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Appendix A: Tips for Universally Designed Teaching
- Become aware of your own culture's teachings and how those affect you as an educator. Learn how the cultures of your students may predispose them to approach education differently than you do. In particular, examine the factor of time, the relative importance of academic work vs. family needs if/when the two conflict, and the perceptions regarding individual vs. group achievements.
Example: As a product of Eurocentric cultures, I automatically value promptness in my students, expect them to complete their academic work even if family needs intervene, and measure performance by each student individually. Those are my biases. When I have students who come from other cultural traditions, I need to recognize that their values may well differ from mine; occasionally, I bend, and sometimes I expect them to bend.
- Provide students with options for demonstrating knowledge and skills. Those options should include not only traditional tests and term papers but also group activities, demonstration via activities in the community and/or in the classroom, and portfolios of achievements. This rich variety of alternatives responds to variances in student learning styles and preferences.
- Offer instruction, and accept student work, at a distance. Attending class in person is not an option for some people; it is inconvenient for others. Today, email, the WWW, and the increasing availability of broadband telecommunications (which transports voice, video, and data over a phone line all at the same time) make distance learning a viable alternative for many people.
- Alert students to availability of digitized texts (e-books). Not all distance-learning students will need them, but some will, and so will some students who are blind or have dyslexia: the already enormous volume of electronic (digital) books and other reading materials available offers exciting options for universally designing instruction.
- Offer students information in redundant media. If your lectures were prepared on disk, make copies available. Upload the lecture and other hand-outs to a web page, where students can read them using personal adaptive technologies such as screen enlargers and speech synthesis. It is very important that the same information be offered in all employed alternative ways. This includes things you say or show in class.
- Provide the support students need to improve accuracy and speed. For example, some students do far better when they can dictate something than when they write or type it. Computer speech recognition has matured to the point that it understands a person's voice quite well and thus may be used for dictation.
- Translate important materials to other languages as needed by your students. Computer software that translates between English and other languages has matured to the point that it provides "draft quality" translations. If possible, ask a colleague who is fluent in the target language to polish the product.
- Choose physically accessible locations for your classes. If you have a choice, select a room with desks and chairs that are movable rather than one with fixed seats.
Bowe, F. G. (2000). Tip sheet: Universally designed teaching. Universal Design in Education: Teaching Nontraditional Students. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
