Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning

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The field of education faces a critical moment in its history, one characterized equally by risk and opportunity. The convergence of technological, demographic, and legislative developments brings new knowledge, new tools, new learners, and new expectations for those learners. For example:

• A window on the working brain opened by powerful neuroimaging technologies such as PET (Position Emission Tomography) scans reveals the distributed, parallel nature of processing and suggests that these interrelated but distinct brain systems are critical for learning.
• The explosion of network and multimedia technologies revolutionizes the relationship between content, media, and learner, changing the nature of literacy and literacy learning forever.
• Demographic and societal shifts lead to increasingly diverse classrooms, including more students with disabilities, students from varied, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and students with differences in learning styles, interests, and abilities.
• Legislation such as the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) creates new academic expectations for all students within the general education curriculum.

All together, these developments create the necessary knowledge, the essential tools, and the urgent need to develop a new educational paradigm. Universal literacy, unachievable in a solely print-based society, may be possible with new understanding about learning and new network and multimedia technologies. Equally possible is the increasing inclusion of learners whose backgrounds, skills, abilities/disabilities, and interests do not fit traditional "mainstream" models of learning.

The Book

CAST's book, Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age: Universal Design for Learning (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2002), discusses and illustrates Universal Design for Learning as a framework for understanding the needs of diverse learners and educating them.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a new paradigm for teaching, learning, and the development, selection, and use of curriculum materials. Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age frames UDL within the most recent research and literature on instruction and curriculum, and sets it clearly in the context of current real-world issues that teachers face, including teaching children of diverse abilities and disabilities, standards and assessment, technology use, and education policy.

Drs. Anne Meyer and David Rose and contributing writers present case studies of diverse students, illustrations of teacher practice, demonstrations of software tools and learner technologies, and research from neuroscience and psychology.

Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age lays out the excitement, the potential, the challenges, and the difficulties of this moment in time for education -- the challenges of the issues every teacher faces and of the technologies that are in such flux. Teachers and practitioners are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to create a new place in education for all learners.

Purchase this book.

The Web Site

To complement and expand on the concepts set forth in the book, CAST has developed the Teaching Every Student (TES) Web site. The TES site offers an accessible, universally designed, online version of the book itself as well as comprehensive resources, interactive exercises, and opportunities for educators to share their ideas and experiences in using the UDL approach via online "communities of practice."

Funding

CAST wishes to thank the many individuals whose generosity and commitment to CAST's mission have helped to make this work possible. Additional funding has generously been provided by the following foundations and trusts:

• Foundation Carinoso
• George J. Gillespie Charitable Trust
• Sidney and Judith Kranes Charitable Trust
• LD ACCESS Foundation, Inc.
• New York Community Trust - The Island Fund
• Pinky Foundation
• Arthur K. Watson Charitable Trust