Mental Health Week — UDL: not just for physical barriers
When it comes to talking about how to accommodate our learners, it’s easy to come up with scenarios and examples for students who need accommodations or redesigns for physical barriers. This student is blind, how can we facilitate learning on this course in ways that don’t rely on visibility? There are a lot of examples for developing audio resources or manipulable resources to help those learners. This can be more difficult to do for learners with mental health needs.
Dr. Frederic Fovet’s presentation yesterday for Mental Health Week covered this topic using UDL to reflect on the barriers and how to remove them for learners with mental health needs.
Before getting into some suggested reflections it has to be said that not every fix will work for every course. There are things that might be removable barriers in some courses, but may be integral to the academic integrity of another course. There might also be some barriers that get caused by the circumstance of the class such as the assigned class space or the class size. But I would still recommend taking some time to reflect to see if there are opportunities for new methods, or expanding choice.
The first step that we really recommend for this is making sure you have the core goals of the course outlined in some fashion. Typically this might be learning outcomes or objectives, but other methods exist. Having these core elements defined can help determine if there are multiple approaches to accomplishing the same goal. For example if the goal is for learners to be able to educate non-experts about environmental issues, instead of a group presentation that might be accomplished by letting students create animations, design awareness campaigns, etc. It can also help Accessibility Services understand whether a suggested accommodation would compromise the academic integrity of a course.
Reflecting on your key course goals and how you primarily assess them can help you determine whether you’re inadvertently moving emphasis away from those goals and putting it into things like rapid recall, group work, and public speaking.
As an example of this Dr. Fovet raised participation grades that are actually grading attendance. These grades may penalize students for having a mental health crisis. Often these grades are to incentivize students participating and engaging in the course. By opening up choice for how students participate you may actually encourage more of the participation that you’re looking for. Allowing students to submit “In the News” or “In Pop Culture” relations either online or in-class may help more students add their voice to your course, and may encourage students to put more thought into their contributions.
You might consider asking “what are the things that cause anxiety in my course? Do these anxiety points reflect what is truly important in the course? If not, is there a way to expand choice or redesign the activity to better reflect that goal?”
The go-to example for this is public speaking. I’ve had a number of in-class presentations where I would stammer and shake despite the time I put into preparing. Instead for a lot of these courses the same learning and skills may have been better represented with a different activity, perhaps one that I could display in a portfolio. Of course I did have to develop my presentation skills during my time in the Bachelor of Education program, but that also came with the context that I had joined the program knowing that public presentation would be a core element of the program.
If you’d like help describing your key course goals, identifying accessibility barriers, or finding ways to remove those barriers please contact us at elearning@upei.ca
