Accessing the what, how and why of universal design for learning using popular culture

For the past 22 years, I’ve been teaching humanities courses to online students. And for those who don’t know, online courses typically have two key components: an assignment area (usually due on Sunday of each week) and a discussion area (an initial post due on Thursday, often with cited sources, and at least two replies to peers by Sunday).

Tying those two worlds together is an “announcements” feature, a sort of bulletin board area where I can post updates, reminders or supplemental material. I can also send that announcement information out as an email to each individual class member to make sure that they see the updates.

• Universal design for learning: an introduction and getting started
• The case for using universal design for learning at your institution
• A universal design approach to teaching multilingual students

Finally, I can share ideas via the “gradebook” area, offering each student feedback on all tasks in the class. Here, I typically offer individual feedback first, then general feedback for the whole class to underscore key points of the assignment.

Note, too, that most of my classes are preloaded for me. The idea is that if all of us teach the same content, we’ll get consistent measurements on standardised curriculum. Thus, my “individual” self appears mainly in the discussion, announcement and gradebook areas. Those individual spaces are the glue that holds the class together, making each section a unique discourse community between me and the students.

Staying present and authentic in those spaces requires hypervigilant awareness of student learning styles in ways that theories such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) outline. UDL focuses on the what (learning disabilities, learning styles), how (access to literacy in the class and in the past) and why (what motivates students to engage with the material).

No matter the subject matter, from a graduate class on British Romanticism to an undergraduate class on introductory academic writing, the most efficient way for me to hit the what, how and why is to leverage popular culture sources delivered in various media, particularly YouTube.

Imagine this scenario:

You are asking students to compare/contrast a topic of their choice.

In the announcement area on Sunday night, for the week ahead, I might talk about my own experiences with this compare/contrast structure, then offer a favourite example from a non-traditional audio source, like this 1973 classic, My Lovely Lady, from my recently departed hero, Jimmy Buffett.

When I join in the discussion for the week on Monday morning, I might post this link, which contains both the lyrics and an ongoing discussion about the song by parrot heads (the moniker for Buffett fans). On the webpage, students find more than just the lyrics. They might choose to watch the video with Mr Buffett himself; they might choose to read around to see some of his other lyrics – so many choices are available.

In listening to and reading the lyrics, students encounter a basic compare/contrast: should the speaker leave the Tennessee hills for the Florida Keys?

On Tuesday morning, I might take that concept a bit further. As I wait for the class to start posting (most don’t really get going, in earnest, until Thursday), I might pull out parts of the text and ask: did Buffett set up the compare/contrast well? Can you decide what you’d do from what he offered? If not, what additional information would you need to make your choice?

By Wednesday, I’ll take the next step, confiding that I’ve loved this song since I was a little child. I might also share some memories that I have associated with the song. From there, I’d likely share how I’d free-write about those memories to get them down on paper and out of my academic writing voice, as we can’t have first-person writing in this class.

By Thursday, students will start posting their own sharings on the standardised prompt on compare/contrast. Here, I can make my analogies between the Buffett song and their choice. I might talk about how their choice is more detailed. I might also ask students if they know of a song or a film, etc, that uses a compare/contrast that resonated with them.

By Friday, I’ve easily set that connection with the what, how and why of UDL. For example, some students love Jimmy Buffett and offer other compare/contrast songs by him. Others say he’s not their bag, but they offer other artists or poets who compare and contrast in effective, pop culture avenues. Whatever their choices, students engage on their terms with the song that I offered on my terms, starting the night before the lesson began.

And here’s how that all ties to those basic concepts of UDL:

What: noting learning styles and disabilities

Here, we can have conversations on the what: What’s your learning style? Do you prefer to learn by song? Did you like reading the lyrics? Or did you prefer hearing the song first? And how might approaching texts and ideas via your preferred method impact your engagement with the assignment and discussion (something many students say they never considered before)?

How: access

For the how, having ease of access is great, as students can share all of my additional resources free of charge on their smartphones or computers, making it easier to stay engaged in class and work on tasks no matter where they are (and students often say they never considered how this extra access mattered).

Why: motivation

At this point, we’ve presented an example of compare/contrast writing in a non-traditional text that:

reveals a lot about me, as a person, and invites students to do the same, thus building community; offers opportunities to explore the task in non-traditional texts that appeal to multiple learning styles; offers free and ongoing access to these materials.

We can see how the motivation to talk about compare/contrast via texts that matter to the individual student is bolstered because the teacher has led the way. I introduced the idea on Sunday night, then connected to my example and revealed more each day, diving more deeply with each exchange into connections to their ideas on compare/contrast in the discussion area.

Finally, we need to use this connection in the feedback in their weekly assignment. For group feedback, I might offer a summary of the week, noting that we started on Sunday night with the Jimmy Buffett example, then call out key areas of growth with this example that we shared in the discussion area during the week.

At the end of the feedback, I’d likely offer ways to keep working on key parts of the compare/contrast process, and I might even offer another song by Jimmy Buffett to foreshadow the next assignment or topic. And from there, I could pick up that song in the Sunday announcement area and start the cycle over.

While it might be tempting to find a song or movie and copy and paste from one term to the next, I invite you to start over with each section you teach. As there are so few individual areas in today’s fixed-content online classes, it’s important to approach each term as a new frontier with new, unique students waiting there to explore your pop culture resources. In the process of reacting to each new class, you may also find yourself discovering more about your heroes or, like me, you may just enjoy many terms of revisiting classics and teaching new voices the Songs You Know By Heart.

Stone Meredith teaches college-level composition, literature and philosophy courses at Colorado State University Global. She is the founder of the Clever Chicas Project, a not-for-profit movement celebrating ordinary women doing extraordinary things.

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