Universal design for learning (UDL) has emerged as a pedagogical framework for disability inclusion that preemptively addresses barriers to learning through the provision of multimodal and accessible forms of engagement, representation, and action and expression.[1] Through such multiplicity, UDL implicitly necessitates a media practice on the part of the instructor, who must use media tools to design, deliver, and evaluate varied forms of instruction and student expression. Offering students the chance to make a podcast, for instance, will routinely require instructors to learn some of this technology themselves, perhaps offer resources or tutorials, and determine standards for media evaluation. These skills are not routinely part of academics’ training (particularly outside of media studies!), and specialized skills such as the development of accessible media for disabled audiences are even more rarely part of an instructor’s training. Thus, it ought not be a surprise that many attempted UDL interventions are failures. Rather than meaningfully increase access for disabled students, such breakdowns hurt student outcomes and discourage instructors from pursuing accessible and inclusive teaching.

I regularly employ UDL strategies in my teaching, including providing captioned content, offering flexible deadlines, and recognizing multiple forms of participation, but I do not believe that these steps are sufficient to foster accessible and inclusive courses. We need to look beyond UDL and its implied media practice on the part of the instructor. We need to not only provide access but teach about access and disability as part of the content of media studies. I suggest that we do so through a collaborative media praxis informed by disability justice, critical access studies, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. In what follows, I briefly critique UDL and introduce these alternative frameworks before sharing an undergraduate group project that demonstrates such praxis.

Universal design for learning, like other forms of universal design, could be criticized for its claims to benefit “all people.”[2] The rhetoric around “universal design” tends to erase the needs and contributions of disabled people while proclaiming benefits to people who are not subject to ableism.[3] For instance, when we praise the utility of learning management systems that offer to “read aloud” a PDF, it is often with examples of people who commute, do coursework at the gym, or enjoy audiobooks. Often lost in this conversation are the history of text-to-speech software as, initially, an assistive technology and the specific needs, experiences, and preferences of blind people and others with print disabilities.[4] While many people may benefit when universal design rhetoric prioritizes “everyone,” it effectively centers non-disabled audiences and their choices, re-marginalizing disabled people, whose needs originally inspired particular technologies or techniques.

UDL’s framing also tends to position its subject—the instructor or even the educational institution—as normative; there is a sense of providing access for others but little sense that the people designing learning materials may need accommodation or that the institution may need to change. Furthermore, universal design frameworks have tended to ignore race and many other forms of embodied and cultural difference. As of spring 2021, CAST is attempting to revise the UDL guidelines with a vision of equity that encompasses “race, class, language, disability, and gender,” but such concerns are not currently explicitly part of UDL’s goals or methods.[5]

In contrast, disability justice and critical access studies offer tools for thinking about access as a culturally situated process. These perspectives conceive of access as a relational and co-constructed phenomenon, produced in the moment by a constellation of choices and possibilities.[6] Disability justice, a radical movement rooted in disability activism among people of color, eschews assimilationist understandings of access and embraces the possible messiness of conflicting access needs and shared politics. Rather than framing access as something that can be “solved” through a single top-down process, disability justice understands access to be a process of ongoing negotiation, change, and interdependence within a given community. Similarly, critical access studies asks scholars to look beyond “having” access to consider what access entails and how it may work for or against the transformation of ableist systems.

Critical goals also undergird culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), which advances anti-racist pedagogy in order to “perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling.”[7] In suggesting cross-pollination of UDL and CSP, Waitoller and Thorius observed that UDL was largely “non-critical” in its attempts to expand access to curricula by disabled students without challenging the eugenic histories of racism and ableism that often led to such exclusions in the first place.[8] Perhaps, then, in combination, UDL’s flexibility and CSP’s critical goals could potentially incorporate perspectives from disability culture and work against oppressive educational systems.[9]

Anti-ableist and anti-racist teaching, at its best, not only facilitates access to course content for diverse learners but empowers students to offer their own knowledges and objects of study. This, I suggest, is most powerfully done in media studies through the incorporation of a praxis-based form of instruction. Praxis, or the critical making of media, has long been associated with activist modes of media that blend creative and theoretical engagements. Alexandra Juhasz describes feminist queer media praxis in particular as a “collective, principled making...a doing and thinking, together, in the name of world changing.”[10]

I regularly attempt to generate such critical intersectional praxis in a course titled “Media Bodies,” which explores how bodies are made knowable and valued through mediation. In this course, learning outcomes are explicitly tied to a developing understanding of access as a relational and ongoing phenomenon that is relevant to media production, reception, and use. The final assignment in this course is a praxis-based group design project in which students design a media intervention that “reconfigures the relationship between users, bodies, and mediation” in some beneficial way. I center mediation in this project to draw attention to “media affects, embodied practices and everyday experiences, rather than media texts and technologies in-and-of-themselves.”[11] Focusing on questions of experience, feeling, and habits provides students a jumping off point to reflect on their own practices and adopt an attitude of curiosity rather than judgement about others’. After a semester exploring eugenics, the quantified self, beauty standards, prosthetic and medical media, and multipurpose devices such as the Apple Watch, students are primed to think about how media and bodies exist in complicated relationships that affect people’s wellbeing in myriad ways.

The project moves through several phases, from initial pitches to group formation, collaborative creation, and iterative feedback from peers and the instructor. It culminates in a detailed design document that incorporates research to justify their choices, charts and illustrations to demonstrate intended design and functions, and a user narrative that follows a hypothetical user’s experience. Through these stages, students gain awareness of varied access needs and vulnerabilities, often coming to realize that there can be no perfect solution to the problem they seek to “solve” with media technologies.

For instance, one semester a group attempted to design a multipurpose mental health app to support college students’ needs. This choice was driven by several students with personal histories of mental health conditions, who initially emphasized providing the kinds of features that they would have found personally useful. Through conversation, students realized that not all features would work well for all students; students of color, for instance, raised questions about whether having a text-a-therapist option would enable them to access culturally competent care providers. Such insight requires thinking critically about intersections of media, access, culture, and race.

Similar insights arose around gender and perceptions of safety, around disability, physical mobility, and around varied experiences of mental health crisis. The final design was unwieldy but uniformly thoughtful, offering multiple paths and use cases to facilitate varied experiences. For instance, students described the “vibe out” feature (figure 1) as intended to address multiple uses of audio for mental health:

Figure 1. Students’ design for a mental health app.

While this group assignment is only one example of moving beyond UDL, I believe it is a useful example of how media studies instructors can leverage students’ experiences and creativity to foster a critical praxis that relies upon collaboration between diverse learners. The role of an instructor in such teaching is one of prompting and denaturalization, reminding students to consider their own experiences and to look outside of them to consider how the same media interventions may be experienced very differently by others. If access is to be meaningful, it is not something that can be simply “given,” but is something for students to wrestle with, critique, and produce together.

1. “Universal Design for Learning Guidelines 2.2,” CAST.org, 2020, accessed July 1, 2022, http://udlguidelines.cast.org. ↑

2. “Universal Design for Learning Guidelines 2.2.” ↑

3. Elizabeth Ellcessor, “Blurred Lines: Accessibility, Disability, and Definitional Limitations,” First Monday 20, no. 9 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v20i9.6169; Aimi Hamraie, “Universal Design and the Problem of ‘Post-Disability’ Ideology,” Design and Culture 8, no. 3 (2016): 285–309. ↑

4. Mara Mills, “Technology,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University. Press, 2015), 176–79. ↑

5. “CAST Announces Advisory Board for UDL Rising to Equity,” CAST.org, 2021, accessed July 1, 2022, https://www.cast.org/news/2021/udl-rising-equity-advisory-board. ↑

6. Sins Invalid, “Skin, Tooth, and Bone; The Basis of Movement Is Our People,” accessed July 1, 2022, https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice. ↑

7. Django Paris, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice,” Educational Researcher 41, no. 3 (2012): 95. ↑

8. Federico R. Waitoller and Kathleen A. King Thorius, “Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy That Accounts for Dis/Ability,” Harvard Educational Review 86, no. 3 (2016): 366-389. ↑

9. Samy H. Alim, Susan Baglieri, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, David H. Rose, and Joseph Michael Valente, “Responding to ‘Cross-Pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning’”: A Harvard Educational Review Forum,” Harvard Educational Review 87, no. 1 (2017): 4–25. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-87.1.4 ↑

10. Alexandra Juhasz, “Conclusion: It’s Our Collective, Principled Making That Matters Most: Queer Feminist Media Praxis @Ada,” Ada New Media, July 7, 2014, https://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-juhasz/. ↑

11. Martyn Thayne and Andrew West, “‘Doing’ Media Studies: The Media Lab as Entangled Media Praxis,” Convergence 25, no. 2 (2019): 186–20. ↑