Form and content have been essential to the media classroom, even if seemingly at times form has taken precedence. An array of pedagogical practices, ranging from teaching students to analyze film and media’s formal elements to the implementation of strategies like Universal Design for Learning (UDL), offer the freedom to engage with a course’s information in a variety of ways. In a quest for equity, the non-profit education organization CAST created UDL to remove the “barriers to learning that millions of people experience every day.”[1] According to Thomas Tobin and Kirsten Behling, UDL can radically transform the classroom, not just for those in need of accessibility accommodations, but for all students.[2] CAST defines UDL as “a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.”[3] These suggestions comprise three principles: providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression.[4] However, form (UDL’s primary concern) constitutes only one piece of the necessary components of an inclusive media classroom, particularly a learning space aimed at destabilizing structures that relegate minoritized students to the margins.

Approaches that focus on learning cognition do not exist in isolation from the material students learn. Interpretive tools central to the media classroom such as close reading often rely on perception and experience.[5] In building inclusive spaces for students to engage with media’s multiplicity of meanings, mingling form and content mirrors methodological frameworks that are central to film and media studies.

UDL solves one particular and important form of access (often seemingly related to cognitive needs, noted in CAST’s graphics that depict different sections of a human brain) although in its purportedly universal tenor it does not explicitly engage content, which can also represent a barrier to access for minoritized students in the media classroom. In considering the varying ways that humans learn, UDL has offered an important framework for advancing the work of equity in education, yet its implementation alone does not prevent learning spaces that privilege a colonial perspective.[6] Therefore, UDL is not a standalone solution to some of the inequities shaping many media classrooms. The choice that UDL proposes does not necessarily present a neutral framework for learning, but rather a form of diversifying course content delivery rather than shifting its baseline. Brazilian indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak argues that “we allow a tiny segment of the population to create the narratives of our world. . . . Consolidated institutions, such as universities or” multilateral organizations that include the UN and UNESCO “were designed and maintained as structures of this one-truth humanity.”[7] As a result, the power to control truth claims is often homogeneous and exclusive.

To build inclusive media classrooms, I propose a framework I call Multicultural Design for Learning (MDL), which builds on UDL’s contributions to foreground the social aspects of learning in addition to the cognitive. To expand UDL’s approach, MDL responds to “the imperative and urgent need to dismantle our Euro-American curricula and canons, to address the sustained epistemic violence of center-periphery logics, and to smash white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, colonial epistemes” that also relate to normative age, class, and immigration status, to mention a few markers of marginal social positions.[8] MDL considers both form and content as a holistic approach for addressing the multiple intersections of identity that challenge UDL’s universality. CAST has acknowledged that UDL’s “guidelines have not reached their full aspiration of recognizing and responding to the needs of all learners.”[9] Removing the barriers to learning means not only making changes in delivery but also in content, re-inscribing film and media studies as a field that can foreground the world as we should experience it—and this task involves decentering and dismantling the implicit valuation of existing power structures.

MDL in Practice: Principles for an Inclusive Media Classroom

MDL proposes that through an inseparable bond between form and content in the media classroom we can further understand and redefine that which is currently normative, to the extent that an institution like the university allows itself to be decolonized.[10] This enables learning environments and curricula where the currently marginal (including the global, the queer, and other identity formations that break with traditions that have been dominant and normative) can drive an epistemic shift towards a different apperception of the world, and with it, a redistribution of power structures. The idea of choice that UDL proposes is critical, yet the information that this mode of learning conveys is also key to the inclusive media classroom.[11] In what follows, I outline some ways of implementing multicultural design and offer a set of ideas, practices, and resources aimed at fostering classrooms (and classes) that remove barriers to engagement and belonging.

1.Form and content

Diversifying the curriculum has become one of the first suggestions for fostering inclusive classrooms and dismantling exclusive structures of knowledge. In the introduction to Teaching Media’s “Teaching ‘the Global’ in Media Studies,” Juan Llamas-Rodríguez diagnoses a portion of this issue as it relates to U.S. primacy. He argues that “pervasive Western-centrism in curriculum design often means that all non-U.S. content appears in a single course.”[12] Similarly, perspectives from other dominant cultural groups across identities become the tabula rasa from which every other perspective differs, generating an opposition between film and media produced in the U.S. and Europe, and that from the rest of the world. In this dynamic, global or so-called world media become markers of the foreign, which often translates as a divergence from the norm. This dichotomy shows that diversifying the curriculum is simply not enough.

A multicultural course design hinges on equity of access, but includes placing moving images and media from minoritized groups on the same plane of importance as materials that foreground dominant voices. To build learning spaces that reject racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, and other intersecting forms of exclusion and violence, it is central to not only offer students choice and variety in the way materials are delivered, but also the content with which they engage. Required courses such as “Introduction to Film and Media” and “Film Analysis” have offered me one of the most visible ways to demonstrate MDL’s possibilities. I organize these courses conceptually, and, therefore, the examples I choose can decenter the canons that pose barriers to engagement and learning for marginalized students. These are courses where, for example, work from structurally oppressed artists can illustrate a medium-specific concept without being considered marginal. As such, content curation is an important strategy to shift the balance of what is deemed normal, given, or canonical.[13]

2.Assessment

The discourse of dominant groups as the main contributors to film and media history and the valuation of colonial forms of learning and knowledge production replicate the inequities of existing power structures.[14] One of the areas where these grave social imbalances become evident is assessment, especially when considering the materials that students must engage and how they must engage them. Like UDL, MDL in the media classroom encourages students to express what they know in different ways. This includes academic writing, creative works that comprise short films, podcasts, digital art, op-eds, museum exhibits, film series, and other projects that (in concert with an artist’s statement that details engagement with the themes of the course) can bridge the divide between theory and practice. In my courses, I offer students the choice to make these projects public-facing, facilitating connections with outlets that can make their work visible to broader audiences and provide the possibility of linking scholarship and social justice activism.[15]

3.Collaboration

These assignments showcase how knowledge production can take on myriad forms, including collaboration. A collaborative learning environment is key to MDL, as it takes shape through the backgrounds, experiences, and interests of those participating in the media classroom. In my courses, I engage collaborative learning in a variety of ways, from short discussion board posts (in written, audio, or video form) to collective reading annotations and questions on texts and moving images through software such as Semantic Annotation Tool, PerusAll, or hypothes.is. These contributions shape each class meeting, and I incorporate materials that all participants bring into our ongoing conversation, redefining the student’s role from solely a learner to a knowledge producer.[16]

Collaborative learning and the choice that UDL foregrounds present a potential constraint when a homogenous student base creates a bias that leaves the “one-truth humanity” unchallenged. Having taught at both a highly diverse public university and a predominantly white, elite institution, my solution has been the same: inviting a variety of guest scholars from across intellectual areas and disciplines into our learning community. This expansion, which can offer the benefit of different perspectives and areas of study, demonstrates the importance of learning from and with scholars and co-conspirators who challenge existing norms.

Thinking Holistically: MDL as an Ethical Paradigm Shift

To build an inclusive media classroom, it is imperative that we decenter form as well as content (and how it is produced), shifting what is normative into new paradigms where those in the margins can also occupy the center. MDL looks towards the important conversations and radical decolonial means that disciplines like ethnic studies have foregrounded in their inquiry.[17] UDL purportedly offers a neutral framework of inclusion, yet both media and education are not apolitical. MDL depends on different forms of valuing knowledge. It hinges not only on what we value, but also how we do so.

In a top-down hierarchical system, knowledge democratization is aspirational: UDL offers that possibility, but MDL demands it. As facilitators of media classrooms, it is up to us to redress the damage that privileging form and separating it from content has enacted. Form and content are not distinct pieces of inclusive learning spaces: they are inseparable, symbiotic building blocks that can shift our understanding of the dominant and begin undoing the structural and epistemic violence that this dominant has historically enacted.

    1. Homepage, CAST.org, accessed May 12, 2022, https://www.cast.org/. ↑

    2. Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018), 1–3. ↑

    3. “The UDL Guidelines,” CAST.org, accessed May 12, 2022, https://udlguidelines.cast.org/. ↑

    4. According to CAST, these three principles entail presenting the course’s content and information through a variety of ways or media forms (multiple means of representation), providing options to encourage students’ sustained interest and autonomy (multiple means of engagement), and allowing students to express and convey what they know in different ways (multiple means of action and expression). CAST, “About Universal Design for Learning,” CAST.org, accessed May 12, 2022, https://www.cast.org/impact/universal-design-for-learning-udl. ↑

    5. For more on this topic, see Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 507–517. ↑

    6. Informed by the work of feminist scholar María Lugones, I take a broad approach to the term colonial to include different forms of violence enacted against a variety of groups that are now minoritized (including on the basis of race, gender, and sexuality among other categories of identity). See María Lugones, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia 22, no. 1 (2007): 186–209. ↑

    7. Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, trans. Anthony Doyle (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2020), 16. ↑

    8. Usha Iyer, “Smuggling, Infiltrating, Usurping: Why Globalizing the Film and Media Studies Curriculum is Essential to Decolonizing It,” Journal for Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Media Dossier 7, no. 1 (Winter 2022), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms/18261332.0061.602/—smuggling-infiltrating-usurping-why-globalizing-the-film?rgn=main;view=fulltext. ↑

    9. “CAST Announces a Community-Driven Process to Update UDL Guidelines,” CAST.org, October 6, 2020, https://www.cast.org/news/2020/community-driven-process-update-udl-guidelines. The article attributes this quote to CAST’s CEO Linda Gerstle. ↑

    10. I take a broad approach to the term decolonization to mean that which rejects and liberates itself from the constraints of violent power structures. ↑

    11. For example, offering D.W. Griffith’s work as innovation yet only acknowledging its racism in passing builds an environment in which students of color are excluded, needlessly creating not only a barrier to access and engagement but also an environment that replicates (even if inadvertently) that same violence. Exclusion need not be nefarious to be damaging: syllabi that do not include the work of women, scholars and artists of color or those who are queer and/or disabled among other identities and intersections also build exclusionary learning spaces. ↑

    12. Juan Llamas-Rodríguez, “Introduction: Teaching 'the Global' in Media Studies,” Journal for Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Media Dossier 7, no. 1 (Winter 2022), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms/18261332.0061.601/—introduction-teaching-the-global-in-media-studies?rgn=main;view=fulltext. ↑

    13. For example, in my courses I have used Sara Gomez’s films to illustrate composition and editing instead of (or in addition to) those of white male U.S. or European directors. This does not mean my courses erase the canon, but rather that they acknowledge and destabilize it. ↑

    14. As a Latin American immigrant working in U.S. higher education, my immediate focus is to dismantle (or at least ameliorate) the structures of oppression that exist in the system I currently inhabit. These problems are not unique to the U.S. and elicit the same urgency of action in classrooms and learning spaces around the world. ↑

    15. Similarly, I aim to ameliorate these imbalances through equity-minded forms of assessing student work. Process-oriented strategies such as contract-based grading or ungrading have alleviated the uneven proficiency levels with which students begin a course, creating a more equitable environment where they can focus on the process rather than the outcome. For more on these forms of evaluating student work, see Asao Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2019) and Jesse Stommel, “Ungrading: An Introduction,” accessed May 16, 2022, https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-introduction/. ↑

    16. Even the creators of UDL recognize the importance of collaborative practice. In October of 2020, CAST announced a “Community-Driven Process to Update UDL Guidelines,” crowdsourcing ways to make Universal Design for Learning a more effective form. See “CAST Announces a Community-Driven Process to Update UDL Guidelines,” CAST.org, October 6, 2020, https://www.cast.org/news/2020/community-driven-process-update-udl-guidelines. ↑

    17. Ethnic studies is only one example, as areas of study and expression such as Black radical feminism, decolonial thought, and disability justice among others have consistently foregrounded inclusion through scholarship and pedagogical practices. ↑