Learner Variability in Strategy Development – Module 4

Like many other areas of skill development, students come to our learning environments with variable expertise in executive functioning. This variability may be due to opportunities (or lack thereof) for skills development provided in previous learning environments and the stress experienced in these. Furthermore, the inability to interconnect skills and learning from one course to the next can create a siloed learning experience that can increase stress, lack of engagement, and confusion.

Chronic stress impacts the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, resulting in behavioural inflexibility, difficulty making action-oriented decisions, and inhibited working memory (Molina, 2015). In her book on antiracism and UDL, Fritzgerald (2020) unpacks a model called the TERA quotient (Stanier, 2016) through a UDL lens. Each letter in the acronym (adapted below) stands for what happens in our brains when we assess if an environment is safe or unsafe.

Learn More

Watch this video (Runtime: 6:57 min) in which college students discuss mental health.

Team – What communicates to students that they are part of the learning team?
Expectations – Do students know what’s about to happen?
Rank – Whose status is higher, yours or the students’?
Autonomy – How much say do students have here?

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More Feet on the Ground offers a free learning module on the various indicators of mental health challenges.

If a student assesses that the environment is unsafe, their brain will move into fight, flight, or freeze mode, turning off the prefrontal cortex. The good news is that, like other aspects of the brain, executive functioning is highly plastic. Learners can build new connections across the brain if they find themselves in a learning environment that welcomes their whole selves. During the pandemic, there was an increased understanding of how stress-aware and trauma-aware pedagogy can create communities of learning built on trust. These learning communities of trust provide opportunities for more empowered choices of expression and autonomy of learning.

Reflect

Imagine your variable learners in the teaching and learning spaces you design. How might they answer these questions posed by the TERA quotient? How about in your department or institution? What might these answers mean for the cognitive load used by learners to assess their safety and belonging within our learning institutions?

Kate Klein, a professor, facilitator and writer, has been researching the impact of school wounds in childhood and how these impact adult learners in post-secondary contexts. In this video from a larger workshop on Healing School Wounds, Kate shares what they’ve learned about the intersections of UDL, particularly regarding the role of choice in developing learner agency, and trauma-informed pedagogies.

School Wounds2:22 min

In this video, Kate shares what they’ve learned about the role of choice in helping to heal school wounds.

Transcript of School Wounds

School Wounds & Universal Design for Learning

Facilitated by Kate Klein (they/them) 24:10 to 27:00

Like the word remedial, has the word remedy in it.

And I kind of think until school stops harming children. Shouldn't all adult education be thought of as remedial education.

So as if we can kind of invite into the room a wondering like as adult educators,

What can our role be in kind of tending, suturing, bandaging people's relationship to learning? If it's been kind of banged up in their early lives.

And I believe because I've seen it, that people who've had experiences like the ones we've been talking about which is most people can find personal transformation in adult learning environments, but not just any adult learning environment. And this is what I'm kind of like trying to figure out right now, like, what is it that can make adult learning spaces feel like remedy. Feel like I don't want to use the word healing. But like, I'm going to

be healing to these past wounding experiences.

In my research on this topic for my book, I interviewed this person who's a somatic, experiencing practitioner named Hannah Harris Sutro.

Basically everybody that I interviewed, I asked. Like, so what do you think?

Can we heal school wounds in school? Or is it impossible to heal in the same kind of space where you experienced injury? In the 1st place, like, What's your take on this question? And this is what Hannah said.

She said. I don't think you can go back in time and unravel or return to a prior state. I don't think that's a thing. But I do think that revisiting the scene of the crime, so to speak.

or revisiting that setting, if there's stuff that's different in a good way for a lot of people that can be very reparative.

And the primary thing in trauma repair is choice.

Constantly. Over and over again there's a billion different strategies or tools or techniques. But stuff is like that. It's insanely simple and insanely complicated simultaneously.

Choice is a really basic concept that has infinite ways of being implemented, which is what brings me here today to the udl community of practice. So this concept of choice or autonomy has been a really big part of my thinking and research on the topic of creating spaces of remedy for adult learners’ school wounds.