Whether you are new to UDL principles or seasoned, this video by Marshall’s Dr. Laura Stapleton, will clarify why Universal Design is so useful in promoting student agency, equity, and motivation. She explains how communication and design choices shape UDL, including how information will be presented, how it will be engaged with, and how students will be invited to express themselves.
Optimizing Your Course with UDL
This Marshall resource page will walk you through the foundations of Universal Design, providing an understanding of how the framework is designed to optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. UDL encourages educators to be proactive in considering the variability of learners from the outset of curriculum design, rather than retroactively adapting materials for specific students. This approach supports a wider range of learners, including those with disabilities, varying language proficiencies, and learning preferences, helping to unlock their full potential and enhancing educational outcomes for everyone.
Curricula That Account for All Students: A Look at Culturally Responsive Teaching in Higher Ed
As Ruanda Garth-McCullough, Associate Director of Teaching and Learning at Achieving the Dream, points out: “Culturally responsive teaching charges college educators to make what they’re teaching relevant to the students.” This website, “Every Learner EveryWhere,” presents a primer on culturally responsive teaching, starting with the levels of teaching provided in Zaretta Hammond’s 2014 book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Though primarily about K-12 education and cognitive development, the three “levels” of culturally responsive teaching that Hammond describes provides a useful framework for college and university faculty:
- Surface — observable and concrete elements of culture, such as food and music
- Shallow — cultural norms and attitudes, communication styles, nonverbal cues
- Deep — tacit cultural knowledge, worldview, guiding ethics
Learning Community: Connecting Students from Marshall University and the University of Kazakhstan
Dr. Sumeeta Patnaik and Kae Bradley discuss their experience creating a cross-cultural collaborative project between teacher prep students in Kazakhstan and literature students at Marshall. They share how they managed the challenging logistics of this international partnership and the profound impact it had on their students.
Student Agency: Fostering Inclusion Through Choice-Based Learning Assignments
Agency is central to adult learning theory, as it determines the degree to which our students embrace intrinsic motivation and lifelong learning. In this video by Dr. Shannon Miller Mace of Mathematics and Physics, discover how to design assessments that emphasize agency and give students a sense of control in shaping their own learning, in turn giving them a greater sense of inclusion in the course.
From the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, this page questions the assumptions informing your teaching philosophy, chosen course materials, and assessment practices: “By what methods and activities do students learn? What does it look like to be “knowledgeable” in your field? How is power shared or not in your classroom? What do you assume your students should be able to understand or do in order to be “successful” in your class?”
Building an Inclusive Syllabus
This page from the Stanford University Teaching Commons provides specific examples of language typically featured in syllabi, along with a “warm” and “cold” tone chart. In addition, it explains how to shift the perspective of the course from content to student learning experience.
Student Curated Music Playlists to Increase Students’ Sense of Belonging
Learn approaches to collecting musical selections and consider various contexts in which you could use music to set the tone for student engagement and productivity. Marshall University’s Dr. Wendi Benson, Associate Professor of Psychology, shares tips on how to create a sense of belonging through music.
This page from MIT’s Teaching and Learning Lab presents a Lit Review including some of the biggest takeaways from recent research on academic belonging. Several practical recommendations are drawn from “specific instructor characteristics that were associated with college students’ sense of class belonging.”
Why “Learning Style” is a Misnomer
From the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, this article explains how Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences has been largely misinterpreted and what we can do to better address our students’ self awareness.