Knowing and meeting the needs of diverse learners
Contextual Background:
As a Fashion Contour lecturer, I deal with student groups of about twenty young adults per class. Often the students present a variety of learning difficulties linked to neurodiversity. Some of my classes involve practical drawing exercises, that student have to follow and replicate in order to learn technical drawing skills.
Evaluation
Following the advice from the disability team, we create detailed step by step guides for the students to follow, with readable fonts, illustrations and full instructions. It is however complex to consider each possible obstacle for the comprehension of the instructions without overloading the teaching with too much information.
During the live class I ensure to explain the reasons behind each step, as I know from personal experience that it is easier to remember or recreate a particular step if the reason for it is logical.
The biggest obstacle to teaching in these cases is engagement, as the difficulty or lack of clarity, quickly causes the student to lose interest of confidence.
Moving forwards
As I come to terms with my own neurodiversity (Dyslexia and ADHD) I have learned to appreciate the power of visual communication. Workshop instructions can be made engaging and reassuring by addressing the visual aspect of the handout.
The use of colours, consistently through the handout, will help identify the elements on the page (illustration, instructions, additional notes, reminders or explanations). A consistent style of pagination will also help create a familiarity that can help student feel more comfortable with following the instructions. Not only the instructions will be clearer, but also less energy will be utilised to interpret the page and more energy can be focused on understanding the task.
The use of animated images can also be helpful to explain how shapes change, and can impress the process in the student mind. Students often ask for videos, which are an option for this type of communication, and is already available for some workshops.
This chart is animated in the handout PDF, as can be seen by downloading the file below.
Lastly but not least, the solutions I have envisaged are mostly based on secondary research and personal experience. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the improvements and any need for any other measures, I shall ask for feedback from the students during class and via a voting/feedback form associated with the Moodle resource. Making this as quick, fun and appealing as possible with an interactive form.
One concern about introducing these measures is that some of the learning comes from reasoning and understanding the instructions. There is a risk that too much explanation will hinder the learning process, and transform the exercise into a copying task.
Resources
UCL (2024) Supporting neurodiversity in education. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/publications/2023/oct/supporting-neurodiversity-education#Creating%20Neurodiversity-Friendly%20environments%C2%A0
Images
Fig. 1 – Ghigi, C. (2023) ‘Introduction to grading theory’ FU001745: Fashion Contour Future Technologies. University of the Arts London. Unpublished.