This research is situated within my role as a Specialist Technician at London College of Fashion (LCF), where I deliver software training and provide one-to-one (1-to-1) technical and portfolio tutorial to a highly diverse student cohort. However, I have observed that many students, in particular international students and those with anxiety or specific learning differences, struggle to articulate their learning preferences or access needs during the session itself.
Our current pre-session questionnaire focuses primarily on broad static information, such as course details and session expectation. Whilst they are useful for auditing, I can’t gauge students’ support and access needs which often emerge during session. For example, students with anxiety may find it hard to concentrate in shared spaces, and students with dyslexia may struggle with live demonstrations but would benefit from pre-recorded materials.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) offers an appealing framework for addressing this challenge. The recent UDL Guidelines 3.0 emphasise designing learning environments that “anticipate the variability of learners” rather than relying on individual disclosure or post-hoc adjustments (CAST, 2024). As Hartmann argue barriers are not inherent in the learner, but in the inflexible design of the environment (2015). In the context of 1-to-1 Technical Resources support, this suggests that barriers may be embedded not in students’ abilities, but in how support structures are organised and communicated.
Existing research on UDL in higher education often highlights the value of proactive, student-centred design in improving engagement and satisfaction in relation to group-based teaching and curriculum design. For example, in a faculty-wide study, Schelly et al. (2011) found that students in large, undergraduate courses perceived UDL-informed practices as more inclusive and supportive, particularly when instructors demonstrated awareness of diverse learning needs. Similarly, Martin (2020), writing in a UK higher education context, argues that UDL shifts responsibility from individual students “requesting adjustments” to a wider institutional embedding of accessibility as standard practice.
Its principles should and can be actioned particularly effectively embedded within one-to-one learning contexts. In 1-to-1 Technical Resources sessions, student variability is not abstract or collective but individual, situated, and often predictable when appropriate structures are in place. This makes UDL’s emphasis on anticipatory design especially approachable at a micro-pedagogic context.
In particular, this is particularly important within the creative arts sector, where technical confidence, visual literacy, and experimentation are central to learning, yet students’ digital preparedness varies widely. At a departmental and institutional level, my research rationale aligns with LCF and UAL’s commitments to inclusive education, student wellbeing, and equitable access to learning resources.
By investigating how a UDL-informed pre-session questionnaire can support anticipatory adjustments in 1-to-1 Technical Resources sessions, this research aims to contribute to the UDL literature by repositioning the framework in a micro-pedagogic context. It seeks to demonstrate how small, low-cost pedagogical interventions can enhance preparedness, responsiveness, and student satisfaction, while reducing the emotional labour placed on students to advocate for their own access needs.
Social justice and Equity lens:
Social justice and access sit at the heart of this project. In practice, students often don’t arrive at 1-to-1 technical support with the same “capacity to access” it, the support they receive can depend on confidence, language fluency, familiarity with UK higher education norms, and whether they feel safe disclosing disability or mental health needs. Disability scholarship highlights that disclosure can involve stigma, emotional risk, and ongoing administrative labour, so systems that rely on students “speaking up” at the point of need can end up reproducing inequity rather than reducing it (Pearson and Boskovich, 2019).
To frame this as a social justice intervention, I draw on Fraser’s three-dimensional account of justice , redistribution, recognition, and representation. which has also been taken up in education research to analyse how policies and practices address economic, cultural, and political forms of injustice (Dahl, Stoltz and Willig, 2004; Power, 2012; Cazden, 2012). In this study:
Redistribution refers to making access to effective support less dependent on individual self-advocacy by normalising anticipatory adjustments
Recognition involves treating diverse learning preferences and access needs as expected learner variability rather than exceptions
Representation means creating a structured route for student voice to shape how sessions are organised. In this sense, a UDL-informed questionnaire is not only a practical tool for preparedness, but a small-scale mechanism for shifting responsibility away from students having to “prove” need and toward a more just design of support.
References:
Martin, N, Wray, M, James, A, Draffan, EA, Krupa, J and Turner, P (2019). Implementing Inclusive Teaching and Learning in UK Higher Education – Utilising Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a Route to Excellence. Society for Research into Higher Education.
CAST (2024). CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Retrieved from https://udlguidelines.cast.org
Schelly, C.L., Davies, P.L. and Spooner, C.L. (2011) ‘Student Perceptions of Faculty implementation of Universal Design for Learning’.
Hartmann, E. (2015). Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Learners with Severe Support Needs. International Journal of Whole Schooling, 11 (1), 54-67.
Dahl, H.M., Stoltz, P. and Willig, R. (2004) ‘Recognition, Redistribution and Representation in Capitalist Global Society: An Interview with Nancy Fraser’, Acta Sociologica, 47(4), pp. 373–382. doi:10.1177/0001699304048671.
Power, S. (2012) ‘From redistribution to recognition to representation: social injustice and the changing politics of education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 10(4). doi:10.1080/14767724.2012.735154.
Cazden, C.B. (2012) ‘A Framework for Social Justice in Education’, International Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(3), pp. 178–198. doi:10.4471/ijep.2012.11.
Pearson, H. and Boskovich, L. (2019) ‘Problematizing Disability Disclosure in Higher Education…’, Disability Studies Quarterly, 39(1).