UDL Redesign Part II: how "disabled" students can teach us to do better design!

Practice Positive Educational Thinking Poster

Barbara Graham Cooper wrote a wonderful dissertation about AD/HD students and college writing classrooms.   If you're interested in how our brains function (and dysfunction!), how AD/HD and other learning differences impact writing, and some history around AD/HD diagnosis and compositions studies, it's worth a read.

Here are some takeaways from Cooper's paper, "At the Brighter Margins: Teaching Writing to the College student with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder".

In this paper she does some great work: interviews current and former college students with AD/HD, digs into definitions of and research on AD/HD, and shares personal anecdotes, quotes and concepts that come right from the students.   Here are some of what I gleaned:

• There is a real lack of research into the issues of college students struggling with LD and AD/HD in particular.   
• A lot of college composition research looks into students who have been underserved or underprepared through social injustice, but there is less work around neurodiversity.
• AD/HD is great to study, because it is sort of a perfect storm of executive function issues.  (Executive Function or EF guides our ability to plan, manage time, act strategically and monitor or moderate emotions.). Students with AD/HD display a lot of the issues that I see in my students: smart students struggling to organize work, synthesize ideas, plan time, or generally turn their good ideas & understanding of a topic into a finished product.  OFten AD/HD students also have a specific learning disorder as well!
• It is not helpful to tell these students to "try harder"...trying is not the issue.
• What is helpful is structure & scaffolding.   Modeling well-done assignments, helping break down, plan & chunk out work, and providing templates and models are really helpful.  (See p. 176 in her article for more elaboration!)
• AD/HD students often are successful when they have found a system that works for them.
• They can "hyperfocus" when they are interested in a topic.

This paper helped me realize that when I talk about UDL, I mean that I specifically want to design for students with EF and LD issues (and also ELL).   Following the UDL concept of "predictable variability," it seems like designing a course with AD/HD students in mind would all students with EF issues (which is to say, more or less all of us :P ).  

This paper also really helped me understand AD/HD students (and my friends!). It doesn't just mean that they are easily distracted or hyper (common stereotypes), but rather that planning and pulling together their thoughts can be a challenge for them...and they have to work twice as hard as a more "middle of the road" person to get the same work done.  So while I might in the past have rolled my eyes at self-descriptors like AD/HD, now it makes me feel real respect for friends (and students) who feel so challenged by some of these tasks...but have managed to get advanced degrees, open their own businesses, etc.  And bringing fun, creativity and energy to the planet as they do it!