Foreword

Educational systems are social systems. That shouldn’t be an earth-shattering thing to say, but it’s amazing how often those doing education-adjacent work view education as something that is inherently non-social (i.e. non-human). Near the end of a recent class about universal design for learning, one of my students who was preparing to become a secondary science teacher raised his hand. “You mean,” he said, with exasperation in his voice, “that we’re expected to teach every student in our classes?” “Well, yes,” I replied, unsuccessfully hiding some shock, “of course!”.

Yet, it’s not always obvious that education should actually involve teaching someone at all, let alone everyone. A charitable interpretation of this student’s reaction may be found in teachers’ motivations to enter the field. Secondary and tertiary teachers especially are drawn to education because they love their subjects, with their hearts focused on Shakespeare, cellular mitosis, the Renaissance, or the quadratic formula, and though there is nothing wrong with such a love of knowledge, per se, this focus can quickly warp into a view of education as being merely “teaching something” rather than “teaching someone something.” Perhaps that’s why classroom management is the biggest reason teachers in my own country are quitting in droves. We attract and train teachers by focusing on the something of teaching, but those pesky someones keep getting in the way, and when our teachers can’t deliver on the something, they feel unappreciated and unfulfilled, and they become the someones we blame.

As industrialized nations grapple with perceived failures in their education systems, they have historically taken this basic misunderstanding to an extreme: focusing even more firmly on the something rather than the someone. In the U.S., the “Johnny can’t read” crisis led us to focus on the abstract something of “reading,” rather than the someone of “Johnny,” and altogether ignoring the someones of “Isabella,” “Ahmed,” and others. Worldwide, university faculty are hired and evaluated on their publishing and grant-seeking prowess rather than their teaching skill. Secondary teachers are hired with decreasing pedagogical training in favor of more subject-area coursework. Initiatives and policies are enacted to “raise standards” rather than to “raise students.” And designers are trained to think first, foremost, and always about their objectives (the somethings), as their work is packaged and delivered to unseen and unknown someones at ever-increasing scale.

I’m obviously painting in broad strokes here, but do you see any of these patterns in your spheres of experience? Do you sense education ever being approached in lieu of (or at times in spite of) the someones being taught? Do you ever sense the someone of the learner being sacrificed to the something being taught? And if so, what in the world can we possibly do about it as learning designers?

This book, Designing Learning Experiences for Inclusivity and Diversity, provides a useful leap in the right direction by helping us to first understand the depth and nuances of this problem and then providing practical guidance for moving forward. The authors provide a simple and approachable definition of “inclusivity” in design as “the practice of creating an environment where everyone feels welcome, respected and valued” (Chapter 1), and “diversity” is framed as a simple reality that the someones involved in learning are actually very different from one another in ways that really matter. Rather than overlooking, minimizing, or altogether ignoring the social nature of education, such an emphasis can help us move away from the reductionistic and doomed view of education as merely “teaching something” to a more complete and inspiring view that seeks to

Teach everyone
as they really are
things that matter
in ways that matter.

In my mind, that’s the heart of the inclusive learning designer. It aligns deeply with the tenets and practices of openness and social justice (Chapters 2 & 3) and represents the only morally sustainable and also the most effective way to design learning environments in a diverse social world.

Beyond moral posturing or ideological hand wringing, championing inclusivity and diversity in design is a very practical way to become a great designer as it helps us to avoid three of the most common and limiting pitfalls designers face. Let’s call these pitfalls (a) Me Design, (b) Median Design, and (c) Meaningless Design.

Me Design. The first mistake of a designer in any field, ranging from architecture to software design to learning, is to design for the designer rather than the target audience of the design. This is rarely intentional but reflects the reality that if we do not clearly and consistently think about our audience in our design work, then we will subconsciously fill in any gaps with ourselves. If I’m a sports guy, then I may use baseball metaphors to teach about the criminal justice system even if my audience has no idea what a “run,” “ball,” or “three strikes” is in this context, thereby introducing extraneous cognitive load and confusion. If I’m a native English speaker, then I may use colloquialisms like “bite the bullet,” “break a leg,” or “beat around the bush” that English speakers in other countries have never heard of, thereby yielding misunderstandings. And if I’m food secure, I might create an entire unit about learning fractions from cutting up pizzas without ever hearing the grumbling stomachs of my food insecure students, who are now even more distracted by their hunger. In learning design, this pitfall historically has occurred as white, male, middle-class, Western, English-speaking, etc. designers created learning experiences that they assumed were for everyone simply because they made them for no one in particular. However, it turns out that all designs are for someone. Designs made for “no one in particular” are designs made for the designer, and the designer can never escape designing for themselves until they first understand the true diversity of their audience and inclusively seek to make their designs spaces “where everyone feels welcome, respected and valued” (Chapter 1).

Median Design. The second mistake that plagues designers is creating for an “average” or “typical” learner. As a young designer, a faculty member boasted to me “I don’t care about my students individually; only in aggregate,” suggesting that designers should plot learners along a bell curve and aim to meet the needs of a dot at the top middle peak, ignoring all else. This median learner, however, is a faceless apparition that doesn’t exist, and by focusing on it, we ignore our actual learners (particularly those on the perceived margins). It also reductionistically classifies learners on performance and treats this as an inherent trait rather than a byproduct of the design. The result is design work that artificially views learners unidimensionally and only seeks to meet their needs on a single dimension. The alternative that an inclusive approach to design proposes is to intentionally design for the greatest diversity of learners as possible and recognize that any bell curve of performance is a byproduct of design decisions, not an inherent trait. Richly understanding and designing for a few dots on the edges of the bell curve, such as by attending to cultural responsiveness (Chapters 5 & 6) and the needs of students experiencing disability (Chapter 7), helps the designer to meet the needs of everyone (including the imagined median). It also helps the designer to break away from morally and philosophically problematic roots of the bell curve mentality, which is based on an attempt to sort people and an assumption that not everyone will be able to learn equally.

Meaningless Design. And a third common pitfall that learning designers face emerges from doing work that is so disconnected from actual learners that it ends up feeling empty and meaningless. I think most learning designers enter the field out of a desire to teach and to help people, but as learning design as a discipline becomes increasingly distanced from learners and focuses on delivering learning experiences at increasing scale, designers may find themselves in a crisis of meaning as they ply their efforts to help people but can never see the results. They create learning experiences but don’t see students engaging in them nor see the effects on students’ lives. This is especially true when working as third-space academics (Chapter 4) and would be like a nurse attending to patients through a veil, a chef delivering all their entrees to a black box, or a musician who never left the recording studio. At some point, we would rightly ask ourselves “what’s the point?” and “am I even doing any good in my work?” Focusing on inclusivity and diversity has the potential to rehumanize these efforts, because though we might still be working behind a computer in an office away from our learners, our mental and emotional energies become invested in understanding our actual learners as people, building teams to meet their needs (Chapters 5 & 8), and experiencing learning with them. Rather than focusing entirely on tools, processes, or frameworks, we become reinvested in and refocused on people, the someones of learning. From my own experience, this breathes life into our careers and improves our designs, making us happier, more effective, and more fulfilled in our work.

The problem of practice that this book seeks to address, then, is a critical (perhaps existential) problem for learning design: “How do we design for inclusivity and diversity?” Like the problems faced in education broadly, this problem can only be effectively approached as a social problem as designers seek to understand the someone component of their mandate to “teach someone something.” Proposed practices, solutions, or guides to learning design that ignore or minimize inclusivity and diversity fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the field and are akin to attempting to solve medical problems by pretending that patients do not exist. Rather, the future of learning design should be a future that is increasingly human-centered, by inclusively focusing on people and their true (diverse) selves. As such, I can’t think of a topic that should merit the attention of learning designers more than that of this book. Its guidance can practically help novice and experienced designers alike to avoid some of the most common pitfalls in the field, and its vision of a world of learning that is more inclusive for everyone is the only one worth having.