6
Tianhong Shi
Introduction
Educators are fortunate to be situated in this time of human history. In the 20 years since the declaration of the Decade of the Brain – 1990s (Library of Congress, 2000), neuroscientists have made great strides in learning how human brains function. Educational technology has witnessed rapid advancement as well. With a simple keyword search, the Internet provides abundant resources on almost anything a person would like to know. With just one finger touch on a device, one can easily hold a face-to-face conversation with another person or a group of people on other continents. In 2019, it was estimated that 67% of people worldwide own a mobile phone (Statista, 2019). Teams of early educational technology adopters are developing applications of augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality for engaging user experiences (Georgieva, 2013). However, such abundant information and technological possibilities also pose challenges to educators, in the form of loss of focus and choice difficulty. This chapter proposes a neuroscience-informed pedagogy with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines, in an effort to ensure quality instructional design for the purpose of learning success for all learners.
Wheelchairs and UDL
Image 1. Ninety-one-year old Zhen’An Shi pushes his wife, Genglian Zhang, sitting in a wheelchair, for a Riverfront walk in Hangzhou, China, in Spring 2018.
In summer 2018, the author spent one month in China with her 91-year old father and 83-year old mother. Due to low mobility and a lack of energy, her parents use wheelchairs when they go out for a walk. And how thankful they were for the invention of wheelchairs! Without wheelchairs, many people would be forced to stay indoors all the time. On her flight back to the United States, the author watched the 2017 film Breathe, featuring the story of Robin Cavendish, a paralyzed British polio patient, one of the longest-lived responauts in Britain, a fervent advocate for disabled people, and a developer of medical aids. He was able to breathe using a mechanical ventilator, and moved around in and outside his house using a modified wheelchair with help and support from his wife and friends. As these examples show, wheelchairs have improved the quality of life for many people by improving their access to mobility.
Similarly, UDL aims to provide learners with improved, universal access to learning by removing barriers to learning.
Self-Directed Learning on UDL
In 2017 and 2018, as part of the first and second ID2ID program cohorts (a peer-mentoring program for instructional designers organized by Educause and Pennsylvania State University), the author and her mentees started to research the topic of UDL through book readings, a free online UDL training course created and facilitated by Eric Moore (Moore, 2017), web resources (CAST’s UDL website), and webinars. Following a period of intensive self-directed learning on UDL, the author encouraged online in