The Universal Design for Learning framework (which is covered in more depth in Part 2 of Module 1) asks us to provide students with multiple ways to share what they know, or “multiple means of action and expression.” This means that rather than only requiring students to respond to a prompt in one way (i.e. writing a reflection), we might design assignments so that students’ choices are maximized.

In the REFLECT portion of Module 1 and Module 2, the participant is asked to select one of several ways of engaging in reflection. Rather than writing (alone), the participant is able to move, talk to someone, paint or draw or sketch, design a mind map, or propose another way of doing reflection. This allows the participant some choice in how they communicate what they know.

By helping students to show what they know through oral, visual, kinesthetic, social, and spatial pathways instead of requiring everyone’s reflection to look the same, we can make spaces that are more accessible and equitable for students who arrive to our classrooms with pre-existing anxieties around dominant forms of academic engagement (i.e. reading and writing).

We can also invite students who already have a lot of traditional academic capital to revisit their assumptions what it means for an assignment to be “rigorous,” inviting them to understand the validity of other ways of producing knowledge that don’t automatically privilege the written word. 

The video below explains this a bit further, and offers some ideas for how to design for multiple means of action and expression across many contexts.