Universal design is much more recent in education. At CAST, we are working in classrooms, any classroom with a great diversity of students. We are particularly interested in students that were very challenging because they were at the extremes of distribution with severe physical, sensory and mental disabilities. Those students really provoked in us a change in the view of what we needed to do in digital technologies.
At first, we felt the role we should be playing was to use the great power of digital media to in some way fix the child, change the way that they were so that they learn within the regular curriculum. But the more we did that in classrooms, the more we saw that there was another way to look at the problem, and that was that the original curriculum was poorly designed. We saw the kids as highly diverse and the curriculum as fixed and the same for everybody. So our children with physical disabilities couldn't hold the book and turn its' pages. And the children who were blind couldn't see the book at all. And the children who were dyslexic couldn't get the information out of it because they couldn't decode the words. Our first impulse was to try to fix the kids, but the kids were the way they are and their diversity was part of what the classroom was and we realized that we needed to change the books themselves. We needed to make them so they worked better for the kids who had physical disabilities and couldn't turn the pages, for the kids who were blind and couldn't see them, for the kids who were dyslexic and couldn't decode them. Somehow we needed to change the materials, rather than change the students. And it was at that time that we began to look for a different framework, a different way of thinking about our work, and that led us to Universal Design for Learning.
