UDL and Discrit: A Joint Path Preparing Rural Teachers to Teach Underserved Students

• In Event: An Ecological Perspective on Supporting At-Risk Readers in Rural Elementary Schools

Abstract

The Rural Teacher Residency (RTR) program prepares teachers to work in “high need” rural schools in the northeastern United States, and specifically works to establish a counter-narrative to the commonly-held deficit lens applied to these schools and communities. We also actively work to disrupt stereotypes of “imagined whiteness” of rural places that perpetuate “a view that race is not a concern” in these places (Pini & Bopal, 2017, p. 20). Calls for explicit and critical engagement with racism embedded in the curriculum and structure of educational systems have become louder and more urgent in recent years. In response to these conversations, many educators have opted to re-evaluate and redesign their curricula and operations in an effort to name and dismantle systems that perpetuate discrimination (Minor et al., 2020). The urgency of these actions has redoubled interest among educators and the public alike in endorsing the efforts of many scholars who have long advocated for explicit acknowledgement and abolition of the ways racism, ableism, heterosexism, and other oppressive forces intersect in education (e.g., Annamma et al., 2013; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011; Love, 2019), and specifically in teacher education (e.g., Annamma, 2015; Young, 2016).

Within our teaching in RTR, we have used the approaches of DisCrit and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), finding them each to be powerful tools in their own rights that, when combined, have even greater potential for disrupting structural inequalities in schools. DisCrit - a field uniting Disabilities Studies and Critical Race Theory - problematizes deeply entrenched cultural standards of normativity, including whiteness and ability, that “lead to viewing differences among certain individuals as deficits” (Annamma et al., p. 12). The seven tenets of DisCrit offer a stance from which to interrogate the assumptions of neutrality, many of which operate in schools and curricula, that have historically privileged white, middle class, non-disabled bodies (Annamma et al., 2013). Inspired by principles of Universal Design in architecture (Mace et al., 1996), which emphasized intentional design of spaces to foster accessibility and belonging from the outset, UDL researchers leveraged advances in technology and research in the learning sciences to apply these ideas to the classroom (Rose & Meyer, 2002). UDL guides teachers to expect and plan for variability in regards to students' engagement, representation of learning materials, and students' action and expression of their learning (Meyer et al., 2014).

In our paper we first share examples of the ways in which we have used both UDL and DisCrit as frameworks and pedagogical tools in our RTR courses to try to disrupt and shift paradigms of normativity that support inequitable and often oppressive school practices and systems – interrogating assumptions about rurality, socioeconomics, race, ability, etc. Then we explore how teacher educators bringing UDL and DisCrit together can create a subtle yet important paradigm shift that can better enable us all to disrupt norms of schooling that have systematically disserved many of our students.

Authors

• Bryan Mascio, University of New Hampshire
  Presenting Author

• Beth S. Fornauf, Plymouth State University
  Non-Presenting Author