Using Universal Design for Learning as a Lens to Rethink Graduate Education Pedagogical Practices

Universal design for learning has gained interest from the higher education sector over the last decade. It is a promising approach to inclusion that allows instructor to design for optimal flexibility so as to address the needs of all diverse learners. Most implementation efforts, however, have concentrated on undergraduate education. The presumption is that graduate students have developed the necessary skills to perform, by the time of their admission into the graduate sector. It is also assumed, somehow, that the graduate population is homogeneous, rather than diverse, even if the literature does not support such assertions. Inclusive pedagogy therefore does not seem currently to be a priority in graduate education. This chapter will debunk these myths and highlight the numerous challenges graduate education faces, as a sector, with regards to the inclusion of diverse learners. It will then showcase the many ways universal design for learning is pertinent and effective in tackling these challenges.

Community Cultural Wealth

This chapter is the story of the authors' journey using community mapping in graduate coursework to make visible the assets in local communities through experiential learning. Community mapping is an experiential, inquiry-based ethnographic research method that can be utilized by various community members to understand a community better. In this case, teachers uncovered language and literacy present in the communities and created contextualized learning experiences by connecting students' lived realities to school instruction. The authors began with discussions around community and ethnographic projects to understand what was present in the community. This evolved to include some form of action, primarily in the form of curricular reform and critical literacy projects and/or culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Advocacy Anxiety

The nature of graduate education often promotes the development of radical critical thinking, professional orientation, and research skills. However, it fails to connect this radical development of thought to tangible, action-oriented social justice advocacy practices. Neglecting this connection of theory to practice potentially exacerbates the experience of advocacy anxiety (the fear and resistance of engaging in advocacy) and slacktivism (engaging in relatively meaningless, actionless social justice). Through a counselor education lens, the purpose of this chapter is to explore the roots of advocacy anxiety and slacktivism and how to rectify inaction through the implementation of public policy-oriented, experiential learning activities in graduate education curriculum.

Cultivating the Online Graduate Student Experience

This chapter presents recommendations for creating co-curricular engagement opportunities for online graduate students with evidence and examples drawn from both research and practice. Examples of successes and challenges from a leading online master's program are explored that ultimately led to the creation of multiple events including advising intake sessions, social opportunities, professional development experiences, and a virtual commencement. Four key considerations are provided to those interested in advancing new initiatives: know your audience and your goals, know your time and capacity restraints, consider partners and/or collaborators, and do not be afraid to fail.

Understanding Self to Engage With the “Other”

In this chapter, the author utilizes a reflexive approach to examine their experience revising a core course focused on identity, belonging, and exclusion in a categorized world that is housed in an international higher education graduate program in the United States. The author describes their positionality as a first-generation American and daughter of Haitian immigrants and how it informs their approaches in the classroom. Included in the chapter is a description of the author's teaching philosophy and how it is operationalized in practice. This is followed by a discussion on how external events, both locally and globally, including the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice in the U.S., has implications for their teaching. The author includes a description of course activities followed by excerpts from students' evaluation of the course. The chapter concludes with the author's reflection on student outcomes and their teaching experience.

Preparing Students for Research

Conducting academic research is a requirement to obtain a degree at university. But, before judging the research work students come up with at the end, we need to question the quality of the research methodology courses and to what extent these are preparing them for such a decisive task. To this end, this chapter's focal concern is to find out about the challenges Master students face in conducting research at the department of English (Mostaganem University). This is through a case study investigating their needs, concerns, and views regarding their learning of the research methodology course.

Pedagogy as a Form of Praxis and Commitment

This chapter responds to a rising interest in re-imagining graduate school classrooms as a space for transforming social injustice. The authors situate the exploration of this issue in the context of teaching graduate-level research methodology courses. The chapter brings forth a student-centered and praxis-oriented approach to teaching graduate-level research methodology courses, which is grounded in the guiding principles of dialogue, relationality, and critical consciousness-raising. Through committing to these principles and to our students, the authors demonstrate profound connections between teaching and being. They argue that cultivating student-centered and critical teaching is not the work of creating a set of tools, but instead an engagement with being and becoming through praxis and commitment. Throughout this chapter, we draw on our teaching experiences and collaborative scholarship to illustrate what it means to connect teaching with praxis and commitments.

Empowering Student Learning Through Adventure-Based Counseling Activities

This chapter explores the use of adventure-based counseling (ABC) activities and a therapeutic lens to promote learning in graduate classrooms. ABC techniques originally stem from experiential education programs (i.e., Outward Bound and Project Adventure) and are versatile activities that promote change and growth in participants. The authors explore the use of various components of ABC, such as the Adventure Wave, hard skills, and soft skills, to enact learning through creative and innovative strategies. This chapter will explore the global appreciation for the impact nature and challenge experiences can have on ones' learning and provide activity examples and critical educator reflections to clarify implications for graduate classrooms.

Flipping Statistics Education

This chapter presents a new approach to teaching research methodology courses in doctoral programs by incorporating a flipped classroom structure and a research-practice partnership within a larger guided project-based learning framework as a means of developing students' research self-efficacy. The theoretical underpinnings for each component are described along with a summary of relevant literature. The chapter discusses the development and implementation of this pedagogical technique in a graduate statistics course in a practitioner-oriented educational leadership doctoral program. The chapter concludes with reflections on the strengths and challenges of this approach from students and the course instructor and how this technique builds students' research self-efficacy.

Research-Practice Partnerships With University-Partnered Community Schools as Contexts for Doctoral Student Training

In this chapter, the authors examine the ways in which equity-focused research-practice partnerships (RPPs) in two university-partnership schools served as contexts for their professional learning as educational researchers. They found that our participation in RPPs were characterized by access to a cross-disciplinary learning community, opportunities to collaborate with school stakeholders through research project life cycles, and pathways to become increasingly agentic facilitators of RPPs. Through such processes and structures, they expanded their social justice-oriented researcher positionalities, impacted local educational practices, and communicated their findings to a diverse set of audiences. They discuss the implications of these findings for graduate student education pedagogy, specifically for preparing doctoral students for the emerging professoriate.