UDL in Action: Examples from ACR GCD Awardees

• In Event: UDL in action: Tools to create--and coach--literacy learning environments to accommodate learning differences and enable full participation of children with disabilities

Proposal

In this panel presentation, ACR GCD will present several examples of UDL-adaptations from its awardees including Rochester Institute of Technology (Pacific Islands) and World Education (Nepal).


The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges and deepened the need for quality Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions to support learning for ALL children in or out of school. ACR GCD’s Begin with Books (BWB) Challenge awarded four organizations to create more than 2000 books in 16 signed and spoken languages. Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (RIT/NTID)’s World Around You (WAY) web-based platform enables deaf communities to create storybooks and learning content in local and national sign languages to be shared via an open content digital library of storybooks. The platform—funded previously through ACR GCD’s Sign On For Literacy prize—will be used to create 200 leveled books in six sign languages (Filipino, Indonesian, Somali, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Samoan), for a total of 1,200 books. These accessible books will empower teachers and caretakers, even those who are illiterate themselves, to support and engage in their children’s learning, regardless of disability, helping them reach their full potential.

In the Philippines, the Reading Beyond Sight project, implemented from 2014 to 2017 by Resources for the Blind, provided teacher training and mentoring, parent engagement and advocacy workshops, as well as assistive technology, braille and large-print materials to ensure students with disabilities had the support necessary to learn to read. In that project, students achieved statistically significant reading gains over peers in the comparison group on all subtasks of the adapted Filipino and English Early Grade Reading Assessments.

ACR GCD’s UnrestrICTed Challenge awardees are preparing to scale ICT for education solutions that ensure children with disabilities benefit from language, literacy, and learning support grounded in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) at home and at school. In Nepal, the LEARN Project, implemented by World Education, is collaborating with the Government of Nepal (GoN) to adapt the “Matrix Model” for using ICT to support UDL implementation in the Nepal context, with a focus on ICT that support literacy and language learning. The guidance developed will also note accessible content and non-ICT materials that are particularly useful for enabling multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression. World Education is working with more than 200 schools in four provinces over two years to implement the Matrix, ultimately ensuring that teachers have the EdTech tools they need, and know how to use them, to support their students’ learning.

Author

• Michelle Malecki, World Vision Inc.