Before we start, please consider these questions: What does it mean to invest in flexibility and equity simultaneously? How does your discipline and teaching context influence your perspective on these two ideas? Reflecting on how these two ideas intersect is an important step as we move forward in our discussion of UDL strategies and their application.

What is academic rigor?

Instructors often express what they perceive as a tension between “accessible” and “rigorous”: How can we make courses accessible while maintaining high and rigorous standards? In fact, these two notions not only co-exist, they are interconnected. Creating a course informed by the UDL framework helps to increase accessibility, student engagement, and academic success without reducing standards of excellence (Capp, 2017). The UDL framework provides guidance for creating courses that are both rigorous and inclusive. However, fully implementing UDL requires reconsidering common assumptions about academic rigor.

To start reconceptualizing inclusive rigor in the context of UDL, we encourage you to examine biases related to academic performance and deficit thinking. What comes to your mind when you think of “academic rigor”? How do implicit bias and assumptions inform our understanding of rigor in higher ed?

In her work, Tara J. Yosso demonstrates that deficit thinking reinforces stereotypes and reproduces educational and social injustices. It ignores the assets students from diverse backgrounds bring to the classroom. Yosso writes: “Deficit thinking takes the position that minority students and families are at fault for poor academic performance because: (a) students enter school without the normative cultural knowledge and skills; and (b) parents neither value nor support their child’s education.” (Yosso, 2005, p. 75). We encourage you to examine biases that negatively impact academic engagement and achievement to disrupt deficit thinking. To counter deficit perspectives, facilitate culturally responsive and asset-based pedagogies, recognizing the assets all students bring to the classroom and promoting an inclusive environment that sets high expectations for diverse learners (Paris & Alim, 2017).

According to Christopher Emdin, author of Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success, “To be an effective educator who creates academically rigorous instruction, one’s teaching must be centered around the infusion of life and joy. Academic rigor is about being loud, proud, mobile, unpretentious, and challenged to take on whatever obstacles come one’s way even if they offer some challenge.” (Emdin, 2021, p. 30). Emdin offers an expansive view of rigor. How does it connect to your first associations with this term? What are some new opportunities offered by this asset-based perspective?

What does inclusive rigor look like in practice?

Educational developers McGurk & Brooks build on this with three principles of academic rigor as an inclusive teaching practice:

With these principles in mind, please think about your discipline’s ideas about rigor and fairness. Do you notice any tensions or misconceptions?  What are some ways to ensure that rigor in your courses is purposeful, transparent, and equitable? Can we shift the perception from a frame of lowering standards, to one of adapting and adjusting course standards to be more transparent?

The goal is to reconsider assumptions, align rigor with course goals, and implement it equitably. The UDL framework can guide this process.

3. Reducing grades for late work 

No-late-work policies can disproportionately impact most vulnerable students, those who may have additional responsibilities outside of school, stress, fewer resources, week prior knowledge, or other barriers (Feldman, 2019, p. 115). Not penalizing students for later submissions, can positively impact not only their sense of belonging, but academic success as well. As Feldman notes in his book Grading for Equity:

Consider alternatives to lowering grades for late work (especially, if self-regulated learning and meeting deadlines are not the primary learning goals of your course):

• providing students with opportunities to sign up for deadlines 
• incorporating grace periods
• allowing students to submit assignments without penalty up until the date of the unit’s summative assessment. After the summative assessment or end of unit exam, the prior daily assignments no longer have value and students can’t get points for them (Feldman, 2019).
• accepting late assignments without penalty until one week before the end of the grading term, so instructors have enough time to review the assignments and enter grades before final grades are due (Feldman, 2019).

Choose a common practice and try to reimagine it based on the UDL and inclusive rigor frameworks.

References