Think UDL

Inclusive Practices Include UDL with Amanda Jungels

Welcome to Episode 53 of the Think UDL podcast: Inclusive Practices Include UDL with Amanda Jungels. Dr. Amanda Jungels is the Associate Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University in Houston, TX. Amanda, along with Dr. Chandani Patel and a fabulous team of educational developers created a free EdX course entitled Inclusive Teaching: Supporting All Students in the Classroom. As I was making my way through the course myself, I knew I needed to interview the creators because of the emphasis on UDL in the course. I was so glad that Amanda Jungels was gracious enough to answer my questions and spend some time explaining the connections between inclusive practices and Universal Design for Learning principles. In today’s mega-episode, we get a really great understanding of how UDL is so important for and intertwined with equity and inclusion work. We will talk about learning as as social act, what engagement means through an equity and inclusion lens, and we will also bring in some educational tools. Then we will look at representation and talk about vulnerability, culturally responsive strategies, bringing context to content, why metaphors matter, examine the language we use and even explore what that means in various disciplines from STEM to art history. And finally, we take a look at inclusive assessments and why we should explore upgrading, specifications grading, and what grading for equity might look like. It is a jam-packed conversation and I think many will find something new and helpful, and maybe even revolutionary, with regard to design thinking, in our discussion today.

Neurodiversity is a Strength with Gloria Niles

Welcome to Episode 52 of the Think UDL podcast: Neurodiversity is a Strength with Gloria Niles. Gloria Niles has a background in special education and neurology and is the Director of Distance Education at the University of Hawaii, West O’ahu. Today Gloria and I talk about neurodiversity and how it is often considered through a deficit model. We will talk about how identity and intersectionality may shape our conceptions of neurodiversity, and we will explore ways to use a strengths-based, talent-focussed approach. This positive, flipped approach helps to promote equity and inclusion for all students! Gloria has graciously made several resources available to us such as the Intersectional Identity Wheel and a sample Inclusion Syllabus Statement, and you can find them on our website at ThinkUDL.org. I think you’ll find this conversation revealing in what assumptions we make, and what systemic issues all of our students, especially our neurodiverse students, face in higher education today.

Indigenous Ways of Teaching, Learning & Being with Libby Roderick

Welcome to Episode 51 of the Think UDL podcast: Indigenous Ways of Teaching, Learning & Being with Libby Roderick. Libby is the Director of the Difficult Dialogues Institute as well as the Associate Director at the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. She is an author, speaker and workshop facilitator who offers participants new ways to talk, listen and teach that rely on non-Western methodologies, specifically from Native Americans in what is now Alaska. Our conversation investigates multiple ways that instructors can learn how to teach using Native practices, and the benefits that using these techniques bring to all involved. We discuss earth-based pace, observation and non-verbal learning, dance, silence and reflection, experiential learning and storytelling. We also learn what happens when we just stop talking as well. I hope that you can listen without agenda to our conversation and take some time today to suspend judgement and think about what could happen in your teaching, in your university and in our world.

Mission Possible with Mordecai Brownlee

Welcome to Episode 50 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Mission Possible with Mordecai Brownlee. Dr. Mordecai Brownlee is the Vice President for Student Success at St. Philip’s College and an Adjunct Professor at Morgan State University School of Education and Urban Studies, and the University of Charleston School of Business and Leadership, as well as a columnist for EdSurge. Today’s conversation focuses on recruiting interest, inspiring students, and engaging them for the long haul in their academic careers, as well as what ways we can support students along the journey. Dr. Brownlee offers faculty some ideas to engage students and sustain student effort and persistence throughout a course, a term, and a college career. I found this conversation both refreshing and really helpful to me as a faculty member as we discussed the student success side of things to see how best we together (faculty, staff,  and institution) can support the whole student. This is a conversation about the systemic application of UDL principles, but it has applications for individuals and courses as well. I am so glad we get the chance to be able to learn from this conversation with Dr. Brownlee.

Pauses Make Learning Visible with Melissa Wehler

Welcome to Episode 49 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Pauses Make Learning Visible with Melissa Wehler. In this episode, Melissa Wheeler, the co-founder of the Online Learning Toolkit, introduces us to the “Pause Procedure” with which we can help our students with their own self-regulation and executive functioning abilities. She takes us through four different kinds of pauses including learning, cognitive, engagement, and social pauses, each for different purposes. We will look at when to use the “Pause Procedure” in face-to-face and online classes, both in synchronous and asynchronous modalities. Melissa helps us to help our students sustain their effort and persistence with pauses and communicate to our students that we care about their learning. We hope you can pause for a while  and listen to this really helpful conversation!

Make My Teaching Life Easier With Travis Thurston

Welcome to Episode 48 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Make My Teaching Life Easier With Travis Thurston. Dr. Travis Thurston is the Assistant Director of the Office of Empowering Teaching Excellence at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. This episode details the four groups of people that all instructors should work with to make their lives easier and their teaching more effective. There are many colleagues at universities who are ready, willing and able to help new and seasoned instructors to find, curate and develop resources, design and facilitate engaging courses, interpret student behavior and feedback, and create effective presentations of content, and Travis is here to tell us who they are and what they can do for you!

Grace-Full Online Teaching with Emory Maiden

Welcome to Episode 47 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Grace-Full Online Teaching with Emory Maiden. Emory, now the Associate Director of Online Learning, and I have worked together at Appalachian State for many years and he has always been my go-to instructional design confidant and guru whenever I have had questions, even questions I was afraid to ask for fear of being thought, well, stupid. But Emory has made me feel like my questions were valid and has helped me to improve my thinking every time. Today’s conversation is about moving online and what things we should be mindful of as we plan a course or as we are in the thick of a semester. We will talk about his philosophy behind using tech tools and how online courses really open up our teaching flexibility. We will also go over some things to avoid as you teach online, and Emory gives us some sage advice as someone who has helped hundreds of faculty move their courses online over the years. This was such a therapeutic conversation for me and I hope will be for you as we learn to trust the process, be patient with ourselves, and offer ourselves grace along the way (and don’t we all need that in our lives)! I was so glad to be able to talk with Emory and I think you’ll find this conversation insightful and helpful on your teaching journey.

Collaborative Learning and Student Engagement in Every Modality with Claire Major

Welcome to Episode 46 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Collaborative Learning and Student Engagement in Every Modality with Claire Major. Claire Major is the co-founder of the K. Patricia Cross Academy, editor of the journal Innovative Higher Education, and a Professor of Higher Education at the University of Alabama. She is the author or co-author of several books on teaching and learning including the recently published second edition of Student Engagement Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty with Elizabeth F. Barkley. Today’s episode is chock full of collaborative learning and student engagement techniques that can be used in land-based face-to-face or online learning classes. Claire offers the myriad resources of the K. Patricia Cross academy which has helpful blog posts, a video library, and downloadable resources of teaching techniques with in-person and online applications. We talk about how to transition a favorite in-class technique of jigsaw collaborative learning into an online version that works in both synchronous and asynchronous settings, plus a lot more! It was such a pleasure to talk with Claire and to listen to her pull from her copious storehouses of effective teaching strategies for our episode today!

Maybe It Doesn’t Need to Be a Video with Clea Mahoney

Welcome to Episode 45 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Maybe It Doesn’t Need to Be a Video with Clea Mahoney. Clea Mahoney is an instructional technologist at New York University in New York City and also a facilitator in the Online Learning Toolkit’s Camp COOL and Fall of Call. If you are interested in getting support for online teaching, you can find links to the Fall On Call program in this episode’s resources on the Think UDL.org webpage. In today’s conversation, the last of our Summer 2020 series on UDL in online environments, Clea and I talk about multiple ways of representing information in online classes. How can we customize the display of information, offer alternatives for text or auditory information, and guide information processing and visualization for our students? And if that sounds like way too much, we also discuss how to make online teaching simple and sustainable because, well, maybe it doesn’t need to be a video!

Your Humanity is an Asset: Instructional videos & Trauma-aware pedagogy with Karen Costa

Welcome to Episode 44 of the ThinkUDL podcast: Your Humanity is an Asset: Instructional Videos & Trauma-Aware Pedagogy with Karen Costa. Karen Costa is a writer and faculty development and online learning professional. Her book 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos came out in April of 2020, just in time to help all of us faculty who are trying to learn as much as we can about transitioning to online and hybrid formats! In this episode, part of our Summer 2020 series on UDL in online environments, Karen and I discuss what trauma-aware pedagogy is and how instructional videos can help with the effects of trauma on executive functions and self-regulation. We also talk about balancing structure and flexibility in online design and videos as conversations rather than presentations. In addition, Karen explains the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model of learning which focuses on teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence and how videos help with each of these presences, along with creating an emotional presence as well. It is such a pleasure to have this chance to speak with Karen and learn from her insights into both trauma-aware pedagogy and how and why making instructional videos can improve any course!