The Harvard Education Press Podcast
Sep 17, 2026 · 51 min · 11 segments
An invitation to K-12 educators to reimagine their roles through the transformative lens of design In Educators as Designers, Jim Gaona Ellis draws on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the…
Jim Gaona EllisGuestCaleb ZakarinHostThe backbone of this book, and it's very much an introduction, though it's quite detailed, is to universal design for learning or UDL, which is a framework for educators.
So can you talk a little about the origins of universal design for learning and just give a broad kind of maybe overview definition before we jump into the specifics around it?
I see the originalists who were taking this idea of adaptive technology in education.
That led into a very codifying moment in 1990 where the idea of universal access in our public spaces became federal law and the idea of design universally became more recognized and well known.
And the folks who were doing this that eventually became cast.org, they saw this moment and how this defined their work really well and summed it up incredibly well.
And so we had this moment where we stopped saying the bell curve is education.
Instead, we're going to say, how many people can we provide access to? Following that, there's been a lot of different routes in which development has taken place in UDL.
Different authors, different researchers, different books, different thinkers have led it into new spaces.
And that spaces have gotten a little bit further and further and further away from the main framework.
And the framework is in its third iteration, largely defined by the last quarter century.
And as people have moved outside of that space, we've been asking ourselves, how inclusive can we be with students of color in different books? And other people have been focusing on brain developments and retraining the brain in other books.
And so the world of UDL has stayed centered on the concept of providing access to learners, but it has explored new topics.
And I'm in a third wave that's trying to reimagine it, really leave the framework behind as a base and taking that base in order to push forward into what else might be explored through UDL.
And that's where I... kind of took a page from its history and went back to design and architecture in order to try to push forward into something totally new.
Lots of pedagogical books and frameworks can seem to almost offer like a magic bullet solution, like this is how to teach something perfectly.
You're giving people tools and frameworks to think about um, education, uh, without actually giving, giving this sort of a magic bullet.
Why do you think, uh, you know, or how do you navigate that, that, that, that kind of issue with some, some books on pedagogy that seem to, you know, claim to have the, all the answers when we know it's really hard to actually design a great classroom experience?
The backbone of this book, and it's very much an introduction, though it's quite detailed, is to universal design for learning or UDL, which is a framework for educators.
So can you talk a little about the origins of universal design for learning and just give a broad kind of maybe overview definition before we jump into the specifics around it?
I see the originalists who were taking this idea of adaptive technology in education.
That led into a very codifying moment in 1990 where the idea of universal access in our public spaces became federal law and the idea of design universally became more recognized and well known.
And the folks who were doing this that eventually became cast.org, they saw this moment and how this defined their work really well and summed it up incredibly well.
And so we had this moment where we stopped saying the bell curve is education.
Instead, we're going to say, how many people can we provide access to? Following that, there's been a lot of different routes in which development has taken place in UDL.
Different authors, different researchers, different books, different thinkers have led it into new spaces.
And that spaces have gotten a little bit further and further and further away from the main framework.
And the framework is in its third iteration, largely defined by the last quarter century.
And as people have moved outside of that space, we've been asking ourselves, how inclusive can we be with students of color in different books? And other people have been focusing on brain developments and retraining the brain in other books.
And so the world of UDL has stayed centered on the concept of providing access to learners, but it has explored new topics.
And I'm in a third wave that's trying to reimagine it, really leave the framework behind as a base and taking that base in order to push forward into what else might be explored through UDL.
And that's where I... kind of took a page from its history and went back to design and architecture in order to try to push forward into something totally new.
Lots of pedagogical books and frameworks can seem to almost offer like a magic bullet solution, like this is how to teach something perfectly.
You're giving people tools and frameworks to think about um, education, uh, without actually giving, giving this sort of a magic bullet.
Why do you think, uh, you know, or how do you navigate that, that, that, that kind of issue with some, some books on pedagogy that seem to, you know, claim to have the, all the answers when we know it's really hard to actually design a great classroom experience?
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