Diversity Leadership Committee Column

October 2023

The Diversity Leadership Committee (DLC) wishes everyone a happy National Disability Employment Awareness Month. This month is committed to recognizing the impact of providing access to those with disabilities in the workplace, and in our case, academia. We are highlighting a study titled “An Exploratory Study of Universal Design for Teaching Chemistry to Students With and Without Disabilities.” This study underscores the importance of flexible learning environments that consider differences in individual learning styles. 

After using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in teaching molar calculations to one group of students with learning disabilities, and a mixed group of students with and without learning disabilities, the researchers saw significantly higher assessment scores from all students that learned molar calculations via the UDL model. Universal Design for Learning principles are built on the core understanding that students come from various backgrounds and stages of learning, and providing more than one learning model (i.e. Powerpoint lectures in class, and a video recording to replay later) is a great way to meet students where they are. Ultimately, embedding this framework into teaching curriculums can help bolster the confidence of students with and without disabilities, and offers them more mobility and opportunity in the classroom.

How you can contribute: Because teaching is a core facet of our scholarship as graduate students and faculty, it is vital to regularly evaluate your teaching practices and their degrees of accessibility. Some ways of implementing this in the classroom are:

  1. Understanding your students’ collective strengths and opportunities for growth at the beginning of instruction through a brief beginning-of-quarter survey.
  2. Providing various options of learning materials via digital tools such as lecture recordings and laboratory demonstration videos in addition to planned lectures.
  3. Utilize the Center for Accessible Education (CAE) center at UCLA. We recommend taking advantage of their weekly Disability Specialist Drop-in sessions to get answers to questions about how to best help your students.
  4. Take advantage of resources such as those compiled by the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Chemists with Disabilities to educate yourself.

Remember, not all disabilities are visible – and if you’re not a part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate!

AJ Addae, Professor Abby Doyle, Professor Sarah Tolbert