Coda: Addressing Cracks in the Foundation (Part 6)
By David Rose
(with contributions and review by Jenna W. Gravel, and Nicole Tucker-Smith)
[Note: This is the sixth installment of a six-part blog series by CAST Co-Founder David Rose, part of CAST’s UDL Rising to Equity initiative, a multiyear, community-driven effort to revise the UDL Guidelines to identify, name, and redress systemic barriers to equitable learning and outcomes. We encourage you to join the conversation in the comment boxes, by using the hashtag #UDLrising on your favorite social media platform, or by emailing your feedback to udlguidelines@cast.org.
Access parts one, two, three, four, and five on the UDL Center blog. You may also download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
In many ways, UDL has been very successful. UDL principles and practices are evident, if not always prominent, not only in my old school in Boston but also in the policies and practices of schools, universities, and even businesses throughout the world. Overall, the foundation of UDL (the principles and framework) has proven to be both sturdy and generative. But the gaps and cracks in the guidelines highlighted above limit their application and the future growth of UDL. Fortunately, the process of reviewing and revising those guidelines is now underway.
Two things are important in fortifying that process. First, the process must itself be more universally designed. It must be led by “expert learners” who are much more diverse in the research they conduct and attend, in the settings, communities, and cultures within which they practice and learn, and in the lived experiences of privilege, barriers, bias, and prejudice that will motivate and engage them. That process has begun. But even that will not suffice. Other organizations and movements are already well established in addressing domains of equity that are not well addressed by UDL. Two articles in the Harvard Education Review, for example, have urged better “cross pollination” between the fields of UDL and Culturally Responsive Education (Alim, et al., 2017; Waitoller & Thorius, 2016). Even more recently, Fornauf and Mascio (2021) describe how disability critical race studies (DisCrit) can be extended to more fully develop the UDL framework. The next stage of UDL will require, and benefit from, such cross-pollinations and intersections and a more intentional embeddedness in the wider networks of equity and inclusion.
Second, the process ahead must address two important concerns: That attempting to address new kinds of barriers may weaken the original focus of the UDL Guidelines — on equity for individuals with disabilities — or weaken its foundation in the learning sciences (that concern will be addressed in an accompanying paper). For the first concern, consider an embarrassing omission in the existing guidelines. A person with a physical disability — someone who uses a wheelchair, for example — typically faces two kinds of barriers, not one. The first kind, actual physical barriers, are typically very obvious. But there is a second kind. A student in a wheelchair continually finds that many people, including teachers and other students, will generate implicit biases about their intelligence, ambition, education, future promise, etc., that are not based on their ability but on their identity as a disabled person. The same is true for learners with labels like autism, learning disability, ADHD, and so forth. They all face the barriers of identity and lowered expectations that are not addressed in the existing UDL Guidelines.
The lesson is simple: It is not possible to adequately address the barriers of ability without also addressing the barriers of identity, and vice versa. And that is also true of the barriers that emanate from institutions and communities. The next stage of the UDL Guidelines will require careful (and care-full) attention and remediation at the intersections of ability, identity, institutions, and community. That will inevitably open new cracks. And that is how the light will get in.
Epilogue
Recently, my wife and I visited the MFA for the first time in more than a year. Both the museum and we had changed.
Having been closed for most of the year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the museum was open again but with lots of new procedures and precautions. After our own bout with COVID, my wife and I were out in the world again, but with a host of new antibodies and precautions.
But there were other maladies that intruded on both the museum and us that year as well. For one pointed example, George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020. Even in our upper middle-class suburb of Boston, the accumulation of injustices and tragedies pushed both our church and our community into much more urgent conversations and confrontations about our own roles in personal and systemic racism, and then into political and public antiracism activism. Whether these changes will be effective, or sustainable, remains to be seen. But it feels like change.
As we entered the museum, it was apparent that the museum was changing as well. Most prominently the museum was hosting two major special exhibits. In the upstairs gallery, there was a large exhibit focused on the roots and substance of Monet’s revolutionary art at the turn of the last century. Among other things, the exhibit highlighted the museum’s own role in welcoming Monet’s advances, and his paintings, to America. It was an exhibit that showcased the museum’s traditional strengths.
In the downstairs gallery there was an exhibit that looked very different from the Monet. It was an expansive and invasive exhibit showcasing the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Haitian/Puerto Rican who became famous (actually infamous at first) for his revolutionary graffiti and hip hop “street art” on buildings, subways, doorways, furniture, etc., in lower Manhattan. His brash, innovative, anti-racist, and controversial artwork has recently been recognized and valued widely, and its pairing with Monet seemed both timely and apt. It was an exhibit that showcased the museum’s changing strengths.
Perhaps it was my imagination, but the audience downstairs seemed more colorful, younger, more diverse, and perhaps even more engaged, than in the upstairs gallery. Importantly, it seemed to portend a commitment to a better and more vibrant future for the MFA, one in which not only its building but its art and its mission are more open and welcoming — for both teaching and learning — to everyone in its surrounding community.
[For the references from this series, download the accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
A Note on Authorship and Context
This essay began as a personal reflection by me, David Rose, written merely as an introduction — a prologue — to a longer research paper that would review current advances in the neurosciences that would hopefully inform or guide the process of updating and revising the UDL Guidelines ahead.
During the process of writing that introduction, however, I was increasingly captured by remembrances of a pivotal year in my own development — my first year of full-time teaching in an urban high school in Boston. When I shared the first draft of those reflections with Dr. Jenna Gravel and Nicole Tucker-Smith, who are leading “UDL Rising to Equity,” CAST’s effort to update the Guidelines, the piece was already too long for an introduction. But they encouraged me to develop it further. In so doing, however, they provided such rich and challenging feedback — sometimes stimulating and supportive, sometimes unsettling and even troubling — that many drafts followed. Importantly, that written exchange was embedded in biweekly conversations — an alternate means of expression — where we could more fully share our changing cognitions and emotions. That extended dialogue (actually a trialogue) turned out to be one of the richest and most consequential educational journeys of my career. I had much to learn and they were great teachers.
The essay is thus both personal and collective. The vignettes (in italics) are completely mine, and the subsequent reflections are in my voice. But those reflections have been so altered and educated by our conversations (and readings we shared) that they can no longer be isolated from that context. As a result, I have asked Jenna and Nicole to be coauthors of this piece, an accurate reflection of their role.
Now that the “introduction” has been drafted and ready to be circulated to friends and colleagues, I am eager to attend to the substance of the neuroscience paper. But, in the light the process just described, my approach will be inevitably altered. I used to think that a review of research papers — especially relatively “sciencey” papers about fMRI’s, dopamine, and the like — would be free of the embedded biases and prejudices that often cloud our institutions, our intuitions, and our progress. I no longer think that. Any paper that I would write (on my own) would inevitably be limited by the biases and lenses that I would bring to searching, selecting, and interpreting that research.
As a result, I have asked Jenna and Nicole to join me in co-authoring the upcoming neuroscience paper. While the three of us are hardly diverse enough to adequately represent the full population of plausible consumers, it will be at least be a better start (and more fun). The next step is to share our initial thoughts with the much wider — and more representative — group that will be engaged in updating and revising the Guidelines. We expect to learn a lot from them.
