Addressing Bias and Designing for Identity

About These Reads

The UDL Guidelines 3.0 name bias as a barrier and bring identity into learner variability. These two short reads summarise CAST webinars on each idea.

• Addressing Bias in the Classroom with UDL (3-minute read)
• Designing for Identity: UDL Guidelines 3.0 (5-minute read)

Addressing Bias in the Classroom with UDL

3-minute read. Based on the CAST webinar “Guidelines 3.0: Addressing Bias in the Classroom” with Melissa Sanjeh and Shauntā Singer, PhD (CAST, 2024a).

Key Shifts in UDL 3.0

• Centring and affirming the “who” of learning, focusing on welcoming learners’ interests and identities.
• Acknowledging and aiming to address systemic and institutional barriers in addition to design bias.
• Emphasising collective learning and interdependence, looking at how individuals exist within an ecosystem and how collaboration can be used.

Why the Guidelines Say “Address”

The word “address” is used in the UDL Guidelines 3.0 because it is important to become aware of our own biases that influence the design of learning and learning environments. Interrupting and disrupting bias involves slowing down, interrogating our thoughts, acknowledging the bias specifically, admitting mistakes, and looking at the impact of our choices and behaviours as instructional designers and leaders, not just our intentions.

Questions to Ask About Your Design

In the UDL Guidelines, this connects to Address biases, threats, and distractions (Consideration 7.4).

Designing for Identity: UDL Guidelines 3.0

5-minute read. Based on the CAST webinar “Enhancing Learner Engagement with UDL Guidelines 3.0: Designing for Identity” with Brenda Green and Bill Wilmot (CAST, 2024b).

What Learner Identity Is

Learner identity is a complex phenomenon that emerges and changes over time within varied contexts (historical, social, cultural, relational). It includes attitudes and habits that influence learning and how students understand themselves as learners.

A strong learner identity means seeing oneself as a learner, engaging life experiences with a learning attitude, and believing in one’s ability to learn.

Learner identity is strongly influenced by relationships, particularly with educators. Students’ experiences of their identity as learners are shaped positively or negatively by these relationships. Identity is contextual, multi-layered and variable, meaning it can change over time and depending on the setting (for example, classroom or community).

Identity Throughout the UDL Guidelines 3.0

Identity is not just a single guideline. It runs through all of the UDL Guidelines. The guideline Welcoming Interests & Identities is more than a doorway into learning. It is like a sun shining across the rest of the guidelines.

Identity and Variability

UDL calls for honouring variability. Variability has traditionally focused on the learning brain, or how students learn. In the UDL Guidelines 3.0, identity is an essential part of variability.

How Learning Goals Are Positioned

Here, learning goals means the overall outcomes of learning, not specific lesson, unit, standard or benchmark goals. We must ask ourselves:

• Whose goals are being pursued?
• Are we giving learners opportunities to co-design what success looks like, and to co-construct the learning goals?
• Are we considering what learners want to pursue in life? Their interests are core to identity and goal setting.

The UDL Guidelines 3.0 include the consideration Optimize relevance, value, and authenticity (Consideration 7.2), which points towards a more collaborative design. UDL can help learners understand when to depend on themselves and when to learn in a group, depending on the context of the learning.

Instructional Materials

• Identity shows up in how diverse identities are represented in curriculum materials.
• Windows and mirrors: materials should let students see the realities of others (windows) and see their own reality reflected (mirrors).
• Examples and images need careful thought, because they send powerful messages about who belongs.

The UDL Guidelines now emphasise Represent a diversity of perspectives and identities in authentic ways (Consideration 1.3). This sits under the Perception guideline, because it affects whether learners perceive that they belong.

Learning Environments

Identity is linked to the physical and digital environment, and to the social environment.

• Mapping where students feel they belong, or do not belong, can reveal spaces where their identity is not welcome.
• Separate spaces are seldom equitable spaces. A main entrance that everyone can use, instead of a separate accessible entrance for some people, is an example of inclusion by design.
• Varying and honoring the methods for response, navigation and movement in physical and digital environments supports how students express themselves, which is related to identity and belonging.

Keep Going

• UDL Resources: A Guided Tour: six short parts with Beth, with time to explore the resources yourself.
• What We’re Really Talking About When We’re Talking About UDL
• The UDL Essentials LiveBinder, where these reads first appeared.