My main takeaway from Womack is to try and find balance, but more importantly to maintain flexibility and approachability, in creating an inclusive classroom. This balance can be difficult to strike: for instance, the process of negotiating grading and deadlines sounds empowering and helpful in theory, but I can easily imagine how that would devolve into chaos in my classroom. Instead, mixed methods like the time bank or a range of deadlines seem to be a practical balance. (It is also important to keep in mind the differences in maturity between college students and high schoolers, especially 9th and 10th graders.)
I appreciate how Womack complicates the idea of Universal Design, acknowledging that it is impossible to anticipate all individual users and design a one-size-fits-all text. Instead, thinking about Universal Design as a “continual process” means that we remain open-minded and provide students with options and agency to modify practices to fit their needs. To connect this more explicitly to what we have been discussing in class, multimodal texts are useful because they privilege redundancy and allow for more varied ways not only to display knowledge but also to access a text. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, presenting information in multiple modes increases possible retrieval routes, which leads to better recall.
I also appreciate how Womack reframes accessibility, arguing that “[e]very act of teaching is an accommodation because it creates certain conditions for students to learn and display learning” (497). Accommodation is “the most basic act and art of teaching”, not an exception made to decrease the rigor of teaching practices (494). I need to remind myself that there is “no normal, primary way of learning, only normalized methods made primary through frequent use” (497).
Finally, I found it interesting to read Womack’s close analysis of syllabus design. Last year, I saw the syllabus as a way of letting students know what texts we would read and the expectations of the course. I quickly learned, however, that most students don’t read the syllabus and even those who do quickly forget its contents. In fact, my colleague told me not to bother printing them out, as most copies would end up in the trash after class. Next year, I will be designing my own syllabus for the first time. While I will be keeping Womack’s points in mind, I am also realistic about how much my students will care about or remember the syllabus (in all likelihood: not much). I am more interested in thinking about how the design principles she outlines can and should be adapted to other texts, such as worksheets and handouts, that we produce for class.