As part of marketization and privatization tendencies the last decades have provided several new pedagogical concepts, all of which seem to attract a growing interest. In the Invoice project, funded by The Swedish research council, we applied a follow the money approach (cf. Ball 2012) by collecting and following up 1,000 invoices registered on continuous professional development (CPD) accounts for teachers in three Swedish municipalities. The invoice material revealed a number of popular pedagogical concepts; Universal Design for Learning (UDL), DT (Differentiated Teaching), CP (Clarifying Pedagogy), and LRPE (Learning Readiness Physical Education). The acronymic character can be seen as an alignment to medical programs and as such lending legitimacy and giving an impression of established approaches. 

In our presentation, we pay particular attention to the above mentioned UDL. The concept was launched and promoted by the American organization CAST which presents itself as a ‘a non-profit education research and development organization that created the Universal Design for Learning framework and UDL Guidelines’. According to the organization itself the concept has reached far globally. 

The ambition of policy making is high; there are 130 hits of the word ‘policy’ (referring to books, podcasts, and other material) on the webpage. One illustrative text example is:

In 2006, CAST joined with several organizations to form the National UDL Task Force, an interdisciplinary coalition that advocates support for UDL in federal, state, and local policy. The Task Force has successfully advocated for the inclusion of UDL in the federal Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 and in various policy directives from the US Department of Education.

As far as Sweden is concerned, the concept has been recommended by two powerful, Swedish policy actors; The National Agency for Education and The National Agency for Special Needs Education and Schools, SPSM. The latter advocated the concept in connection to a large national effort on special educational needs.

The presentation explores how the concept of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) constructs (1) problems related to education and (2) how these problems should be addressed. The study is based on critical discourse analysis, a theoretical and methodological approach introduced by Norman Fairclough where a discourse bears reference to a ‘way of signifying experience from a particular perspective’ (1995, p. 135). The ‘critical’ refers to injustices and power which is supposed to be revealed by a close look at linguistic features in certain texts.  

Methodology or Methods/ Research Instruments or Sources Used  

To study the phenomenon of UDL we primarily chose the main webpage of the responsible organization CAST (2020). The main webpage has an extensive number of links, and we considered also these. Thus, the probably most well-known resource in UDL contexts, the UDL guidelines was also included in the text material.

Our analysis of the selected webpage is based on a combination of Fairclough´s analytical steps (Fairclough, 2003, p. 209 – 210) and a modified version by Guo and Shan (2013). This combination has been applied previously by Levinsson and Norlund (2018), Norlund (2020), and Levinsson et al. (2022) and involves the following five steps: 

Focus on a social problem which has a semiotic aspect. Analyze how the problem is portrayed/construed. Identify which discourse/s that are involved.Analyze how the suggested solution is portrayed/construed. Identify which discourse/s that are involved.Map which network of practices within which the problem and solution are located, and how relevant practices are potentially reorganized. Consider whether the network of practices (the social order) ‘needs’ the problem.Identify potential contradictions and gaps in the material. Give space for counter-voices.Reflect critically on the analysis (1-4) Consistent with step 1 in the analytical tool we focused on a social problem that has a semiotic aspect (we found images, fonts, links, punctuation marks etcetera in the material). Together semiotic resources signal something particularly to the reader (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). For the verbal part of analysis, we affiliated to Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) systemic-functional linguistics (SFL) with its focus on how language functions in context. SFL, which shares several starting points with the approach of Fairclough, is built on the phenomenon of transitivity analysis, from which we collected a set of adequate linguistic concepts. 

* Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings 

Our analysis shows that the problem of concern (step 1) can be found in the ‘barriers to learning that millions of people experience every day’, stated as a problem on the CAST webpage. The barriers are not explicitly defined but further exploration makes this obvious; traditional teaching is too rigid and does not consider students’ differences. Both verbal (‘millions of people’) and semiotic resources contribute to the urgency and scope of the message and to the discourse of rigidness. Concerning solutions (step 2), the reader of the webpage gets a multitude of recommendations on how to meet students’ differences, materialized in both visual and verbal representations. We suggest a discourse of potency here, including universality and eternity. The vast network (step 3) that appears from content on the webpage emphasizes this. Referring to possible counter-voices (step 4), one counter-voice would invoke that UDL shares similarities with the heavily criticized neuromyth of learning styles (Howard-Jones, 2014; Murphy, 2021). Another counter-voice would invoke that the expectancy of teachers to provide individual solutions to all their students regarding all the aspects recommended in the UDL Guidelines should, needless to say, be considered impossible. According to Fairclough (2003), the point in making critical discourse analyses is that they make possible the assumptions that are made by involved actors and by extension how power is exerted in a particular practice. In this case we show how the popular policy phenomenon put teachers at risk of being the object of heavy workload and the performers of unscientific approaches. The final step (step 5) generated no particular methodological concerns. 

References  

Ball, Stephen J. 2012. “Show Me the Money! Neoliberalism at Work in Education.” Forum 54, no. 1: 23–27.

CAST. (2020). About Universal Design for Learning. Retrieved from http://www.cast.org/our-work/about-udl.html.

Fairclough, N. (1995). Critical discourse analysis. Longman.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Routledge.

Guo, S. & Shan, H. (2013). The politics of recognition: critical discourse analysis of recent PLAR policies for immigrant professionals in Canada. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 32(4), 464–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/02601370.2013.778073

Halliday, M. (1994). An introduction to functional grammar (2nd edition). Edward Arnold.

Howard-Jones, P. (2014). Neuroscience and education: myths and messages. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 15, 817-824

Kress G. & van Leeuwen T. (2006). Reading images – the grammar of visual design. Routledge.

Levinsson, M., & Norlund, A. (2018). En samtida diskurs om hjärnans betydelse för undervisning och lärande: Kritisk analys av artiklar i lärarfackliga tidskrifter. Utbildning och Lärande, 12(1), 7–25

Levinsson, M., Norlund, A. & Johansson, J. (2022). En samtida diskurs om betydelsen av fysisk aktivitet för undervisning och lärande: Kritisk analys av artiklar i lärarfackliga tidskrifter. Nordic Studies in Education, 42(3), 249-271. 

 Murphy, M.P. (2021). Belief without evidence? A policy research note on Universal Design for Learning. Policy Futures in Education, 19, 7–12.

Norlund, A. (2020). Suggestopedi som språkdidaktiskt verktyg i vuxenutbildning – en kritisk textanalys. Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, 25(2–3), 7–25. https://doi.org/10.15626/pfs25.0203.01