Think for a second about the concept ‘every student doesn’t learn the same’, which for the most part, most people have heard some variation of and are in support of. While my students thrive in my classroom, it doesn’t mean that they are accessing or processing information in the same way. Although this may seem an obvious notion, it makes me then think, ‘well if my students don’t learn the same...why am I asking them to present their learning in the same way all the time?’
This makes me then think of multimodal composition, and how even if I still need specific product, I could design ‘universal opportunities’ for all of my students to present their stages of their learning in different ways. For example, during our brainstorming sessions, rather than set an expectation that all of my students need to write in a graphic organizer or write out a brainstorm, the expectation can be that they must demonstrate a brainstorm of ideas through a modality that best helps them process like images, gifs, word webs, video, etc.,
In discussing accommodations for students, Anne-Marie Womack states “UD privileges flexibility and redundancy, building accommodations directly into the framework of a system...The stakes only get higher when we’re not talking about choices (left or right) but basic access, when students do not have multiple options.” (498) Multimodal composing presents opportunities for all students to rethink how they learn, process, and can show their learning in a way that not only meets their interests but their cognitive skills without signaling specific students out. Universally designing for more multimodal composing opportunities also gives students practice in learning to articulate their process versus just an end product. They have autonomy that then results in an expertise in their learning which can potentially help establish more collaborative communities within our classrooms.
To practice accommodating my students I try to use a mix of visual and text when teaching new concepts. For example, Ted Talks are a huge hit in my class and when we watch them I’ll print not only the transcript of the talk but also the ‘info page’ of the talk to help my students process what they’re about to watch in multiple ways.
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