Recognizing Not All Brains Think Alike

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an explosion of books and articles about what’s often called “brain-based learning,” as neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists study and explain what circuits are firing when a student tries to memorize a fact or solve a problem.

Without question, this scholarship has been a boon to teachers seeking to improve their practices. But there is a caveat: Not all brains think alike.

Researchers call this neurodiversity, and it refers to the notion that every population will include people who have a range of ways of thinking, learning, and feeling.

Author of the forthcoming book An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators, faculty development expert Sarah Silverman talks with us about challenges students who learn differently might face in the classroom and how instructors can foster environments where everyone has an opportunity to thrive.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Sarah’s Ph.D. in entomology—and her journey from studying insects to working in the area of teaching and learning with a focus on neurodiversity
• The origin of the term neurodiversity to describe the full range of cognitive differences among humans as well as the meaning and use of the related terms neurodivergent, neurotypical, and neurodiverse
• How the neurodiversity movement emerged out of the desire of autistic people to be accepted rather than “cured” and the ways that influences Sarah’s work with faculty
• Real-world examples, including from her own experiences as someone who is neurodivergent, that illustrate the value of instructors connecting with students to get a fuller picture of who they are
• Ways instructors might support neurodivergent learners who are encountering challenges
• Access friction—i.e., when the access needs of one person or group come into conflict with those of another—and how being flexible can help instructors approach such situations
• The value of having students themselves help you find solutions (and why it’s okay if they’re not utopian)

Guest Bio: Sarah Silverman is an independent scholar and faculty developer focusing on neurodiversity and accessibility in higher education. In her work on many different campuses, she helps faculty better understand how neurodiversity impacts teaching and learning and how to balance many different needs among instructors and learners. She earned a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of California, Davis, and an advanced certificate in disability studies from the CUNY School of Professional Studies. Her book An Introduction to Neurodiversity for Educators will be published next year by the University of Oklahoma Press as part of the Teaching, Engaging, and Thriving in Higher Ed Series, which is edited by Designed for Learning host Jim Lang and Michelle Miller.

Resources Mentioned:

• Sarah’s Substack Newsletter: Beyond the Scope
• Neurodiversity concepts discussed during the episode drawn from Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline edited by Steven Kapp

Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the practice in Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence and the author of several influential books on teaching. The podcast is produced by Notre Dame Learning’s Office of Digital Learning. For more, visit learning.nd.edu. You can also follow Notre Dame Learning on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:03

Welcome to Designed for Learning, a podcast from Notre Dame Learning. I'm your host, Jim Lang. One of the major developments in higher education in the 21st century has been a greater awareness of what's happening in the brains of our students when we're teaching them. We've seen an explosion of books and articles about what's often called brain based learning as neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists study to explain what circuits are firing, what neurons are lighting up, wiring and rewiring when the student tries to memorize a factor, solve a problem. Without question, that research has been a boon to teachers seeking to improve their practices. But there is a caveat. Not all brains think alike. Researchers call this neurodiversity, and it refers to the notion that every population will include people who have a range of ways of thinking, learning, and feeling. Today's guest has been a vocal proponent for recognizing the neurodiversity in our students and ensuring that all students have the chance to succeed when we plan our courses and class sessions. So what should teachers know about those learners? How can we make sure that they have the same chances to learn as everyone else in the room? Sarah Silverman is an independent scholar and faculty developer focusing on neurodiversity and accessibility in higher education. In her work with instructors on many different campuses, she works with faculty to better understand how neurodiversity impacts teaching and learning and how to balance many different needs among instructors and learners. In addition to this faculty development work, Sarah teaches undergraduate courses, disability studies, and writes regularly on her newsletter, beyond the Scope, which you can find on Substack. So, Sarah, welcome. Thank you so much, Jim. It's great to be here. I promise our conversation, they will focus on neurodiversity, but first I want to ask you about something really important. Bugs. You got your PhD in entomology. What drew you into that field? And if you have a fun fact about that will amaze us all about the bugs you'd studied, I'm all ears. Yeah, okay. In some ways, this relates to the overall conversation about teaching and learning. I think I've always enjoyed insects. I liked them as a kid. I like to read books about them and just pick them up and look at them. But I also became interested in insects because of a great teacher. I took his community ecology class and he was not just an entomologist, but also an arachnologist, someone who studies spiders specifically. I really found that fascinating. I had my first research experience in his lab and he connected me with some other research experiences. It derived from A really wonderful learning experience in the classroom. Then I guess what I would say is I always did want to teach in some way. I thought that I would get a PhD in biology and probably teach biology. I've studied a lot of different insects. When I was an undergrad, I studied something called solitary bees. Those are not the communal social bees like honeybees or bumblebees, but the ones that fly around by themselves and collect pollen. Then when I was in my PhD, I actually use insect models to study lifespan, how long organisms can live. And in terms of fun facts, sometimes I ask people, you know, how long do you think a fruit fly can live for or a mosquito can live for? And they'll say, I don't know, you know, three days, five days, something like that. That's what I would say. I would say that, yeah, I would say that same thing. Yeah, they can live a lot longer than that. I've kept an individual fruit fly alive--in lab conditions, of course, but still-- for hundreds of days before. And mosquitoes similarly can live for, like, you know, 60 to 100 days. So I always find that to be an interesting fact. Such a seemingly small, insignificant organism can. Can live that long. You bet I'm going to share that fun fact. The next conversation I have about insects with other people are mosquitoes. I love that. All right, so, okay, so you started, you studied, you know, science, biology, undergraduate, graduate school, and now you're in this other kind of place in your scholarly life and your work life. So what was that transition like? How did you move from that focus on science and STEM to helping faculty, staff, and students better understand neurodiversity? Sure. Okay. So sometimes I tell people about this journey and they say, how on earth did this happen? It doesn't make sense to them. But I do think there is a coherent story. So I'll try to tell it very briefly, which is that during my PhD program, I became involved with the center for Teaching and Learning. This was at UC Davis. I actually think this is a funny story. I was asked to show up at the TA orientation training, literally the first day of graduate school. There was all these workshops about how to plan lessons and how to assess your students and how to make effective presentations. I was like, this is great. I really enjoyed today. I remember they said at the end, the people who are running this work at the center for Teaching and Learning, and if you get good enough at teaching, you could apply to have this job too. I've kind of filed that away. And I was like, maybe that would be interesting. So eventually I did. When I was doing my research, I was also working at the center for Teaching and Learning and I was running all the graduate student programming. So I helped the other graduate students by doing teaching consultations and workshops and things like that. I was really trained to be a faculty developer in this really unique program. It's called the TA Consultants Program. A lot's been written about it. There's a lot of articles published about this program at UC Davis. And a really high percentage of people who went through it became faculty developers professionally afterwards for a lot of reasons which we might talk a bit more about. With respect to neurodiversity, I was pretty sure I wasn't going to go the research faculty and route. After grad school, I went into a job mentoring STEM grad students and postdocs on stuff that is related to teaching. That was at UW Madison. And I was working for the CIRTL Network program, which is an NSF funded program to support the development of future faculty in stem. Around that time, I really had this big question mark in my head which was how can I bring some of my experiences as a former neurodivergent student and a current neurodivergent instructor and staff member into my work with instructors? It was something that I had been thinking about totally on the side and on my own. I had been taking these classes in disability studies and trying to grow my knowledge in that area, mostly out of personal interest. This was around the time of the pandemic. I had another job at the University of Michigan doing similar work supporting faculty with teaching and learning. I think there was just one day where I saw somebody using terminology related to neurodiversity in a way that surprised and bothered me, which was it was really disconnected from all of the. All of the study studying that I had done about neurodiversity and its history and the disability community. And I was thinking to myself, wow, this seems like a topic that is really of interest to instructors. A lot of people are being asked by administrators or other people to gain knowledge about neurodiversity, but I don't think people have access to the best available information. Information. So I decided to start putting together some materials that are about neurodiversity but aim specifically at college faculty. And this I kind of viewed as the marriage of two of my skill sets and interests. One, I have a lot of experience speaking to faculty and kind of packaging things in a way that I think I hope will be useful for them. But I also have been teaching about disability history and disability studies for a pretty long time now. And I thought that there could be a way to bring this information to faculty. So that's kind of how I got into the work that I'm doing now. So, one thing, maybe we could sort of do some ground clearing here in terms of, like, the terms, so neurodiversity. And then, of course, we have, you know, other terms, neurodivergence. So can you give us a couple of quick little definitions here in terms like, what are the key terms to know before we get into, like, the rest of the conversation? Yeah, sure. Okay. So can start with neurodiversity. That's a noun. It's a thing. And it describes the general diversity of human cognition. It's just a fact about the human population. Much as people vary in height, that's a form of diversity. People's cognition and also communication behavior does vary. But this concept was not born out of a totally neutral conversation, even though it could be described as a neutral fact. It came out of the adult autistic community, which formed online in the 1990s, mostly through listservs. When I talk to people, I often say, if today you think listservs are just the worst thing ever, and you delete them as quickly as possible. In the 1990s, that was pretty much the only way you could communicate with a big group of people over the Internet. So it was if they've gotten out of hand or if they've gotten annoying, they at one point had a very important purpose for connecting people. I personally like listservs. But anyway, so these listservs sprung up. One was called the independent living listserv, and there are a couple of others where adult autistic people were having conversations about whether there was an alternative to a purely deficit based understanding of autism. Is there a way that both the strengths and. And challenges that autistic people experience could be described? And neurodiversity, the idea that there's naturally occurring neurological diversity among people, came out of those communities. Neurodiversity today is a concept that has grown out of this somewhat narrow context of adult autistic people advocating for themselves to A much wider concept that discusses the full range of cognitive differences among humans. In terms of the other terms you mentioned, neurodivergent is also a neologism, a newer term that came out of this conversation. It refers to people whose cognitive style is different or not in alignment with the norms of society. We could say that that's contextually dependent in colloquial usage. Neurodivergent often refers to people who have a certain medical diagnosis, such as autism, adhd, learning disabilities, sometimes mental health conditions. But it could also refer to somebody who does not have a specific diagnosis, but whose cognitive style does not align with societal norms. It's an alternative to medical diagnostic language. It's more of a sociological term than a medical term. Then you also have the term neurotypical, which can refer to somebody whose cognitive style overall does align with the norms of a situation. I talk about this in my writing sometimes, but one of the origins of the term neurotypical was kind of a satire of autism researchers. It was a fake diagnosis that autistic advocates gave to show how dehumanizing it is to have your diagnosis with be read in such a negative light. So they would say neurotypical people can't be cured of their disease. They have all of these traits, like being obsessed with social norms and obsession with conformity. Unfortunately, over 9,000 out of every 10,000 people are neurotypical today. Sort of this crisis narrative. The origins were in satire, but today I think it's used. It's kind of also used as an alternative to the term normal, which makes neurodivergent people seem like they're not normal. It's a way to just describe somebody whose cognitive style does align with the norms of a situation. Those are the three basic terms I think are useful to know. Neurodiversity, neurodivergent, and neurotypical. Sometimes people ask, well, how do I use these in a sentence? I think it's useful to always remember that neurodiversity refers to the general fact of variation. You could say we value the neurodiversity of our student body, or something like that. One more term that sometimes you'll hear is neurodiverse. This is used in two different ways. I have a preference on how to use it. Sometimes you'll hear people use neurodiverse as a synonym of neurodivergence, a way to say that somebody has one of these diagnoses or their cognitive style doesn't align with norms. I prefer the term neurodivergent for that. It seems to be more firmly rooted in the history of this conversation. But neurodiverse is also a really good term to refer to a mixed group of people, neurodivergent and neurotypical people. So of any class or classroom in higher education, you could probably call it neurodiverse in that it contains neurodivergent and neurotypical people. Neurodiversity and neurodiverse refers to the population, whether it's the whole population or a population in a classroom. And then we might contrast between neurotypical and neurodivergent people in that room. And the neurotypical is not just normal. It's essentially people that are aligned with expectations for normally happens in that environment. Traditionally, for example, like higher education, we learn these ways and a neurotypical person fits into those ways. A neurodivergent person may has some way they dev, you know, learn differently from that traditional way. It's not necessarily bad or wrong, it's just the way it is. Right. So like, you know, neurotypical versus neurodivergent is there's two different styles in the room and we don't. We have to prioritize or, you know, say one is better than the other. Yeah, that's a pretty good summary. The only thing I would say is that it's sometimes useful to remember that the idea of neurodiversity or neurodivergence, in this case, it's actually not derived from learning. A lot of people will make this mistake by saying, well, what neurodivergent means is that someone learns differently. Sometimes that is the case. For example, if someone has a learning disability, some of the diagnostic criteria might refer to specific things about their learning. But two of the biggest categories that we have in higher education, autism and adhd, none of the diagnostic criteria refer to learning specifically. Now, of course, if somebody has significant differences in their communication or executive functioning, that's sure to affect learning in some way. But I have found it interesting to think about how these categories emerged, not specifically. Specifically in relation to learning, and then to think about, okay, how do we actually apply that to the learning context? Yeah, that's great. So, you know, you bring a lot of passion to this work. And I, you know, I've heard you speak, I read a lot of your writing. You bring a lot of passion to this work. And you know, I'm going to sort of locate that in two different places. First of all, you make the point that this the sort of the movement to recognize neurodiversity as akin to other social justice movements. But also, I know you have personal experiences as well, like in some contexts, and maybe you've felt like you needed more support for yourself as a neurodivergent learner. So can you tell me about both those things and help essentially situate your passion and why this is so important to you? Sure. Okay, so just to touch on the first thing that you said, neurodiversity as a social justice movement, that I think the reason that I'm so interested in that aspect of the history is because sometimes we see neurodiversity or the support of neurodivergent students framed as a sort of problem to fix in higher education. So what actions can we take to make neurodivergent students less disruptive or to find teaching methods that, I mean, it's good to find teaching methods that help people, but find teaching methods that kind of eliminate the friction of neurodivergent students presence and different things like that. Really, I think that neurodiversity emerged out of the desire for autistic people to not always be in this cure narrative. Prior to the emergence of the neurodiversity movement, there was a lot of focus on therapies or medical treatments that could make autistic people not autistic, to remove their qualities or traits entirely. And so that was always a really big part of the neurodiversity movement is for acceptance rather than cure. And I think that that's something that I really try to infuse into my work in higher education. It's not that anybody who is like 10, teaching an English class or something has the intention of curing anybody of anything. But the underlying idea, which is, can you be normal? Can you lessen some of your traits? Can you mask some of your traits? Can you cope in a way that doesn't ever force me to confront your difference is something that I think we sometimes will see in higher education. A lot of the focus for me has been on trying to help people understand more about the experiences of neurodivergent students, how some of their life experiences might affect them in the classroom. Rather than jumping straight to the direct strategies to support neurodivergent students with learning. I'll just give a really quick example before I get into some of my own experiences. I think that a lot of people wonder, okay, how can I support a neurodivergent student without thinking a lot about where their life experience might be different than a neurotypical student? This is a story that I heard from an instructor who's a computer science professor, and they had a student who was autistic and they were going through a community college software engineering program. And the intention of the program was to. To go straight into industry so you'd get your software engineering degree and go work in corporation or some other workplace. This professor was talking to one of her students who is autistic and who was really successful in the program, got really good grades, and she was thinking, I'm sure that he's going to be able to get a great job, and was asking him, hey, have you been applying for jobs? And he said, nope, I have a job already. I don't need a new job. And. And when she asked, well, what is that job? He said, I've been working at McDonald's. And she was like, okay, well, why don't you want to apply for a software engineering job? I think that you'd be successful. And so he kind of said, well, I experienced a lot of social isolation and rejection by my peers, really throughout all of my education, middle school and high school, and at my current job at McDonald's, I have friends for the first time. And that's been really important to me. And I don't find it very appealing to try to go into a brand new workplace where I might be rejected again. He kind of explained why his life experience was leading him to certain decisions, which was that he really appreciated the stability of his friend group at his job. So this instructor was explaining this to me and saying, you know, there's something going on here for this student that I just didn't understand that he might be lining up some of his life decisions in a way that's different than what I imagined. I always imagined that students would go through the experience of finding a friend group and kind of establishing their identity much earlier, and that when they finished this college program, they'd go into the job that the college program prepared them for. So I think that's just a little bit of a story that, yeah, there are differences in the way that people learn or process information or communicate, but it can also have much larger effects on what's going on in their life and some of the decisions that they make. That's a really powerful. That's a really powerful story. I mean, yeah, that's. Yeah. Thank you. And I think it's a good story. Also, I try to discuss it with instructors because I don't think the end of that story for the professor should just be, okay, keep working at McDonald's forever. I hope you never use your software engineering degree. No, I don't think that would be a great decision. But it's just about the empathy and understanding what the issues in this person's life are and how maybe the transition to a workplace, even if you have excellent qualifications and skills, looks different for some neurodivergent people than it does for some neurotypical people. So let me just pause here on the story for just one more second here. Yeah, I mean, is the professor's role there to say, listen, there are other pathways and I can help you. We can help you if you want to take them. I mean, so what do you think is the professor's role there? Yeah, I think it's a good question. Obviously the professor, I think this professor had an advising role also for the student. And I don't think they're ever going to be able to convince or force them in any way. But I guess if I were in that person's situation, I would probably start with, first of all, thanks for sharing. And that is a really big thing. Having a friend group feeling secure and accepted in your workplace or any other setting is a really important thing and a human need. I might talk to the student about how do you ideally see yourself applying the education that you've received? From my perspective, you did a great job in the program. You met all of our learning goals. I could see a lot of ways in which you would be successful. I might also talk to the student about what some of their fears and concerns are about the different workplaces. There are a lot of different workplaces where you can be a software engineer. Maybe for this student, a corporate office is not going to be the best one, but the software engineering industry is pretty famous for flexible work arrangements, remote work arrangements, and it's also kind of famous for its interest in hiring neurodivergent people, especially at this point. So I might try to educate myself more about the different opportunities and help the student kind of approach it with. There probably is an environment, if I look around where I will be. Be successful, that maybe it won't be frictionless or without challenge, but that to help them see what some paths might be that might not pose the same barriers that they're imagining. And I think that understanding this story actually is. It shows us why it's so important for faculty to understand and be willing to learn more about the students in our classes. Like, it's a real imperative to say, okay, if you have this, you might have this student, and you don't realize what's going to happen and how they're experiencing your class in a different way, then you might expect people to experience it. And so it's really. Yeah, it really should drive us to faculty members to understand what's going on in the seats, I think. And we sometimes lose track of that. So now you have some experiences for yourself that you might be able to share as well. At least one that could help us, again, get another view of what's going on. Yeah. So I guess I would say without going into my whole personal history with different diagnoses and diagnostic journeys, one thing that has animated a lot of my work with faculty is this question of clear communication and transparency. One of the earliest things that I understood about myself as a learner, and I guess I should mention that I don't think I have yet while we've been talking, that I am personally autistic, and I also have gone through a formal diagnostic process for that. But one of the first things I understood about myself as a learner is that I do not interpret other people's instructions the way that they intend them a good deal of the time. I remember when I was in high school taking the sat, I didn't do so well at first, and then it only finally clicked for me. This is the way I phrased it at the time. I have to give the answer they want, not the answer that I want to give, which I think was an early. A manifestation of me trying. Trying to describe other people, like, mean something different than I do when we're looking at the same set of instructions or same text or something like that. And I think this presented a lot of issues during my educational career. And I guess one, maybe one example of that might be that I had a lot of difficulty taking in my professor's instructions and producing something that actually met their expectations. So I would regularly fully read a set of instructions, try to follow them to the best of my ability, and just get a 40% or something. This happened a lot in science lab classes. And in a highly punitive grading situation, this can actually have disastrous effects. Because if you get a couple of bad grades with no ability for reattempts or something like that, you can end up getting a very bad grade. This was one of the first things that I noticed about myself as a learner, which is that I needed many different attempts on something in order to come to a consensus or actually match what the instructor was looking for. I've always wondered about how this experience interacts with the general good teaching advice to make your instructions really explicit, make your expectations really clear to students. Because I think that that's a great thing to strive for. And my experience, both personal and as a teacher with neurodiversity, also tells me that that's a lot harder than you might think it is if people's perception of information is much different than yours. I think about this a lot also as a neurodivergent instructor, when I will sit down to make instructions for an assignment or a class activity. So I'll write out exactly what I think the students should be doing, and then immediately I get dozens sometimes of questions of, what did you mean by that? And how exactly do you want me to do that part of the assignment? I think noticing the ways in which you communicate and perceive information differently, it can be very humbling, both as a student and an instructor. You know, that's one of the things that I've tried to talk a lot about, which is to not get discouraged when communication does not proceed completely smoothly in the classroom, both if you're the student or the instructor, and to just recognize that it may take some time to fully understand expectations. I'm not saying that the idea of making expectations explicit is not a good idea. I think it's a great idea, but it just may not happen as quickly as you think it will if you're considering neurodiversity. Yeah, I just. Just want to point out here that, you know, your work has been very strong in terms of like. And very vocal in saying, you know, we sort of get these teaching advice not only about, like, teaching in general, but also, like, teaching neurodivergent learners. And, And. And the, The. The. You know, it's like a playbook. Do this, this or that. That's going to solve this problem. You've really pointed out that actually, well, you might do this one thing for this one group, and this other group actually is then shut out by that technique. So you really, you know, you've analyzed a lot of these situations in your public writing, and I know you're also in your new. Your forthcoming book, which is going to be great, which is great. And we're looking forward to when that comes out next year. But, and I think what you're saying right now is a way to kind of think about that, right? We have to keep learning and nothing we do is going to be, like, perfect in terms of, like, helping, like a neurodiverse population. And so you don't just. You want to add anything to that. Yeah, sure. So sometimes I give a term to the kind of phenomenon that you're talking about as access friction. I think that might be a little bit of a more narrow term than the general phenomenon you're talking about. So I'll explain what that is and then how I extend that concept a little bit. I actually first heard this term access friction, from Arley McNeney who was a Canadian teacher who was very involved in the online social media teaching, learning conversation. And she was also a former Paralympian basketball player, and she sadly passed away a couple of years ago. So I always just like to kind of give honor to her memory whenever I talk about access friction. So it's a term that describes when access needs come into conflict. And it has been a little bit more of a niche term mostly used in disability communities, and I've tried to bring it more into the teaching, learning conversation. So sometimes I call this acute access friction when you have a direct conflict of two different needs. So, for example, say you're in a lecture hall which is wired for sound amplification, which is great because maybe some of your students have disabilities related to hearing, and they're going to be relying on the sound amplification to understand what's going on. But also you've got a few learners in the room, such as myself, who are very sensitive to sound. This is somewhat common to autistic people and some other neurodivergent people. When my spouse and I watch TV together, it's pretty much just me lowering the volume and him raising the volume for an hour. We don't actually get a lot of the same information because we're very focused on that. As I think about, maybe we should just wear two different headsets or something like that. But anyway, so I would call that maybe acute access friction. Even if you might say that being in a space that has loud sound is not as much of an access issue as not being able to hear at all, which would be the case for, like, a hard of hearing person. I've been in a lot of situations in which I just avoid that space if it's too overwhelming for me. So I'm. If I was back in my undergraduate days, I hate to admit it, but I might avoid going to that class. You know, I might not be that excited about showing up. Up and attending, I might retreat or like sit away from my classmates or like be really distracted and unable to participate. So maybe it's a slightly different access issue than not being able to hear at all, but you could see how it would rise to that level. So these kinds of things, they often get overlooked because we have the generally pretty good impulse to say accessibility is really important and it benefits everybody. I don't know if you've heard something like that, accessibility benefits everybody. But here's a situation where you can see there's a very legitimate need for people who can't hear as well to be able to hear. But in a lot of situations that could make it more difficult for somebody else to participate. I don't know if you ever go to a conference where people are kind of keep. Keep saying you have to use the mic for accessibility, it's really, really important to use the microphone. And to a certain extent, yeah, that is really, really true. But I can't think of reasons that somebody might not want a microphone to be used. So this is access friction, right? It makes it difficult for people who have these two different needs to be in the same space. If you think hard enough, if you get creative, you can figure out ways that this can work. You have to, as you were saying before when we talked about the computer science student, be curious and interested in students experiences. Maybe if you do know that a student has this kind of sound sensitivity, you can look at places in the room where the sound isn't coming out of the speakers. Another thing you might consider is I've met a fair number of neurodivergent students who have this sound sensitivity and they manage it pretty well by wearing some noise dampening headphones. That's a pretty simple action that students can take themselves, but it is unfamiliar, at least in American culture. Wearing headphones sometimes signals disengagement or that you aren't participating in some way. So this is another barrier to get over. Maybe it's true that everyone can be in the same room and participating with this prop of the headphones, but you have to reconsider your assumptions about what that means about the person's participation. So yeah, the other type of access friction, I consider it a little bit more of a moderate friction, is more about the frictions that arise from pedagogical or instructional design strategies. It might not be this very acute one access need versus another that I was talking about before, but it's like what if one person's access needs make it harder for some other person to learn? It creates not ideal learning conditions for them. So one example, it's actually something you and I had a little bit of a back and forth about on LinkedIn is that there are some people who have a disability that makes it really important for them to have access to the written materials that are going to be used ahead of the class. Especially if you have a disability that affects the processing of information in real time. To be able to look over the words and the flow ahead of time, to know what's coming and be able to participate. But as you mentioned, there's plenty of research that indicates that the strategic withholding and release of information as part of a learning activity can heighten interest and can benefit students by holding their attention during the learning process. So yeah, you can offer the materials ahead of time as an accommodation for some students. Some people who think about accessibility much more broadly would say, okay, why don't you offer that to everybody? Maybe everybody could benefit from getting the slides, so to speak, ahead of class. This is another example here where there might be a significant benefit to not looking at the slides ahead of class for the majority of people. This is something that would need to be navigated in many cases. You might have to have a conversation with students about something being available to them, but maybe something that they could choose not to use if they want to take advantage of this benefit of having information revealed to them as part of a learning process designed by the instructor. I don't know. Yeah, that's great. And you know, we're sort of come to the end of our time here, but you sometimes use that, you use the phrase non-utopian and essentially that's what we're seeing, we're talking about here. This is non--maybe it's not a perfect solution here, but the things that we've talked about, which I think are really important to emphasize here at the end, the first is, as an instructor, I need to keep learning and growing. I need to do everything I can to understand the students in the room, their different access needs, and just keep learning about them and hearing from them. And the second thing is just that, so help me, have the students help me find the solutions and they can draw from their prior experiences, they can tell me what helps them, what they've experienced in their classes, and so all that kind of things. So I have to commit as an instructor to keep learning and I have to keep learning also from the students themselves. So that seems to me a way to kind of address these sort of access friction situations or non-utopian perspectives on teaching and learning. So thank you so much for these great thoughts. All your sharing, it's been fantastic. Thank you so much for this conversation, Sarah. Thank you so much, Jim. I really enjoyed it. Designed for Learning is a production of Notre Dame Learning at the University of Notre Dame.For more, visit our website at learning. nd. edu.