UDL Revisited

Earlier tonight, we took the Guinea Pigs to a production at a local playhouse of James and the Giant Peach.

We go pretty regularly to various productions at this and several other local playhouses, and when I ordered the tickets several months ago, I didn't much focus on the details of the write-up.  I rather came late to the Roald Dahl party -- he wasn't very well known, back in the day when I was myself a tot.  I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I remember the Oompa-Loompas' song to Mike Teavee making an impression, even then.  That was about it.  But when Guinea Pig #1 was nine or so, she ripped through about ten Dahl books in straight succession; and shortly thereafter Guinea Pig #2's teacher read Peach aloud in class; and over the years I've read Matilda and Elevator to one or the other of the younger Pigs.  And everyone's a fan.  So when I saw the Peach production on the Playhouse schedule, I just clicked through cheerfully without much thinking.

I didn't really notice, for example, that this particular production was being put on by the Signstage Theatre, from Cleveland.  

In Signstage productions, about half of the actors are speaking and about half are deaf.  Each character has a voice -- sometimes the actor's own; sometimes another actor's piped in from offstage or even spoken by someone else onstage.  Any time there are any spoken words, somebody on stage -- not necessarily the character who's got the action -- is signing what's said.

It sounds a little complicated, but it worked.

The kids were riveted.  Not just mine; throughout the place.  Which was, by the way, packed.

And it was fascinating.  Before the play began, kids throughout the theatre were poring over the program and signing their names out by letter, using the sign alphabet that had helpfully been printed in it:

Once the show began, kids stared rapt at the signing actors; some of them, including my son, unconsciously moving their own fingers to mimic the actors' movements.

After it was over, we headed next door to Paul Newman's restaurant for dinner, where there were a handful of other families whose kids, like ours, were still clutching their programs and signing out "secret codes" to each other.

Pretty neat.

It reminded me of two other things, which combined with the Signstage experience morphed into a little Education of Pam unit on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles enacted for the deaf population yield benefits to the population at large:

The First Connection: On our trip to Florida last month, we took the Pigs to a Polynesian Luau at SeaWorld.  (You know... geography lesson.)  We were seated next to a delightful young woman who turned out to be a deaf interpreter ASL Interpreting Services.  She was scoping out the luau because she was going to be interpreting it a few days later, for a conference that planned to attend the show.

A conference of...

dentists.

One of whom, evidently, was deaf.

It turns out that she does a great deal of "show" work; that a lot of entertainment businesses  go out of their way to make their shows accessible to the hearing-impaired.  She spoke particularly highly of Disney, which evidently is known throughout the deaf community for having interpreters available for all its shows, for providing interpreters for the duration of any Disney cruise on which there is even one hearing-impaired passengers, and for training interpreters to be truly integrated into the song-and-dance revues, rather than merely standing to the side signing the language.  Which in turn brought to mind:

The Second Connection: More years ago than I care to recount, here, one of my college friends rounded me up to attend a concert by the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.  (If you're not familiar with their music, follow the links out to their recordings, or follow the message from founder Berenice Johnson Reagon to her site, to hear clips.)

Check out the woman dressed in black, second to left.  Shirley Childress Saxton.

She doesn't sing.

She signs.

She's been a member of the group for... well, that was more than twenty years ago.  It's a small group.  She doesn't sing.

Why, I wondered, as they first came on stage, regal, straight-backed, dressed in bright African robes and towering hats; and she took her position and started signing, would a deaf person come to a concert?

But after I'd seen about two songs, I got it.  You'd come to see this group.  Precisely because it is accessible.  Saxton is a wonder.  It's an a capella group.  The women aren't singing the same words at the same time.  Saxton has to pick out one line that she's going to follow, and it's fascinating to watch -- she doesn't necessarily pick out voice carry the melody, or the loudest voice, or the voice whose lyrics are moving the most.  She doesn't stay with the same voice throughout a whole song, either.  She signs phrases, following this singer for a bit, then moving over to the next, then coming back.  Occasionally she just opens and closes her fist, in time with one of the thrumming, wordless, vocalizing parts that are keeping the beat.

All the while, she's swaying, leaning in and away, sometimes watching the singers, often looking out at the audience.

Poetry in motion.

Literally.

I wish I could put up a video clip; sometimes words really don't do it justice.

P.S.  Check out Roald Dahl's own website for loads of book-related games, fun facts, biographical tidbits, and lesson plans on the books for middle school teachers.

2/12 Assignment: "Value Added" of Technology Uses Discussed Thus Far

I'm taking three courses this semester: this one; Psychological Issues in Special Education; and Multicultural Issues in Counseling. All three, it turns out, speak to differences between learning styles and capabilities; and alternative means of working effectively with a diverse student population. I'd like to claim that I carefully planned the timing of my coursework so that I could take full advantage of these synergies, but I'd be lying. Sometimes, synchronicity just occurs.

But as it happens, I have referred to UDL explicitly in one of my other courses (using it to frame the idea that classroom modifications made to benefit special education students can also have the unintended effect of benefiting other students without disabilities as well); and spoken of the potential value of technology in reaching certain students from multicultural backgrounds (who may, for example, not be comfortable speaking in front of groups but may be quite comfortable presenting information electronically).

So I'm getting... somewhere.

The term "value added," which once held a specific technical meaning with respect to production processes, has now entered the popular lexicon and is bandied about freely, with radically different meanings to different people. In Sara Dexter's eTIPS article, she defines technological "value added" to be technology that "makes possible something that otherwise would be impossible or less viable to do" (Dexter article, p. 3). 

Some of the uses of technology that we've touched on in our class readings and discussions have met this standard more obviously than others. In class two weeks ago, we briefly touched on a tiny smattering of the primary documents available through the Internet: this is probably the most clear example of what Dexter calls "value added... in accessing information" (p. 5) that simply was not available to schoolchildren even a decade ago. The Webquest examples we looked at demonstrated ways that younger children might taste some of these primary sources within reasonable parameters, to ensure against the perennial Internet risk of Too Much Information.  By providing a guided, "scaffolding" structure, the Webquest framework may serve to provide "value added... in organizing information," as Dexter defines the term.  The Peace Corps blogs in the Resource list are a neat, very personal window into another world; and both they and the class blog featured in the Teddy Bears Go Blogging example served as what Dexter calls "value added... in communicating knowledge." Even the tableaux we worked with the very first class demonstrated a very quick, very accessible means of demonstrating understanding of the "key moment" in a text -- another example of "value added... in communicating findings and understanding to others."

At the same time, I see limits. In the Teddy Bears Go Blogging example, the most obviously terrific, inquiry-based, multisensory activities that the obviously terrific teachers were doing, were independent of the blog. The role of the blog was limited to communicating after the fact -- which does indeed meet Dexter's definition (and rightly so), but is not itself the main instructional event; nor is it the salient, impressive part of the Teddy Bears story. In the You Gotta BE the Book example, the role of technology is (again, rightly) subordinate to the larger idea of using drama to engage and motivate reluctant readers. Motivation per se actually does not meet Dexter's criteria for "value added" -- she is, perhaps, trying to steer away from the idea of "computer time" as a reward. In any event, as I blogged earlier, using drama (and technology) as motivational tools can be powerful, but ought not be confused with the still-necessary long slow slog of actually learning to read.

Even the wealth of wondrous primary sources: there's room for skepticism about the "value added," particularly in the younger levels of schooling. The Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive model that we discussed in class is a succinct model for the stages of learning; and the types of primary sources we looked in the Valley of the Shadow site were compelling examples of using primary documents to support higher-order Historical Thinking skills such as Applying, Analyzing and Evaluating.

But I would argue that there is a reason why Bloom put the lower order, recall-based skills at the bottom of the pyramid. And a reason that the bottom levels of the pyramid are bigger.  The model is meant to be hierarchical; with higher-order cognitive processes building on the foundational base of knowledge.

The implication of this for the question of "value added" as defined by Dexter is that before the "instructional goal" can turn to analysis and evaluation, students need to acquire significant background knowledge. Before they can plunge in and analyze that astonishing news clip about the adolescent youngster waiting for a bus, to take him to a school that had been closed for four years, they need basic background: about Jim Crow, and Brown v. Board of Ed, and the response of selected school districts, and how the courts were used to effect social change, and a host of other issues.   Otherwise, the clip -- marvelous though it is -- cannot make any sense. Otherwise, there is not, really, any value added.

Otherwise, they're just watching TV.

And that is, over and over, the question that Dexter posed, that we have keep coming back to, with relentless honesty: what is the "instructional intent"? Does technology actually support it?

UDL Postscript

I just wanted to add how surprised and delighted I was to come across ee cummings' poem "maggie and milly and molly and may" in an article that was otherwise rather, er, technical. I've never much read ee cummings, not generally being able to get past his punctuation, but this one is just lovely, and I'm so glad to have discovered it, however serendipitous the route. I'd copy the whole thing here, but Elizabeth scared me about copyright infringements in our last class, so I'll just include the last two lines:

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)

it's always ourselves we find in the sea.

In every venture, 

we get out... 

what we put in.

post-PS: So Mom, I changed the background just for you. How do you like the new one??

1/22 Assignment: Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Concept Map: Background to UDL:

Background: Universal Design for Learning (UDL) first evolved from an architectural movement. After the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 imposed requirements that public buildings be accessible to individuals with disabilities, many buildings were "retrofitted" with access ramps and other modifications that were in many cases unattractive. Universal Design was a movement which emphasized the concept of full accessibility from the earliest planning phase; and the integration of access with aesthetics. Designers quickly realized that the concept of "access" gave rise to unexpected benefits to a much wider constituency than was originally intended: curb cuts initially intended to enable wheelchair access turned out also to benefit parents pushing strollers and kids wheeling on Heelies; closed captioning technologies initially developed for the deaf turned out also to benefit yuppies exercising in gyms and opera lovers who don't speak Italian. It was inspirational.

Concept Map: Philosophy of UDL

Applying Universal Design to Education: The Universal Design to Learning (UDL) movement seeks to extent the concepts of "full access" beyond physical access to buildings to access to the curriculum itself. In so doing, it seeks to utilize technologies such as voice recognition and text-to-speech software that remove barriers to content that students with disabilities such as limited sight might experience (this would be analogous to the wheelchair-bound and deaf individuals in the architectural examples above); but also to look more broadly and apply lessons from recent brain research about learner differences and determine how technology might serve their access needs as well (this would translate to the mothers with strollers and the opera lovers in the example).

Brain research suggests that learning is distributed across three interconnected networks: recognition (which are specialized to sense and assign meaning to patterns, and allow us to identify information and concepts); strategic (which generate and oversee mental and motor patterns and plans); and affective (which are associated with emotional responses, and enable us to engage with tasks, learning and people). In each of these networks, the brain utilizes both "hierarchical" (gestalt and parts-to-whole) processing; and "lateral" (multiple simultaneous thoughts, such as recognizing multiple colors simultaneously) processing. All people utilize all three networks and both types of processing; however, individuals vary widely in both which network is best developed and in which type of processing is easier; which results in considerable learning differences.

Having identified those differences, UDL seeks to broaden access to learning through adherence to three principles: to use multiple formats to present information and enable students to demonstrate mastery; to draw upon multiple pathways such that learners are presented with the same material through formats that "hit" upon multiple senses to reinforce learning; and to draw on multiple forms of motivation to engage students.

Concept Map: Implementing UDL

Implementation of UDL: Effective implementation of UDL hearkens back to many of the same principles that Sara Dexter outlined in her eTIPs article in last week's reading. Educators must start with crystalline clarity about their instructional goals, as well as detailed knowledge about their students' individual needs and the media options that might support them. Thereafter, the educator develops a plan for differentiated instruction; drawing upon a full range of access-oriented technologies (such as text-to-speech), media that allow multiple formats to demonstrate mastery (such as allowing students to present material in a digital presentation rather than paper-and-pencil test), and formats that support multiple sensory pathways (such as using video and audio clips in addition to text-based sources). Supporting all of this, and again consistent with Dexter's eTIPS, must be sufficient support in terms of both infrastructure and professional development.