Cracks in the Foundation: Trouble with Shakespeare (Part 3)
By David Rose
(with contributions and review by Jenna W. Gravel, and Nicole Tucker-Smith)
[Note: This is the third 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, four, five, and six on the UDL Center blog. You may also download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
In early September of 1968, and happily (if belatedly) assigned to the annex, I rushed to prepare for the arrival of 110 sophomores, all boys (this is what explicit gender discrimination looked like in those days). Fortunately, Boston had a well-established curriculum. One of the first things I noticed was that much of October would be devoted to teaching Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”. Fortunately, Boston’s curriculum also provided a comprehensive teacher’s guide. It specified what I should teach — the critical elements of Shakespeare’s style, his use of metaphoric language, his development of character — and how I would teach it — assignments, lectures, discussion questions, tests, etc. I loved the play and was eager to teach it.
Only one problem. The printed textbook was completely inaccessible to my students. I was teaching the lowest “track” of students. Their average reading level was at second or third grade level, some lower than that. Given text difficulty, as well as the Elizabethan vocabulary and iambic pentameter, the textbook version was completely inaccessible to all of them. (Note that I had no “disabled” students. Students who were blind, deaf, physically disabled, etc., had already dropped out or were in segregated classrooms. None of my students were diagnosed with reading disabilities — more on that improbability later.)
After several weeks of growing frustration, lowering of expectations, and ineffective classes, I scavenged about for a different way to teach Shakespeare. Fortunately, while my students were “poor readers,” they were sophisticated teen-agers (indeed, some were in gangs not so different from the Montagues and Capulets). And I wanted them to confront what was so unique and artful about Shakespeare’s way of telling the story, not a “simplified” version or comic book.
Ultimately, we “read” the full text in a highly scaffolded way — by listening to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s recording of it (on a 78-rpm record player!) while following along together in the textbook. We paused frequently to talk about it or (better) to improvise the scene in their own language as a way to check comprehension and to highlight Shakespeare’s craft as a dramatist. In that way, I emphasized the actual goals of the curriculum — understanding the literary art and genius of Shakespeare — by reducing the barriers of decoding. Also, by using the recording to scaffold the reading — even though awkward — provided the best pre-digital opportunity for them to continue to practice and develop as readers.
My experience in Boston was hardly unique. Many teachers before and after me have created similar (and often better) adaptations of their curriculum to improve its accessibility. But each of those adaptations required hard work, were usually created on our own time, and designed without sufficient background, guidance, or resources to do them properly or optimally. Equally troubling, each of our efforts was independent, isolated, and redundant, repeated again and again in countless schools, districts, and states throughout the country. This was adapting the general curriculum, not universally designing it.
The idea of applying universal design to a curriculum was not articulated at CAST until more than 25 years later — in 1995 — followed soon by a publication of the basic principles of UDL in early 1998. Largely on the promise evident in UDL, CAST was awarded its first large grant from the U.S. Department of Education — called the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum (1999–2004).
The Center gave credibility to UDL and also provided support for developing many ideas that would be core to the foundations of UDL. As one example, where we had begun by identifying deficits within children, we came to realize that our first responsibility was to identify barriers within their learning environments. The UDL Guidelines were our attempt to address those barriers. Overall, the Guidelines have been remarkably generative and resilient. But we have learned a lot in the last decade from research and practice and cultural changes. What we have learned has revealed significant cracks or weaknesses in the foundation, cracks that limit its future. Let’s start with two of them.
A) Cracks in What the Guidelines Address. The source of one of the big cracks in the UDL Guidelines is apparent in the title of the center — The National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum. The Center’s mission assumed that the existing core curriculum was a given. That is, our mission was not to transform or re-envision the core curriculum in a school, but to make the existing curriculum more accessible. That seemed enough at the time.
But it is a problematic foundation for the UDL Guidelines. In the years since, colleagues at CAST and elsewhere have grown restless with that original mission. As one colleague noted, by applying the UDL Guidelines we were often merely “increasing access to boredom.” For some families and cultures, it was much worse than boredom. For them, accessing the general curriculum was an implicit (or even explicit) submission that their own culture and families were substandard, ignorant, broken, deficient, even pathological. (To that we shall return later.) To design a curriculum in which all students will feel equally challenged, supported, and belonging will require more than making the existing curriculum more accessible, it will require universally re-designing the mission or goals of the curriculum.
During the last decade, there has been significant wrestling in the UDL community with mission and goals. Ultimately what emerged was the idea that the primary goal of UDL is to create “expert learners.” That goal has many advantages: It focuses on preparing students for their future in a rapidly changing world, it reduces the emphasis on rote memorization and routine practice in favor of advanced strategies and skills for new learning, it encourages mastery motivation and self-regulation rather than dependence on extrinsic rewards, and so on. (The three principles, of course).
But the existing Guidelines lack sufficient attention to how to universally design either goals or activities for expert learning. There are not enough recommendations or examples to equitably inspire and motivate the investment in expert learning that will be required of students (and teachers and parents) who are very diverse in their abilities, aspirations, resources, and backgrounds. At the least, that will require diversifying the typical domains in which expert learning can be practiced and achieved, in the kinds of mentors and models that will guide novice expert learners, and in the kinds of options and scaffolds that should be provided along the multiple (not standardized or uniform) pathways to reach expert learning.
B) Cracks in who the Guidelines address. Because the funding for the National Center came from the Office for Special Education Programs, its focus was to serve those students with diagnosed disabilities. But such a focus creates cracks in the foundation of universal design. While advocates for UDL consistently emphasize the importance of recognizing and addressing student strengths (not just deficits), the UDL Guidelines focus primarily on addressing weaknesses rather than strengths. One consequence is that many people continue to see UDL as a deficit-based pedagogy rather an asset-based pedagogy, and too rarely as a universal pedagogy.
As one example, consider students who have remarkably strong talents or abilities. For them, the standardized, one-size-fits all, curriculum consistently imposes ceilings (another kind of barrier) rather than challenges. They commonly face boredom and restraints rather than the optimal difficulties that education often requires. Rarely, if ever, do the Guidelines explicitly address how to design options that raise that ceiling.
As another example, consider intra-individual differences. Focusing primarily on an individual’s disability or deficits makes it much more likely that they will be identified primarily by their weaknesses. A consequence is that strengths are unappreciated, unattended, and unexploited. They are likely to be shuttled into remedial activities (often of questionable effectiveness) and often to the exclusion of opportunities to amplify or accelerate their strengths. As a result, their identity development is harmed, they are under-educated, and they are not adequately prepared for their future. More explicit, and more prominent, articulation of strength-aware options and alternatives is an obvious way to dispel the perception, or even the reality, that UDL is a deficit-based pedagogy or one that is primarily about disability or “special education” students rather than being truly universal.
[Go to part four of this six-part series. Or download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
