that’s like so many other folks. Like it’s all the folks that are on the outskirts. And I guess I’m just trying to say everybody is important. All of those, you know, every single one of our listeners that’s listening, and maybe you aren’t the provost or the vice provost, or you know, have the Tinder track spot, and maybe you’re kind of toiling away in your section of UDL wherever you are. We are it. We are the the network, and we’re making our waves, you know, and gonna bring it in, but that brings me to the the next question. Is kind of like that. If so many of these UDL practitioners aren’t in that position of authority or to set institutional budgets or priorities, what are your thoughts on how UDL can be recognized as you know we have to talk about this a strategic advantage? It can’t just be because we like it, it’s got to be for the good of you know where we’re working to, and for the students.

Matt Brett 23:26

Yeah, I might just very quickly kind of backtrack to the last quick question, and then I’m going to sure segue a little bit from that. That’s to say that listeners may not be the provost right now, but I think if they go about things in the right way, they may well be the provost in future, and if they can bring and they can maintain those UDL values, and if they can find ways of being able to demonstrate their abilities and the successes of sort of UDL in the practice, they they may well be the provost in future. And that that I think I would be hoping that in your kind of monitoring of the stats and uses of this kind of podcast that you can at some point, if you just sort of say, “Yeah, this podcast has played an influential role in being able to support people to reach those positions of authority in future, and that’s maybe a roundabout way of saying that if UDL has been primarily a sort of bottom-up kind of issue, that there are questions around how people can draw attention to the relevance of that work, and to my mind, it is about being able to demonstrate what works and being able to evaluate not just through the power of persuasion to sort of say this is the right moral thing to do, even though it is, but to be able to back that up, to be able to integrate within practice and ability to demonstrate the the value or the impact of these activities, and to do that requires time, and to do that requires people to make difficult choices between do I do task X or do I do task Y, and how do I kind of balance these things? And my my encouragement would be that people deliberately. Quarantine time, or deliberately make time to do things like being part of the network, to see that as a legitimate part of their work, to be nurturing that network, to be engaging with that network, to be generating the evidence of the work that they’re doing, and then to think that into the sort of network. So, to my mind, that’s a bottom-up way in which practitioners can start to be part of the institutional narrative to see this as a strategic advantage. With any luck, and education systems around the world will be approaching this in very different ways. But in Australia, at the very least, we have a pool of funding, which is now legitimized kind of UDL as a as an idea, and that presents an unparalleled opportunity within Australian higher education for practitioners to engage in how that money is spent, to engage in being able to evaluate the impact of how that money is being spent, and then, with any luck, at least some of the people that have been involved with that will be able to say, “I did this amazing thing. They can put that on their resume or on their on their CV, and that that will take them up to the the role of provost or vice chancellor in years to come, and they will then be able to do both. They will have the positional authority, and they will be leading with a kind of strong UDL kind of value set, and they will be embedding a way in which the feedback loops of evidence and trial and design, etc. can roll out time and time again and generate amazing outcomes for students. That’s that’s what the endeavor is. And yeah, with this, we might potentially demonize or potentially be critical of current institutional leaders to say, yeah, they’re maybe not as invested in UDL as as we might be. What what I would feel compelled to add to that is that leaders are the product of their circumstance, the product of their time, the product of their journey, etc. And there will be a spectrum of engagement with these issues, and several university leaders personally who I think are very, very committed to these things. So this is not about no one doing this. It’s about making sure that over time the average or the it’s normalized that this is the way in which everyone does things rather than this being a potential anomaly in the dominant power structures for higher education. So I just wanted sort of make sure that we, when we’re having this conversation, we don’t see it as us and them. We see it as we’re all in it together, and that the role of the president of an organization or a vice chancellor is really complicated. One of my favorite books in higher education is The Uses of the University by Clark Kerr. It’s often quoted, and there’s a section in that that just sort of talks about how complex the role of a university president is, and how it’s very hard for people to be all of these things, and in some cases, people are none of those things. But trying to be as many of those things as possible, and making sure that UDL is a feature of that, is is what we should be aiming for in terms of our future leaders.

Lillian Nave 27:42

Absolutely, and everybody’s on a different area on this path. You know, in Australia, you’ve just got this kind of big turn to now fund UDL. That’s amazing, and I’ve learned so much about how Australian universities are doing, how you’re moving this across systems, and Ireland too has another big, great infrastructure, and they’re ahead. You know, organization working with the government. So I think it, you know, as you said, it’s contextually bound. So depending on where we are, we’re somewhere along this path, and you know, kind of making the way the best way we can given our different circumstances, for sure.

Matt Brett 28:22

Yeah, for listeners around the world, it may well be worthwhile just sort of contextualizing Australian higher education. So, Australia’s got a population of close to 30 million. So that makes us, you know, we’re a little bit like Texas, I suppose, from our US side of things. Yeah. So we’re we’re small in the the scheme of things. We’ve got a very concentrated higher education sector, where about 90% of our students are situated within about 40 quite big public universities, and we’ve got close to 200 smaller private institutions. So, when we’re talking about the way in which the policy settings are sort of changing, etc. we do need to put that in context. You know, it’s a comparatively a small system, very concentrated universities. Universities, on average, are around about 40,000 sort of students. So we’re kind of quite big institutionally along those lines. So our our context will be very different to what might be happening in Tennessee or Oregon or other state systems in the US or internationally, but that also presents its own challenge because if you’ve got an organization and the university that I’m working in, which is Deakin University, that’s got over 60,000 students. Now that’s a big organization that presents its own challenges to being able to think about how UDL can be elevated into the strategic narrative within policy and procedure and practice, and that may be very different for a smaller community college that might only have 1000 students or something like that. Yeah, we need to be very much attuned to the contextual dimensions of these things. And one of the things that I’m working towards, given my sort of policy kind of. Interest is how do we sort of make sure that that becomes a set of the key requirements that all higher education providers need to be working towards from a standards regulation perspective, which then can be recontextualised by each individual institution, however big or small they may be, to be thinking about how they they set up their curriculum for the populations that they serve.

Lillian Nave 30:18

I was amazed by how large all of the universities were, I did not know that, and so I know it’s like a system within a system. But I know in some ways that’s going to be easier, in some ways that’s going to be harder. So I know it all depends on context. I have three children. One went to a school that had 2000 students. One went to school with 10,001, is at a school with 45,000, so everybody’s different. They are all very different, very different experiences for sure. Okay, so I didn’t know if you wanted to talk about UDL recognized as a strategic advantage, or if wanted to go into something else.

Matt Brett 30:58

Might be a good sort of pivot point to sort of talk about the recent research report that we’ve done around how universities are referencing disability and kind of UDL on their websites, and there is a connection between the two in terms of some of the work that we’ve done and how we’ve been able to quantify how universities are going about this. But before going into that, I might just think about this conceptually around what do we understand by disability, and how did that then impact on the way in which we went through the review process and what that tells us. So first off, disability is, to my mind, an interaction between people and their environments. So it’s not a fixed attribute of the individual, it’s a dynamic interaction between people in their environments. And in Australian higher education, at least, we tend to count the number of students with impairments. You know that that’s our metric in in some ways, and conceptually that doesn’t make sense because if disability is the product of people and their environments, we’re missing a big bit of the puzzle there. We’re missing systematic review of the learning environments that are being created. So that’s conceptually where the reports sort of came from, and it was what I thought was important to to do was to try and find ways of starting to capture information about those environments. And my natural instinct is to take a multi-level policy analysis and start off with the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities, and then go down to any legislation that the universities might be subject to, and then any policies that the universities might have, and then how that flows through to data. But I sort of recognize that that needed to be flipped on its head, and let’s think about it from a student perspective. And the first thing the student needs to do is go to a website, and is that website accessible as a starting point? And if they then can access that website, yeah, is the information within it accessible? The documents produced by it accessible. If they want to find information about a course, does that information signal that they’re welcome? That the university sort of acknowledges they exist, that they they might have disability, and then we can take a look at the kind of support or or the kind of learning environmental kind of features that might be there. So we can look for information around that, and then we can look at what are the policy settings or the institutional strategic prioritization that is afforded to disability UDL that maybe explains patterns of how accessible websites might be, or how welcoming emissions web pages might be, or how sophisticated the support information might be. So that’s the framing, and I’ll throw out some some of the stats from that off the top of my head, and for readers that then might look at the report and then do a, I might be a couple of percentage points off because I don’t keep every every decimal point in my my head all the time, but what we found with that is that the core digital architecture for Australian universities was pretty solid. 93% of universities have set up their homepages in ways that are below the global error rate for education domain website accessibility kind of check. So yeah, we’re doing well. Okay, we also looked at a three sets of documents: the strategic plan, the annual report, and the disability action plan. As a trilogy of documents, as a proxy for the way in which universities are generating information that may or may not be accessible. So, if you think about then a PowerPoint slide that an individual academic might put in a syllabus, and we we didn’t have the ability to look at all that, but let’s let’s look at the top-level documents to see how they’re looking, and we found that 0% of universities were able to meet the accessibility standard across those three documents in parallel. So 0% so which is kind of tells tells us something around the ability to translate these sort of standards into practice. We looked at the admissions web pages, and we found that the main admissions landing page that you would go to, only thinks about 14% of universities mentioned the word disability on that page, and in the Australian context, about 27% of school students are identified as having disability of one form or another. That’s the formal national statistic. So, if one in four of your students come. Through to university or a student with disability, you would sort of think, well, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to say disability on the main landing page, but a minority of universities had that. These are some of the stats that we looked at from a UDL side of things. We looked at the disability support webpage and looked for references for UDL within that sort of thinking that that’s the natural home for UDL. That’s where most staff that are working in UDL have been kind of situated in Australia historically, and I think again only about 14% of universities mentioned UDL on their disability support web page. So 14%

Lillian Nave 35:33

14. Okay,

Matt Brett 35:34

yeah. And one can put some caveats around this. Around well, yeah, we didn’t look at every web page, and we were looking very specifically at the sort of landing pages for these things, but it tells us something around the extent to which these ideas are percolating up and and being operationalised within within Australian higher education. If we then look down at the enabling kind of features here around our policy and strategy, we looked at the policy frameworks that then shape every other policy must comply with the overarching policy framework. 0% of policy frameworks mention disability within within them. We found that around a quarter of universities included within their physical building access policies reference to disability, and about a quarter, also in their procurement policies, made reference to disability. So, if you think about how we design our buildings, if you think about how we buy software or buy furnishing or buy other things, if we don’t have a signal within those to say you need to be thinking critically around disability as a way in which the learning environment is constructed, it’s potentially a reason why we have an outcome where 0% of our kind of key documents are are accessible. We also looked at strategic plans. Yeah, sorry, I’m just kind of throwing all these kind of stats here. They’re going to be boring as. Please keep

Lillian Nave 36:51

going. This is interesting.

Matt Brett 36:53

I think it’s important to be able to sort of step you through the conceptual logic and what we what we found as a way of saying, well, what might that look like in future if other systems were to go down this path? There are ways in which we can systematically track the way in which universities are being constructed and the extent to which they are attuned to the specifics of UDL and the strategic prioritization for universities. There’s again only about a quarter of universities that use the word disability within the the strat plan, and using the word is different to having a sophisticated narrative around disability, which is yes to me quite surprising. And I’ll I’ll finish this kind of very long monolog here with another bit of information, and that’s to say that I’ve recently resigned from my job, and I will be taking up a new job in the near future. And as a result of that, after 30 years of doing this kind of work in in higher ed, I’ve been very nostalgic. I’ve been very sentimental, kind of thinking about what I’ve been doing, etc. And I looked at an annual report from a university that was published in 1998, which was kind of early in my career, and it’s it’s some of my initial work, and there was like a page of information around disability in my work within the annual report. Wow, it would have taken up is one page out of kind of 50 pages. That’s as proportionate terms. It was like disability had really strong prominence back then. That’s not to say we’ve gone backwards over time, but it’s to say that it’s possible to have mature, nuanced engagement with UDL and with disability within these kind of key strategic and operating kind of documents in ways that currently have have been squeezed out. That sort of analogy you said before around yeah the the sponge being squeezed and yeah thing for whatever reason we’ve lost sight of the fact that this is a quarter of our market, it’s a quarter of our potential sort of students, and it needs to be treated as such rather than being, you know, one word in a 200 page document. That doesn’t cut it to my mind. We need to get back to a way in which we critically engage with this and put a spotlight on what this means. And again, the more that people talk about this. The more that it becomes a feature of our institutional storytelling, and I went to your masterclass on storytelling, and it was awesome. I’ve got to say, we need to be able to tell that story in effective ways, such that it becomes part of the fabric of the institutional narrative, the institutional strategy, and the institutional value add.

Lillian Nave 39:17

Right, right, because all of the the data is good. It’s, I mean, it’s good for us to know this data. It’s really good for us to know that only 14% mention disability and 0% other frameworks or policy frameworks, right? But that’s not winning hearts and minds. It might get people like open their eyes, yeah. But it’s going to be well. How does that affect a student? How does that affect our mission? How do we make those numbers do the talking to tell that story? I’ve seen that’s how it has to happen in higher ed or in any organizational structure. Need to get if we’ve got 1000s of people that are working at this university, and you do with huge university. Cities in Australia, we have them here. That to get all of those people on board, we have to unite behind a story rather than a compliance, which is like the the carrot and the stick. The carrot being the you know leading a pack mule or somebody on something on and trying to avoid getting whacked with a stick, and that works a little bit, but not as well as if we can gather behind or come behind a spirit, an idea, and catch the feeling, and then have something small grow, or say, “Yeah, I can align my values, my ideas, what I believe with you know what this institution is for, and I can align with that. I can you know have energy to do that because if we don’t have have that, then you know just keeps breaking. Everything keeps breaking all the time, and we’ll lose people. We’ll lose a momentum, and it’ll that number won’t change too much. That 14% I think, won’t change too much.

Matt Brett 41:03

I think for some people, the approach that we’ve taken with this report will sort of make their eyes close over again. It’s just a again sort of stats and numbers, and it’s it’s disconnected from the reality. But I think what I would do the story that I’m telling about this is that we have been counting the wrong things, we’ve been looking at the wrong things, we’ve been incentivising the wrong things, and this is my way of putting a spotlight on some of the levers that are open to government and some of the levers that are open to institutions to sort of say there are better ways of going about this. And my hope is that by highlighting that one can count, one can document the important environmental factors that are shaping the student experience, that that will normalize routine monitoring of that. It will normalize universities choosing to sort of fix those environmental features, and by doing that, that will open the door for the practitioners, for the educators, to take advantage of maybe more funding, or clearer policy signals, or clearer strategic policy focus on on these things that their work is able to shine and be understood and be part of the institutional narrative that sort of says we we have been doing some really cool stuff here. The report that I’ve referred to, we deliberately saw this as the first of multiple stages of reports. There’s other research that’s coming down the the line, but as a first one, we deliberately sort of said we we are not going to name and shame. We are not going to demonize. We are not going to be. We’re just going to look at a national story. But what we did do for each individual institution, we sent them through. This is where you stack up against these kind of national kind of numbers, and it’s been really interesting talking with some universities that have reached out for for dialog about their institutional numbers, etc. and there have been some universities that that really get it that this is the first attempt at being able to put a spotlight on the importance of these things, and it’s really up to them as to how they might choose to use that data as a way of saying, “Oh, we agree with this, and we will incentivise, yeah, making our websites more accessible. For example, making some of the documents that we post to our website more accessible. As an example, other universities may be saying, “Oh, yeah, we recognize that we’ve got work to do in in the curriculum space, etc. There was some people I’ve interacted with that have perhaps been a little bit more defensive and sort of saying, “Oh, we feel that we’re being judged here, and maybe didn’t fully capture the the full scope of work that we have been doing in our university to promote these things, and my response to that is, well, that’s great, but if you’ve been doing that work, how prominent is it? How have you been able to integrate that within your institutional strategic narrative, or your institutional annual report narrative, or the other stories that you’re telling yourself or the broader sector about yourself, and I think that’s a that’s probably a challenge for everyone who’s doing this. Is how do you get more prominence for the great work that you’re doing, and ensure that everyone can see the positive efforts that you’re making towards UDL?

Lillian Nave 43:53

Yeah, and how are our students like? How students have some choice in where they’re going? I know a lot of the students in Australia tend to go in their own city, like so. They’ll they’re not going to go across the country and go to school less or fewer fewer. Well, that’s sort of what happens a lot more in the United States, but less so in Australia. But they still have a choice, you know. And let’s most of I know most of the population is around the coasts or in bigger cities, and they’ll travel an hour. You’ve got great transportation. You can take a train, you know, and get into places. And so, if there, if a student is looking on a website and sees that there’s they’re paying attention to neurodiversity, to mental health, to disability, for one university in this city of Sydney, and another one is not. Then that’s going to certainly influence, you know, who’s going to even apply or or try to do that.

Matt Brett 44:50

Yeah, I think there are requirements in in Australian higher education to be transparent around what might be available policies, etc. So again, from a design of the research, we we. Anchor this as much as possible in a regulatory perspective. Like, what does the law say?

Lillian Nave 45:04

Yeah,

Matt Brett 45:05

other universities kind of following the law, with a view that every university should be complying with the law. But within that, there is the potential for student choice to to be influenced by the way in which universities are presenting themselves. And right now, it is pretty clear to me that some universities are really good at being able to tell a story to say you’re welcome here. We see you. Yeah, we will support you. You’ve got a rightful place to be here. Other universities, it’s up to the individual to sort of say, do I feel I’m going to be seen? Do I feel I’m going to be kind of heard? And the students are going to go there, irrespective of the the sheer weight of numbers. If you’ve got 25% of school leavers leaving school going through to university with disability, but every university will have significant numbers of students with disabilities in their sort of midst. But to what extent are they setting up a an effective, welcoming, affirming kind of dialog from the get go through their web interface? And we’ve got other research that’s coming down the line around what do they actually do behind the scenes, behind the paywall, rather than yeah, what do they put out publicly? But that public interface, to my mind, is critical because it is still such a a domain that is subject to levels of stigma or self stigma and fear of discrimination, etc. That we need to be sending that message really, really clearly.

Lillian Nave 46:19

Yeah. Now it’s really interesting research to me that you are in very much holding accountable what universities are supposed to do. I appreciate that you are kind of mirroring it back to them, and they can understand that what might need to happen and where they are kind of in relationship to others and doing that anonymously. But is there interest too in like other people reached out to you to find out more about this as far as implementation or other systems? What advice do you have if other people are interested in this? Because it seems like very useful to have this. And have you found that there’s others that are like, oh, what’s going on over here?

Matt Brett 47:00

Yeah, I mean, I’m the humble guy. In in, but you

Lillian Nave 47:04

can’t be on this podcast. You just have to tell me the truth, okay?

Matt Brett 47:08

Yeah. So just

Lillian Nave 47:09

move that out for a minute and just tell me about what kind of superstar research this is for me. Yes,

Matt Brett 47:15

it’s it’s. I have been really really pleased. Yeah, there has been engagement interest in this within government circles, within the sector, with research colleagues, and just in the last month, an application for funding has gone into a Brazilian kind of higher education grant program to do some research that’s going to emulate some of this work, and potentially do a comparative analysis of systems across the global South, which is ostensibly Africa, South America, Australia, parts of Asia, etc. So, yeah, to my mind, I’m trying to do this thing for the good of the country, for the good of learners, and and to fulfill my underlying kind of value set that I sort of spoke about sort of earlier. So, the fact that within months of this being sort of published, I’ve got folk in Brazil kind of putting in funding applications to to emulate something, it’s freaking amazing. You know, it’s really cool. But what what I would say with this quite clearly from the get go is that I think the key common conceptual anchor is about measuring systematically the learning environments that intersect with and in some respects create or or exacerbate disability. That’s the key. Yeah, we need to be doing that at scale, systematically, kind of globally, but with a view that how that then is contextualized within a local sort of context, because the law will be different. Yeah, in Australia, I’ve set up the report in ways that are anchored to Australian law, and we do have requirements around transparency, around the way in which we set policies, around the way in which our higher education is constructed. Not every country is going to have a similar kind of legal kind of framework or a similar legal way of sort of structuring this sort of higher education. So the key idea is systematic review of environmental factors, how it intersects with the legal framework, and then how that sort of hits the ground. Yeah, that that’s my mind is is critical rather than yeah specifically utilizing the indicators that I put forward in that first report and I I would also just want to add to that this is the first time that I’ve done it in that way and if I had my time again or my time again it will refine over time it will get better over time so when we get to maybe version 10 or 20 or 30 of this, we will have a much more rigorous and more effective sort of indicator set that enables us to track environmental factors in higher education that intersect with disability, and that may well, over time, see the number of students disclosing in disability in higher education reducing considerably because the environmental factors are such that people can just get on with their studies without having to say, “Oh, by the way, I’m deaf, or I’ve neurodiversion, or I’ve got mental health, etc. They can just get on with their studies. And right now, our focus has been on counting, documenting, and one thing I didn’t say about the report, which I think is another. For statistic is that whilst we had 0% of universities with a policy framework that specifically mentioned disability, we have 100% of universities with a policy that references reasonable adjustments, which is a kind of legal requirement under our disability discrimination legislation. So our focus has all been about adjustment, adjustment, adjustment. How do we legitimize? How do we get evidence around that, and then that flows through to the formal statistics? If we can get the UDL settings right, students don’t need to get an adjustment; they can just get on with being a student, getting on with their lives without the friction, without bureaucracy, and they’re more likely, to my mind, to be able to succeed in that context. If that’s the approach,

Lillian Nave 50:37

right? Just we’ll call those accommodations in the U.S. and I have made recently a Venn diagram about accommodations and universal design for learning, and they don’t completely overlap. If you think of those as two circles, they’re kind of like the the Mastercard. You know, those two circles in a Mastercard that that’s kind of a global symbol. But because UDL does eat into the accommodations circle. I think it is that design principle that if we’ve got flexibility, if from the very beginning you have captions for your videos, you you know you’ve got accessible technology, you’ve got transcripts and things like that, right? So if you are deaf or hard of hearing, you’ve got options. So that negates the need for some of those accommodations, so you won’t have to go and prove that you’re deaf and prove that you have a diagnosis, and then go through either. It’s expensive, by the way, to do that in the United States. I don’t know if it is in Australia, but having medical diagnoses or something, and then you’ve got to take that. And it’s again, it’s a lot of red tape. So the more we can kind of squish those two circles together, that I think it can UDL can take a chunk, maybe not all, but a chunk out of that need for accommodations, which is expensive and is also in many times, a problem of our own making. So, so many of those accommodations are because of policies, like you have to be here in person, use a pencil on paper, whereas that has absolutely nothing to do with the learner actually explaining what they know. They could be at home via Zoom on a keyboard, right? But because that’s a policy, or that’s a maybe even a desire, a preference of the of the university or of the professor, then we have to go through all of these things to get the accommodation. So, I mean, to me, that’s that’s how it ends up working out. That look, if we can squeeze those two Venn diagram circles together, UDL can take over a lot of that and and and can design that university where, like you said, their focus they’re wearing these big goggles that’s just looking for what’s wrong with the student, what’s the disability. Oh, we’ve we’re going to tick this box. Okay, neurodivergent. We’ve got this many. We’ve got this many who are dyslexic. We’ve got this many, and gosh, I feel like we could save the university a lot of money too if we just flipped it around. You know, I don’t know. That might be dreaming.

Matt Brett 53:16

Absolutely, and I think I’m guilty of this kind of quite frequently in terms of talking about the relationship between the two, that it can come across as UDL will negate the need for accommodations at all. Yeah, that’s not the case. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The accommodations always be there, but it’s about how do we how do we sort of make sure that we set up education systems in ways that negate the need for accommodations that don’t need to be made because there is another way of being able to set things up, and I think that’s one of the things which you’ve just described really clearly 100% back there. Just as an aside, and it speaks to the bureaucratic nature of large universities in Australia that are trying to deliver education at scale in a resource-constrained environment. A lot of our education is based around yeah batch processing. You’ve got a fixed time for a a study period, whether it be a trimester or semester. You’ve got to get the results in within a particular period of time, and then pull into the next semester. It becomes a really time down bureaucratic kind of process. And one of the things that is easy accommodation to make is extra time, whether it be extra time for a an assignment or exam, whatever the the case may be, and historically, Australian universities have a lot of bureaucracy around that because if you’ve got too many students that are needing extra time, then that interferes with the marketing, and then that the marking then interferes with being able to finalize results. The bureaucracy sort of you know drive. But we’ve got a number of universities at the moment that are going through different approaches around automatic extensions, where you’ll get an extension for an assignment, no question asked. Yeah, and it’s been fascinating from my perspective just to see how different universities are approaching that. We’ve got some that have just said unilaterally, top down, we’re making this change. It’s going to save us money. We’re going to save the opportunity. They’ve just done it, and it’s it’s. In in place, other universities that’s bit opt in. The academics have got a little bit more power and control. And when you have the opt in model, lo and behold, all the academics on masses say we’re not going to opt in, and it’s it’s not there at all. And other universities thinking about oh we can do it, but how do we set up our systems to be able to manage this kind of thing? It’s fascinating to see how different universities are struggling with the same problem,

Lillian Nave 55:23

yeah,

Matt Brett 55:24

and have different contextual ways of being able to deal with that. What what I’m hoping is that spilling out of that will be clear evidence that the less friction you put in place on how to get that kind of accommodation, the easier it is for students. The less stressed out they get, the less demand there is on getting doctors’ letters and other kinds of things to substantiate claims, and the system will just kind of smoothly kind of adapt and sort of process and enable students to just sort of get on and and and submit the work when they’re able to. And the net effect for that will be less students accessing services and less students then formally disclosing disability. And it will look like our numbers are taking a dive at a system level, but to my mind, that’s a success. Right, having less students having to put their hand up and say, “Yeah, I need something, is a market success rather than a market failure.

Lillian Nave 56:11

Absolutely, and the more our faculty and instructors and administrators know about UDL, the more they can choose to create these designs that require fewer and fewer accommodations, right? So there was a big change in the way I taught, which was always a timed test and a specific way of doing things. And I realized actually the fact that it needed to be timed was irrelevant to what I needed them to demonstrate. And so then I stopped having timed tests, and it was a lot of other kinds of assessments, and therefore no student needed that accommodation ever because I no longer required this timed test. I know that doesn’t work for everybody, and that’s fine too. But there might be other things in an instructor’s practice that they can reevaluate. Like, did I even need to do it that way? Just because that’s the way I always did it, or the way I was brought up, is that really the way it needs to happen? And with so many changes in technology, you know, it’s all changing now.

Matt Brett 57:14

Yeah, I think the I’m not sure how it is kind of playing out in the the states, but certainly in Australia, there is a hell of a lot of concern around academic integrity and the validity of assessment in a world of generative artificial intelligence. And my fear is that even though the technology and the alignment with emerging kind of UDL practice is allows us to think creatively around how do we design assessments in ways that are more effective, more able to be designed that don’t trigger the need for adjustments, etc. I see risk in some universities that we may be backsliding towards the 1800s, where everyone will have their ink pot and quill without a computer, with a supervised overseer, sort of making sure that no one’s kind of cheating, etc. And I think that risk is real, and I think that’s all the more reason for UDL leaders, for UDL practitioners, to be being able to demonstrate not only the impact of their design around curriculum design, delivery, assessment on kind of student learning, student outcomes, but but also being able to demonstrate that there is integrity, and that there is validity to the assessment. That means that the learning outcomes are not compromised as a result of the choices that have been made, and we do not need to go back to the pots and fills that some universities appear to be going pursuing.

Lillian Nave 58:34

Right, I know. There’s a lot of talk right now, and we’re recording this in you know fall of 2026. Well, fall in the U.S. winter, spring over in Australia, right? Yeah, yeah. So let’s just say September 2026, and that is still a really big topic right now. Is about how do we kind of beat generative AI? So, and some want to say you’re going to use blue books and you’re going to do all the writing in class, and that causes a lot of problems for anyone who has a disability. That’s difficult, and also calls out, you know, there are a lot of calls out somebody with a disability who needs to have a computer or text or some, you know, use a keyboard. We don’t need to be doing that right now either. But maybe by the time people are listening, things have changed. But

Matt Brett 59:25

yeah, one one other thing I just want to get in there as well. I know, yeah, my my background and a lot of the work has been focused around disability, but I did just want to make sure that listeners understand that when we’re talking about UDL and we’re talking about disability, that we both recognize that this is not just about disability; it does does apply to a much broader range of human human diversity and experience. That means that the adjustments that one might put in play, or the the way in which one might design your learning environment from a UDL kind of lens, is going to benefit a whole lot of learners. And again, that’s that’s part of the evidence that I think we need. To be building systematically and ensuring that we are not equating UDL just for disability. It’s much much broader than that and caters for a wide range of student backgrounds and characteristics.

Lillian Nave 1:00:12

Absolutely, yes, and yes, and actually, that’s a little like improv term. Yes, and I absolutely agree, and the more we can do to kind of spread the word about that learner variability is knowing that everybody is different. Every learner is different, and so much of all all of us are on some spectrum, whether we are disabled now or later, or sometimes situationally, you know, or even just our attention, or everybody’s different. It’s going to show up different ways. Neurodiversity is going to show up different ways. Just a neurotypical learner at a particular time in their life is going to show up different ways. And so, the more flexibility and the more multiple ways that we have to provide for that difference in our student population, the better off all of those students are going to be. But you know, I’m preaching to the not just the choir. I guess well, that’s a very I guess preaching to the choir. I guess that’s an American way of saying it. But yeah, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, or our listeners. So, well, is there any advice you have? Let’s say somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, “This is amazing. I’m going to look through his report. I’m going to see how he did all of this, and but I’m not maybe not a researcher, but I want to see if I can advance UDL tomorrow. Is there advice that you have for that person listening before we go?

Matt Brett 1:01:47

Yeah, I mean, my my key message would be just make some time. You can control where you spend your time, what you think about, what you do. So just think about how you are spending your time and how you might allocate even a smidgen, a little fraction, whether it be a minute, 30 seconds, more would be better. But just deliberately allocate some time to be maybe thinking about some of the things that we’ve spoken about today. So, how are you engaging with nurturing your network within your context. How are you thinking critically about the the power structures within your organization? How are you thinking about how you might be able to evaluate your kind of UDL practice? And yeah, I know a lot of folk that will be listening will will have really busy jobs, really beginning time, and I’m aware of that. I’m conscious of that, but you have the power within your control to tweak where you are putting some of your time, and that might mean saying no to a couple of things. But even if it’s just a small amount of time, to be thinking a little bit more critically around how you’re engaging with your context, about how to understand your context, about how to build that network, and to see within the knowledge flows and how knowledge of your institution is in integrating UDL and how your practice of UDL is being fed into that knowledge flow, it’s a good thing. The more people that just do that, even half an hour or an hour, that’s enough, you know. If the UDL community kind of globally was just spending a little bit of extra time, just stood doing that, even half an hour, yeah. Just think about how how big the impact will be in terms of the way in which global higher education systems are interacting, engaging with UDL. We’ll get some amazing outcomes down the track. Won’t happen overnight, but it will happen, as we jokingly say in Australia, which is a bit of a joke as a TV commercial from the 80s. Yeah, it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.

Lillian Nave 1:03:40

Nice. Well, and our network just keeps growing. The fact that we’re talking really around two opposite sides of the world. There’s so many of us that want to be making this better and infusing UDL for our students. That I’m just so glad you’re part of my network now, Matt. So thank you, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Matt Brett 1:04:03

No, thank you. It’s been a delight and a honor and a privilege. So yeah, hopefully, kind of listeners have enjoyed this this conversation. And please reach out if you have any sort of questions or want to find out more about some of the work that I’ve been doing. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

Lillian Nave 1:04:17

Great, I’ll have all that information on the resources for the podcast for this episode, so people will be able to find you. Thanks,

Matt Brett 1:04:25

thank you, Lillian. It’s been a it’s been wonderful.

Lillian Nave 1:04:29

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 thinkud.org. The music in each episode is created by the Oddyssey Quartet. Oddyssey is spelled with 2d’s, by the way. and 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 Appalachian, 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.