whether they are or aren’t being inclusive in their approaches, unless a particular disadvantage is made obvious by students. A common response from academic colleagues when reading the guides is that they consider much of the advice to be common sense, or just good teaching practice, when perhaps they were expecting that being inclusive would involve something more specialised. Many pedagogical advances in Higher Education such as blended learning, can greater flexibility by design (Gordon, 2014) and taken together with a drive for clarity and consistency in student experience in our own institution, this means that many current institutional initiatives are inherently, even if not overtly, pushing inclusivity forwards. This therefore means that, although institutionally we may not have a clear and shared understanding of what inclusivity is in practice, we are already making some steps towards it. Heath (2010) advocates shrinking the change as a good way of making people feel that they are already part way towards achieving a goal, so a useful exercise in promoting the agenda has been to use the Universal Design for Learning Licence to Learn framework (Knarlag, 2016) to map out the institutional activities and initiatives which could be considered as contributing towards inclusivity, enabling a sense of achievement and an understanding of how big the remaining challenge is. Competence standards We have frequently returned to discussions around competence standards and with our academic colleagues and have discovered that “graduateness” is a mis-match in our understanding of these ideas. As a disability practitioner, the concept of competence standards is crucial to understanding and implementing reasonable adjustments and advocating inclusive approaches. However, the term standards’ is legalistic and at ‘competence odds with the common parlance of learning outcomes and assessment criteria used by academic colleagues. The Equality Challenge Unit’s guidance around competence standards (ECU, 2015) is an excellent resource, but potentially too lengthy to appeal to busy academics. The guides use language familiar to academics, however using more acceptable language risks the full understanding and implementation of competence standards in module design and assessment. Understanding the audience
whether they are or aren’t being inclusive in their approaches, unless a particular disadvantage is made obvious by students. A common response from academic colleagues when reading the guides is that they consider much of the advice to be common sense, or just good teaching practice, when perhaps they were expecting that being inclusive would involve something more specialised. Many pedagogical advances in Higher Education such as blended learning, can greater flexibility by design (Gordon, 2014) and taken together with a drive for clarity and consistency in student experience in our own institution, this means that many current institutional initiatives are inherently, even if not overtly, pushing inclusivity forwards. This therefore means that, although institutionally we may not have a clear and shared understanding of what inclusivity is in practice, we are already making some steps towards it. Heath (2010) advocates shrinking the change as a good way of making people feel that they are already part way towards achieving a goal, so a useful exercise in promoting the agenda has been to use the Universal Design for Learning Licence to Learn framework (Knarlag, 2016) to map out the institutional activities and initiatives which could be considered as contributing towards inclusivity, enabling a sense of achievement and an understanding of how big the remaining challenge is. Competence standards We have frequently returned to discussions around competence standards and “graduateness” with our academic colleagues and have discovered that is a mis-match in our understanding of these ideas. As a disability practitioner, the concept of competence standards is crucial to understanding and implementing reasonable adjustments and advocating inclusive approaches. However, the term ‘competence standards’ is legalistic and at odds with the common parlance of learning outcomes and assessment criteria used by academic colleagues. The Equality Challenge Unit’s guidance around competence standards (ECU, 2015) is an excellent resource, but potentially too lengthy to appeal to busy academics. The guides use language familiar to academics, however using more acceptable language risks the full understanding and implementation of competence standards in module design and assessment. Understanding the audience
JIPFHE.ISSUE-9.1-Winter-2017.docx