Universal Design for Learning, with Dr. Sam Johnston

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Sam Johnston, Chief Postsecondary and Workforce Development Officer at CAST. She offers insights into the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines and how they can be used to improve and expand access to learning. She dives into the three core principles—providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression—and offers a preview into the upcoming release of an updated version 3.0 of the UDL Guidelines, which will be released on July 30, 2024. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

#306 — Universal Design for Learning, with Dr. Sam Johnston

40 min
AVID Open Access

Dr. Sam Johnston  0:00  

For us to be really successful as a society, we have to be different, right? We can't have all the same qualities. We'd never solve a single problem. If I can't act on information and express what I know, or if I'm in a classroom and maybe half the class can't, what a loss for everybody in terms of learning from one another, in terms of learning with one another. What a loss for the teacher.

Paul Beckermann  0:25  

The topic for today's podcast is Universal Design for Learning, with Dr. Sam Johnston. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid org. AVID believes school is the center of every community. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark  0:44  

Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann  0:55  

I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin  0:56  

And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann  1:00  

And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies. 

Transition Music  1:05  

Education is our passport to the future. 

Paul Beckermann  1:09  

Our quote for today is from the CAST vision statement. It reads, "We envision a world where all learning experiences in school, the workplace, and life are intentionally designed to elevate strengths and eliminate barriers so everyone has the opportunity to grow and thrive." All right, there's a bit packed in there. Rena, what are you thinking about that today?

Rena Clark  1:34  

Just a little bit. Since our topic is UDL, it makes me think about the goals of UDL, which are around creating inclusive, supporting learning environments that really cater to diverse needs of all learners. So by offering some different opportunities, flexible learning options, removing obstacles, actually every student, every person, benefits from that, so that they can, in fact, reach their full potential. So eliminating those barriers is really helpful for everybody.

Paul Beckermann  2:09  

For sure. Winston, what are your thoughts?

Winston Benjamin  2:13  

I 100% agree with Rena, and the way that I'm hearing is also there's a bit of intentionality that's important to speak about within the quote. It's like that idea where practice meets moment equals greatness. So, if you're not doing the practice to actually, like, get your skills ready and being intentional about how am I going to work this muscle? How am I going to make this opportunity maximize itself? There is no success. So, I think there's an important aspect of intentionally designing for barriers, because sometimes our default isn't to think about all kids. So I think that's a really great quote.

Paul Beckermann  2:48  

Cool. Well, we're fortunate today to have a guest with us who can help us unpack this a little bit further. Our guest for the show today is Dr. Sam Johnston. Sam is the Chief Postsecondary and Workforce Development Officer at CAST, where we heard our quote from today. In this role, Sam collaborates with a talented team to increase access to middle- and high-income careers for populations underrepresented in the workforce. Sam focuses on design-based research, translating universally designed tools and strategies developed through co-design with stakeholders into practical applications in the field to improve education, training, and workplace practices. Hey, welcome Sam.

Dr. Sam Johnston  2:48  

Thank you for having me.

Paul Beckermann  2:50  

You bet. We're excited to have you here today. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself? Maybe just give our listeners an idea who we're speaking with today? We heard a little bit, but let's get it from you.

Dr. Sam Johnston  3:44  

Yeah, well, I'm at CAST. I'm a researcher. Actually, most of my research is around social learning, and then I also direct a team where we really focus on trying to make our higher education and workplace environments more inclusive. We reach into K-12, especially more career focused in K-12 to try to sort of bring greater equity to how we, you know, how we engage in supporting all students. I guess I would also say I really am someone who thinks an awful lot about how we frame intelligence, and really the fact that one thing that UDL really points out to us is that we frame it too narrowly, right? And so we lose all sorts of people along the way when we start to sort of say, well, at this age, you know in this stage you must master this in that exact way. Or, you know the right way to do it is x. Or, you know the place that learning happens is in school. Right? Learning happens all over the place, all the time. And I also think it's it's framed too narrowly when we don't think about it as a social endeavor, right? I think much more about collective intelligence than I do about individual intelligence, because I'm like, it's hard for me, with my own team, it's hard to know where one person's contributions end and another person's start. So I guess that's what I would say, is that, you know, I'm someone who thinks about learning all the time, and I think about it in a lot of different ways. And I think those really align with universal design for learning as a framework to really open up more ways and more sort of promoting and valuing different ways of being a learner in the world. 

Paul Beckermann  5:40  

That's awesome. I love that collective intelligence concept. That's cool.

Rena Clark  5:44  

I was gonna say you're in good company of people that are thinking about education all the time. So, hopefully we can have some collective intelligence today on this topic. And you talked about it a little bit, but can you get into a little more details? What exactly is CAST? What does it that stand for, and what is the mission?

Dr. Sam Johnston  6:05  

Yeah, so CAST now stands for just CAST, but it started out as Center for Applied Special Technology, and it really started to address, you know, a major challenge, which was that the laws had changed, and meant that you could not exclude certain students with disabilities from public education. But the practices hadn't really changed, right? And so CAST sort of grew up alongside the first personal computers and realized that if you actually brought those technologies into the learning environment, they enabled an amount of flexibility that actually allowed people to look quite capable in environments where we treated them as not capable, right? And that very often is something that happens with people with disabilities. And so, you know, a good example that the founders of CAST often shared was, for example, a person who had limited physical mobility would be told, "Well, you can't be in school in your grade because you can't pick up a book." And they realized that, actually, there's many, many different ways to read, right? You could use a switch device to turn the pages. You could use a digital format of that book and have it read to you, right? That's sort of commonplace now, but 40 years ago, when CAST got its start, that was really, really revolutionary, and CAST was really a pioneer in making learning materials accessible, usable by all, by really taking the work in the neurosciences and learning sciences more broadly, right? Thinking about best practices in teaching and learning, and thinking about how our brain functions and processes information, and taking evolutions in the world of education technology, and pushing those evolutions so that we could create environments that were really more thoughtful about how everybody can participate, make sense of information, demonstrate their understanding, and really be motivated, right? It's not very motivating if you can't access the learning environment. So, CAST then, out of that early work, then came up with the Universal Design for Learning Framework. And the really central premise there is that barriers aren't inherent in the learner. They're really about the interaction between the learner and the environment. And the other piece that I think was really critical is that we learn the most from the margins, right? And the margins is sort of where innovation happens, right, like where they're necessary, but these so often are things that benefit everyone, right? All of us very commonly use things like speech-to-text now, right? We use text-to-speech all the time. Those are innovations that started with people with disabilities because they were essential? And now they're things that are commonplace, but we have people with disabilities and their needs to thank for that. So that's really sort of the UDL kind of origin story a little bit. 

Winston Benjamin  9:17  

I appreciate you giving us a little bit of the origin story. You mentioned the UDL framework in passing. So just to help our listeners get a little bit more sense of what is the UDL framework, and maybe give a little bit more breakdown of its framework purposes, context, and what is the larger purpose, the hope, that people use it in in classrooms or in just dealing with human beings in general?

Dr. Sam Johnston  9:43  

Yeah, so it's a great question. So the UDL framework is really a way of using a framing to really plan for and address the variability that's going to show up in any learning environment. So from one learner to the next, for a learner from one context to the next, right? Someone looks very different if they've ridden a bike 300 times than they do when they're brand new at it. And, the goal of the framework is to say, okay, very broadly, our brain has three major networks. And if we look at those three networks and attend to the fact that there's variability in those, right, so in the recognition network, right? How we perceive information, how we comprehend it, and make sense of it, right? There's going to be so much variability in that. How can we be proactive and plan for that at the outset? Right? By creating multiple means of representation. Then we really think about people act on information to demonstrate what they know. They build skills. And that's really tied to our strategic network. Setting a goal, executing on that goal, planning and monitoring our work, paying attention to where we're succeeding, where we need a little bit more effort. And that really aligns with this idea of really providing multiple means for people to act on information and express what they know. And finally, and really what we've come to see is really the heart of everything is this sort of affective network, right? You think of our sort of fight or flight mechanisms, and that is really about motivation. And we have to sort of think about engaging people in more than one way, and so that's sort of the overarching concept of the framework. Is that we always try to think about these three principles, but I always say from one learning environment to the next, right? When we think about it as a curriculum--so the goals and materials, the methods and technologies and the assessments we use--they are going to be wildly different. I work with a lot of people who've had a lot of barriers to accessing higher education, for example, their goals. And a lot of people who also have to think about the cost of higher education and managing it with family responsibilities. If I don't attend to their personal goals along with their learning goals, I'm not going to reach them, right? A lot of people for whom, if they don't have stipends or funding to attend higher education, it's forget the learning goals. It's out of reach. So the way we sort of frame those ideas of a curriculum is going to be very different from one context to the next, but the idea of these three principles are very enduring. We can always think about how we represent information. We can always think about supporting different ways to access and express understanding, right? And we can always think about motivation.

Paul Beckermann  12:35  

I think those three principles are so key to understanding the whole UDL thing, and it's really accessible for me, which is kind of ironic, right, when we're talking about accessibility. But I love how it's set up, the structure of it. So I'm wondering if we can take a little time and dig into maybe a principle in more depth. So let's just start with the first principle of the framework, multiple means of representation. You want to dive a little deeper into that and explain what that might mean to an educator who's listening?

Dr. Sam Johnston  13:07  

Yeah, when we think about representation, it has a lot of different dimensions. So kind of, you know, one that's somewhat obvious is if I were on this podcast and I were a person with a hearing impairment, I would hope you had a transcript that I could follow, right? Right there, we've got a different method of representation, but it is also about comprehension, seeing yourself in the concepts that are shared. So I'll give a quick example from work we did in the higher education space with what's called trade adjusted workers. So people who maybe had jobs, those jobs didn't initially require a higher education degree. Those jobs went away, right? They needed retraining that required them to come back to higher education and take some upskilling in math. Now, if we'd represented those people all this knowledge and skills in the workforce, and we'd represented math, you know, in a really abstract way, maybe they'd be like, "Oh, I can't do this." But what we did is we represented math in the context of putting batteries into cars in an electric vehicle company, right? They knew manufacturing. It was something familiar, so they were like, "Oh, I got this." They could see themselves in the work. They could comprehend it. So representation is really about those best practices around one, providing options, always for how we represent information, but also providing options and understanding the learners and how we support those concepts and ideas so that people actually can comprehend them, and relate them to their own background knowledge.

Rena Clark  14:51  

That really resonates--that relating to that background knowledge and using our students' funds of knowledge and then how we can represent that. I appreciate that. I also want us to dig in a little bit more into that second principle, multiple means of action and expression. So similarly, I really love the way that you explain it so I can understand and relate, and I think our listeners will, as well.

Dr. Sam Johnston  15:15  

Yeah, I mean action and expression to me, you know, is so amazing, and I used to associate it really tightly with assessment, and I still do. But I often, when working with people, think about action and expression really being focused on. How can people act on information and express what they know in a certain point in time, right? And it really falls down if we don't use UDL assessment because we don't actually get what people know. If I'm giving a formative assessment, and it's in the area of biology, and I want to understand how well my students know the migration patterns of Beluga whales, and I ask them to write an essay about it, I'm not going to get access to what they know. I'm going to probably get access maybe to their motor planning, right? How well can they pick up the pen and write? I'm going to get access to their grasp of vocabulary and grammar. But I could ask that same thing in a range of ways, right? Show me how you know this without being explicit about how they have to show it, and I would get all this richness of answers right? And that gets back to what I was saying earlier about really being interested in collective learning. If I can't act on information and express what I know or if I'm in a classroom and maybe half the class can't, what a loss, right, for everybody in terms of learning from one another, in terms of learning with one another. What a loss for the teacher to not see all the amazing ways in which people are going to understand and make sense of migratory patterns of whales, right? So that really goes through the fact that really this area of action and expression, and this is really tied to the work of Sean Bracken, who's does great work on UDL out of the UK. He's really started to push the area as socially just assessment and really rethinking like are assessments even fair? Are the ways we ask people to act on information and express what they know fair in the sense of right and fair and valid? And I love how he reclaims that term. Valid in the sense of, are they meeting a learner where they're at? Are they attending to putting the best lead-up to that assessment for that learner possible so that they really can demonstrate what they know? Are they providing kind of valuable feedback that not only informs how that learner is going to continue to learn, but also how they're going to continue to teach? Right? So I mean all that to say, I could talk about action and expression all day, but I often start there when I work with people, because I'm like, if we don't address this, we're not going to get anywhere, right? Because you can say, Oh, I'm going to redesign how I represent information, but then I'm still going to test you in the same old way and put you back in the same box.

Winston Benjamin  18:10  

Oh, my God. I feel like you're talking about my own learning experience. And I wish my teachers were invested in this conversation. I feel like your next and third aspect of principle really leads from your last, in terms of action and expression. And the third is multiple means of engagement. Could you give us a deeper dive into that portion, as well?

Dr. Sam Johnston  18:38  

Yeah. I mean, I think that right engagement is so critical for everybody, right? If a teacher or a whole school or a whole community is engaged in solving problems, is engaged in, you know, thinking about what's going on, it's so much more powerful for everyone. And so all the principles are tied right? If I'm an environment and we haven't supported the comprehension or the capacity to perceive information of everyone there, it's like half the lights are out in the room. It's not great. If we haven't really given people different ways to demonstrate what they understand and share that across the space. Again, we're only getting one small fraction of the amount of knowledge that could be shared across the environment, right? So when we think about engagement, it's really about optimizing the environment so that everyone can learn from and with one another. And I'm a, in addition to UDL person, I'm a community practice person. That's what I did my doctoral work on. That's my other love. And it's so powerful when you think about we all know this. We're in an environment where everybody's on fire. Like, I'm writing a proposal with the team right now. It sounds so silly, but like every day, we're all in there. Everyone's adding stuff in, and everyone's working so hard because we believe so much in the work, right? We're like, we all believe in this, and it's a brilliant team. I'm like, who would have ever thought writing a proposal was fun and exciting? It only is because everybody's in there, bringing their knowledge in their own ways, and that's what we want to see in all our learning environments. And I think that's especially what educators want to see, right? And they often feel so defeated when they're in a learning environment and half the kids are on their phones, right? And so when we think about everybody's engagement, including theirs, it really, totally transforms the learning environment. And so, options can be anything from, you know, engagement, giving people choice around how they demonstrate mastery, right? It can be addressing the fact prior to an assessment. That's going to be an anxiety-provoking experience for some people. And so we build things in, right? Like we build in opportunities to do some breathing, or opportunities to do self-affirmations, right? To really thinking, you know, and this I think about in my own life, because I'm working through this with a kid a lot that's mine right now. But I think the biggest thing with engagement to me is providing options for people to have their identities validated. And I think that is so critical. And when we define learning too narrowly, which we often do in schools, so many people are left out. So many people are left out from who they are, how they learn, and how they show up in the world be treated as valuable as somebody else, and no one has more value than anyone else.

Paul Beckermann  21:36  

I love it. You had so many nuggets in there, and I feel like this whole engagement topic is just forefront on so many teachers' minds lately. You mentioned the cell phone thing. We need to engage our kids differently and more inclusively to really make a difference, because that's a big challenge. And I'm thinking about technology now too, because since the pandemic, it seems like every school went turbocharged on technology, right, because we had to extend to remote learning, and then we came back in person, but now we have these devices in our hands. What role does kind of technology fit in that whole UDL concept? I know that technology was part of that origin that you talked about, but now that we have more access, how can we leverage that in the UDL process?

Dr. Sam Johnston  22:25  

Yeah, I think it really, you know, obviously, you can do lots of things related to UDL that don't bring technology in, but technology, if it's brought in, can be very powerful because it allows you to do things that are very central to UDL, like separate out content from the way we display content. So think back to that "Well, this child can't pick up a book. They can't possibly be in their fourth grade classroom." Well, actually, if you separate the content from how you display it, display it as text-to-speech. Display it, allow them to use it with a switch device where they could use the mobility in their chin to move the digital pages. So, it's very powerful in terms of creating the flexibility that we want in our learning environments. At the same time, I think back to this sort of engagement piece I never put--and I've worked in education technology for essentially my whole career--I never put technologies in front of people just for the sake of it. And I never treat technology as a place to sort of offload teaching. And I think that is really critical in terms of using it as a way to bring people together. And I know I've worked a lot outside of formal learning environments, and when I did work way back when, I did work with people who are working in the field to address mental health care and post-conflict settings, right? Places where they've been natural or man-made disaster, and we had people two weeks in person together, and then five weeks learning online together from wherever they were in the world, with a very rudimentary learning management system. And people would literally get hop on their bike, pedal an hour to the cafe to go and join with this other small group of people who could actually understand their experiences, even if they were at the other side of the globe. To me, those are the kinds of powerful uses of technology that build community. I use technology to build community, to amplify learning, to make sure that everybody's learning can be expressed and understood and shared. So I think it's really always about like, what's the goal? Why are you using this technology? And how does it support bringing people together, and allowing people to be optimized in that environment?

Rena Clark  24:54  

Sorry, I'm actually taking notes because I'm so excited about it. Like a learning session. I guess I love that, amplifying the learning, always having that be at the center, and then really thinking about this part of how does it support people being together? That's a question I think I'll use from now on. As we're kind of getting towards the end, though, I know that a new version, version 3.0 of the UDL Framework, is currently under review. So if you just could talk to our listeners a little bit about maybe some of the revisions. You've talked a little bit about the process and working together and all being excited, perhaps maybe preview some of the themes that have come out of that process.

Dr. Sam Johnston  25:43  

Yeah, so the guidelines, the UDL guidelines, are sort of a set of, you know, to sit under those three principles--multiple means of representation, action, expression, and engagement, a set of nine guidelines and various sort of points to consider that are not meant to be used as a checklist, right? They're meant to be used in relation to what's happening in your learning environment, and as learning and teaching evolves, and as our understanding of learning and teaching evolves, as our understanding of things like identity evolve, and we think about what's been left out, especially some of the equity questions, in particular around race, in particular around ethnicity and income, the guidelines have to evolve  with the field. And so this was a sort of a 4-year process, very collaborative, to work on what's called Guidelines 3.0. They'll be launched July 30. They've had multiple feedback, and are still in the final stages of multiple feedback from constituents, really, all over the world. There's a very strong emphasis on looking at literature that was right and questioning literature that was maybe used by dominant white culture, for example, and saying, "Okay, what have we left out?" And that also impacts the ways we do research, right? I do a lot of work in communities where the idea of doing a randomized control trial, forget it. But there's lots of ways of doing research that is incredibly valuable that are about people's stories and testimonials, and bringing in art into research, bringing in all these things that has just as much value that often gets left out when we're looking at meta analysis and things like that, right? And so, the focus here is really on Guideline 3.0 is centering equity in the ways it needs to be centered, and thinking about inclusion in different ways. And so things like I was saying at the beginning, addressing the fact that learning is really a collective endeavor, not just in what people often say in other cultures, but historically. Like we do work in affordable housing. And my favorite thing about that work is seeing this community of, I mean, I've literally been in places where there was five generations there at the same time. I could have cried with joy and I'm like, "This is how we learned as a society for forever and ever and ever." Like, only recently we put people into these narrow you know, here's grade four, and everybody's 10 years old, and blah, blah, blah, and so I think it's really about evolving with what we know about learning, about teaching, about human beings, and about really acknowledging and valuing people. And I think that has been a wonderful process. I think it's been a very thoughtful and inclusive process, and I think it's really tried, especially to bring in voices that have historically been underrepresented in the space.

Winston Benjamin  28:53  

I truly appreciate the development of the 3.0 and your engagement in equity, and I love that you're responding with the growth of technology in the times as our knowledge about neuroscience and the brain gets better and better because, as you said, the years of growth and knowledge. How does that impact UDL, the neuroscience knowledge that we have currently, and how might the guidelines support understanding as we learn more about the brain? If that makes sense?

Dr. Sam Johnston  29:26  

Yeah, it makes great sense. I mean, I think this won't be the last version. We're going to still learn more. We're going to learn more about as artificial intelligence comes in, and hopefully is well used, it's going to change how we learn as individuals and how we learn as communities. So I was talking about collective intelligence to start. I'm a big believer in a similar concept, but it distributed intelligence. So really thinking about how we distribute it. That's going to really change how we understand what our brains tend to and how they grow and develop. So I always find it super cool. One of my colleagues on our team, Luis Perez, is a screen reader user, and when he'll play things back, if he's not playing it back, for me, he plays it back at a very fast speed that's too fast for my ears. But I always say, with another group of people and they don't know why, I always say, explain to them how you can do this. This is so cool. And that's really an amazing thing. That if one of our mechanisms is less used, so he has a visual impairment, so that's less used, perhaps, than his auditory systems. His auditory ends up being really off the charts in terms of how effective it is. He can listen at double-speed. He's also an amazing jazz connoisseur. So, that is what we're going to keep finding out. The more we optimize environments for everybody, the more we're going to find we're not sitting around saying, "Oh, no, artificial intelligence is going to replace me." We're like, how do we bring it in to do even more, to solve more complex problems, to bring more people into the conversation? So, I think we're only going to keep learning, and I think the more we use the guidelines to bring in more perspectives, to bring in more ways of being and doing, and thinking and acting, and more identities, the more we're going to just find that our brains are these amazing, malleable things, and when we put them together with other people's brains, they're even more amazing,

Winston Benjamin  31:44  

Super, super computers,

Dr. Sam Johnston  31:48  

Definitely. Yeah.

Rena Clark  31:53  

All right. Well, it's time for us to go ahead and move into our toolkit. 

Transition Music  32:01  

Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? So, what's in the toolkit? Check it out. 

Rena Clark  32:12  

So let's talk about what's in our toolkit today. Winston or Paul.

Winston Benjamin  32:20  

So I'm going to cheat and use one of our earlier conversations. So it's going to be related to the quote as well as the second principle--multiple means of action and expression. I really appreciate that the core of that is students, their funds of knowledge, their experience, and also designing it to make sense for them because, like, you could talk to me about video games, and I will make sense of math. So I appreciate the teacher being aware of their student's knowledge and valuing enough to design around that knowledge.

Paul Beckermann  32:57  

I'm hanging on a phrase that you said, Sam--socially just assessment. I've never heard it expressed that way before, and it takes me to project-based learning in some ways because it allows students to really become themselves in an authentic learning situation and apply themselves to that learning situation. And then there's so many choices and variabilities within that so that the student can access the things that they're really gifted at, and express what they do know. Because, as you said earlier, sometimes our assessments don't tap into what they actually do know. So hopefully PBL could be something in our toolkit that gives us some of that flexibility and leverage. 

Rena Clark  33:36  

Hmm, yeah, I love that strength-based lens. I'm going to throw in there some previous episodes we've done around UDL. So if we go way back, it'd be lovely to hear you know how we have actually progressed even in this series. But in number 63--Accelerate Learning with Accessibility in UDL, and then Episode 172--The Shift of Student-led UDL and Blended Learning, with Dr. Katie Novak. So some other episodes you can check out on the topic, as well. Sam, do you have anything you want to throw into our toolkit?

Dr. Sam Johnston  34:12  

I think just the power of sort of conversations and engaging like this. To me, this is such a good example of the power of UDL. We all have different life experiences. We all have come at this in different ways and care about it for different reasons, right? But when we sort of riff off one another and learn off one another, that learning environment is so much more, really beautiful, and I think that's, that's what I want to see. That's what I want to see in every classroom. That's what I want to see when I walk into my Makerspace and affordable housing. Like, I just want to see people on fire about learning. And I think that's possible when we really are curious about people, and we're really committed to saying, like. "What works for you? How are you going to learn best?" And we take as a basic value an assumption that everybody's a learner, whether they're someone who can verbalize or not, whether there's someone who is totally comfortable with the dominant style of instruction or not, everybody is a learner. And getting at that is really, I think, it's just a beautiful, a beautiful thing. 

Transition Music  35:25  

It's time for that one thing. One thing. One thing. Time for that one thing. It's that one thing.

Winston Benjamin  35:38  

What's the one thing that's still roaming around. I'm going to say this, y'all. It's okay if you cheat and drop two things, because I think this conversation has really allowed us a couple of things that we can really dig into. So I'm going to ask, what's your one thing, maybe two, that you're walking away still thinking about in this conversation. Rena? Paul?

Rena Clark  36:00  

You heard me earlier, Sam. I appreciate you've had so many great things that even in these podcasts, I take them as learning experiences. That this collective knowledge, I learned so much just through the conversation, so thank you. There are a couple of different things that I was really thinking about, resonating. I really appreciated earlier on, you talked about we really have to attend to personal goals in order to attend to educational goals, because when people show up, it's their whole selves, and how do we relate to them in their personal lives and what they bring to the table? And the other thing is that no one has more value than anyone else. Everyone has value and worth, and so how do we support them?

Paul Beckermann  36:42  

Yeah, what's really struck me is this whole community aspect, you know, is the whole being more powerful than the individuals and using technology to bring people together, not technology to isolate somebody in the corner and just do self-learning for 60 minutes. Use it to collaborate. Use it to bring people together. I love the phrase that you said, it's like half the lights are out in the room. You know, if not everybody has access, let's get all the lights on so that the room is brighter, and the ideas are brighter, and we can really thrive together. That stuck with me.

Winston Benjamin  37:17  

Absolutely. I appreciate that, yeah. And similar to me, like the idea of justice as the foundation for our intentional work, I think that stuck out to me as a part of like, seeing beyond the identities that I value and how I ask people to show up in a space, and being willing to meet them as the act of justice. That action step is a valuable action step. Sam, would you like to share anything or give us an extra thing to think about as you walk away from us?

Dr. Sam Johnston  37:53  

I always sort of think, you know, I always want people to understand UDL because I think it's powerful, but I always want people to walk away and think about, have we been defining intelligence too narrowly? And what's the problem with that? I mean, there's so many people who get left out when we are saying to people, "Do it this way. This is the way to be intelligent. This is the way to be capable." There's so many ways to be capable, right? There's so many qualities we need in the world, and for us to be really successful as a society, we have to be different, right? We can't have all the same qualities, or we'd never solve a single problem. You need people who are more cautious. You need people who are more daring. You need people who are truly going to see people on a level that other people don't, right? You need all these things to be successful. And so I think UDL helps us. I think communities of practice help us too, but I really think that we have to wrestle with the harm we've done by really defining intelligence too narrowly, and we have to undo that. And I hope UDL can help us get there.

Paul Beckermann  39:22  

I'm just hanging on all these ideas and thoughts. Honestly, I think this should be like Education 101 class. You know, start your educational career with some of these concepts that you shared today, Sam. These are so foundational, and they they breathe into every other piece that we do. We really want to thank you for joining us and offering those insights with our audience today. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Sam Johnston  39:46  

Oh, thank you. What a great conversation. I appreciate you all.

Paul Beckermann  39:50  

Thanks so much.

Winston Benjamin  39:51  

Thank you.

Rena Clark  39:52  

Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin  39:55  

We invite you to visit us at AvidOpenAccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann  40:10  

We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark  40:14  

And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin  40:18  

Thank you for all you do. 

Paul Beckermann  40:19  

You make a difference. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai