Universal Design for Learning Post

 Some of the guidelines that I am already using in my library include the engagement and access point. I have worked hard in the last year to cultivate a better, more well-rounded, relevant and up-to-date collection, because the average age of our collection was 2000 when I started last summer. I'm hoping that even when it is nonfiction our kids/students are after, they will feel more empowered and self-sufficient with a better collection to browse through for their reading needs.  Because we had lost many books during two separate floods, any of the books that happened to make it through the previous two librarians were hesitant to weed, which means out of the small amount of books we had in the nonfiction section, many of them were irrelevant. There were even science and medical nonfiction books that should have been replaced regularly, and instead had an average age of the 1990's. I've also worked to minimize distractions in the area so that students are able to focus, and for the physical space of the library, I feel like many parts of it do follow UD principles. It is both safe and easily accessible to the students. I've made it more so in the last year by offering open checkout time every day, even when I have classes present (which was a big NO for the librarians prior to myself), and adding signage in the nonfiction section to help aid in their searches after they've utilized the online catalogue and gone through the steps of Dewey Decimal on the shelves. Each of these really allowed the students to feel like they could come into the library at any time, and were able to find materials and resources by themselves, or with help from a student library aide. I also worked really hard to cultivate a sense of community and including the students, parents and staff to be a part of the library and the library program by instituting the 20 Book Challenge, having a family night at the book fair (we hadn't held a book fair at our campus in just over a decade!!!), inviting parents to be chaperones for the 20 Book Challenge Field Trip, and making a larger social media presence so that parents and guardians could see the fun activities that we were doing in the library so that the students felt like they had a sense of ownership and connection to the library. 

I feel like a Universal Design guideline that I could add to my teaching practices in the library right now might include an emphasis on expectations that help to optimize a student's motivation. It's something that I started on last year, and that I would really like to build on. I saw some students, after completing the 20 Book Challenge that said, "Okay, now what? I'm done, right?" Those moments were disheartening. But for every one of those types of moments, I also had a student that told me, "I didn't read before this, but I found out this year that I REALLY like mystery," or that they really enjoyed reading a series that they didn't know we had in the library, but found because of the twenty book challenge. I hope to be able to take more of a guide role in the future and let them take more of the driver position of their library learning. 

The part of the Universal Design guideline process that I feel like I would need help on falls under the action/expression and expression/communication block. I have found so many new things in the last year alone from going to TCEA, from other librarians on social media, and from people that I work with (for example, PearDeck was SO fun and I had never heard of it until this year!). However, I am still feeling slightly overwhelmed by them, and am trying to sort through how they work, so that I can in confidence offer them to my students as options when they are working on something in the library. There are so many tools for, analysis, composition, construction and communication that should be available and offered to our students at the "buffet" that the guideline video talked about. If I'm unfamiliar with a tool, it has been my instinct for a long time to try to familiarize myself more with it before I'll let a student use it as a tool for presenting information. My goal is to be better about allowing them more freedom when expressing their thoughts on projects. 

It would be a goal as I continue to undergo research into UD guidelines and practices to share my findings with my fellow teachers. I could compile a list of UD resources for staff, including the American Library Association's UDL toolkit (https://alastore.ala.org/universal-design-learning-academic-libraries-theory-practice) and websites like CAST (https://www.cast.org/). This would empower myself and the rest of the staff to learn independently and helps to foster a culture of Universal Design Learning school wide. We might also be able to explore scholarly articles together like "Universal Design for Learning in Academic Libraries: A Methodology for Mapping Multiple Means of Representation in Library Tutorials" ([Universal Design for Learning in the Academic Library: A Methodology for Mapping Multiple Means of Representation in Library Tutorials]). This article showcases how Universal Design can be applied to library instruction, and how I might then be able to feed into and work with the other teachers in their classrooms.