Learner Variability in Strategy Development
Like many other areas of skill development, students come to our learning environments with variable expertise in executive functioning. This variability may be due to opportunities (or lack thereof) for skills development provided in previous learning environments and the stress experienced in these. Furthermore, the inability to interconnect skills and learning from one course to the next can create a siloed learning experience that can increase stress, lack of engagement, and confusion.
Chronic stress impacts the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, resulting in behavioural inflexibility, difficulty making action-oriented decisions, and inhibited working memory (Molina, 2015). In her book on antiracism and UDL, Fritzgerald (2020) unpacks a model called the TERA quotient (Stanier, 2016) through a UDL lens. Each letter in the acronym (adapted below) stands for what happens in our brains when we assess if an environment is safe or unsafe.
Watch this video (Runtime: 6:57 min) in which college students discuss mental health.
- Team – What communicates to students that they are part of the learning team?
- Expectations – Do students know what’s about to happen?
- Rank – Whose status is higher, yours or the students’?
- Autonomy – How much say do students have here?
More Feet on the Ground offers a free learning module on the various indicators of mental health challenges.
If a student assesses that the environment is unsafe, their brain will move into fight, flight, or freeze mode, turning off the prefrontal cortex. The good news is that, like other aspects of the brain, executive functioning is highly plastic. Learners can build new connections across the brain if they find themselves in a learning environment that welcomes their whole selves. During the pandemic, there was an increased understanding of how stress-aware and trauma-aware pedagogy can create communities of learning built on trust. These learning communities of trust provide opportunities for more empowered choices of expression and autonomy of learning.
Imagine your variable learners in the teaching and learning spaces you design. How might they answer these questions posed by the TERA quotient? How about in your department or institution? What might these answers mean for the cognitive load used by learners to assess their safety and belonging within our learning institutions?
Kate Klein, a professor, facilitator and writer, has been researching the impact of school wounds in childhood and how these impact adult learners in post-secondary contexts. In this video from a larger workshop on Healing School Wounds, Kate shares what they’ve learned about the intersections of UDL, particularly regarding the role of choice in developing learner agency, and trauma-informed pedagogies.
In this video, Kate shares what they’ve learned about the role of choice in helping to heal school wounds.
School Wounds & Universal Design for Learning
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But the word remedial has the word remedy in it. And so I kind of think, until school stops harming children, shouldn’t all adult education be thought of as remedial education? As adult educators, can we play a role in tending and suturing and bandaging people’s relationship to learning if they've had these experiences — which I think the majority of our students have?
I personally believe, because I've seen it in action, that people who have had experiences like this can find personal transformation in adult learning environments — but not just any learning environment. And so I wanted to share this quote. In my research on this topic for my book, I interviewed a somatic experiencing practitioner, Hannah Harris Sutro. And I asked everybody I interviewed basically like, What do you think? Can we heal school wounds in school, or is it impossible to heal a wound in the same kind of environment in which it was created?
And so here's what Hannah said in relation to that question. She said: I don't think you can go back in time and unravel or return to a prior state. I don't think that's a thing. But I do think that revisiting the scene of the crime, so to speak — or revisiting that setting — if there's some stuff that's different in a good way, for a lot of people, that can be very reparative. And the primary thing in trauma repair is choice. Constantly. Always. Over and over again. There's a billion different strategies or tools or techniques, but stuff is like that. It's insanely simple and insanely complicated simultaneously. It, being choice, is a really basic concept that has infinite ways of being implemented.
And so this concept of choice or autonomy has been a really big part of my thinking and research on the topic of creating spaces of remedy for adult learners’ school wounds.
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School wounds - Runtime 2:22 min
https://youtu.be/cmiLlNnaSHI?si=MJXR3X3aEOFhIswp