Art for All: Liz Byron Loya on Universal Design for Learning (Ep. 486)

In this episode of Art Ed Radio, Tim sits down with Liz Byron-Loya—art teacher, author, and advocate for Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—to explore how UDL transforms the visual arts classroom. Together, they break down the core principles of UDL, strategies for removing barriers to learning, and ways to better engage every student.

Liz also shares insights from the newly released second edition of her book Art for All, featuring updates on culturally sustaining pedagogy and the role of AI in education. Listen as the discussion touches on the nature of teaching, the power of student feedback, and why sustainable, inclusive practices are essential for education.

Full episode transcript below.

Resources and Links

• • Join the Art of Ed Community
  • Listen to Liz’s previous Art Ed Radio appearance
  • Find Liz’s book on Amazon and the CAST website
  • Check out LudiA, the AI-powered chatbot for UDL

Transcript

Tim:

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. The show is produced by the Art of Education and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

Welcome to the show. I am very excited today. I will be able to talk to Liz Byron-Loya. Liz is an art teacher and an author, and she has recently released the brand new second edition of her book called Art for All: Planning for Variability in the Visual Arts Classroom with Universal Design for Learning.

And I love how approachable Liz makes universal design for learning or sometimes we’ll shorten it to UDL. So if you hear her or I talk about UDL today, we’re talking about universal design for learning and at its core UDL is about designing instruction that kind of removes barriers before they become problems. It’s a proactive approach to planning and teaching, and it offers students multiple ways to engage, multiple ways to learn, and multiple ways to show what they know. And obviously, Liz can talk about it a lot better than I can, but I will let her do that in just a bit.

I’m excited to talk to her because she has all sorts of great concrete strategies, and she also talks about a lot of the bigger picture things about how we can build space for student voice and how we can reflect on our own teaching and reflect on maybe some of the barriers that we are putting up as educators and just think a little bit more deeply about how we approach things and how we can do what’s best for our students. So we’ll talk about all of those things.

We’ll talk about what UDL looks like in practice, how it connects with our students and our classroom, and even touch on how new tools like AI can be used thoughtfully, I suppose, without taking away from student creativity. So I think there’s a lot to get into today. I’m really excited to have Liz on. So she’s ready to go. Let’s go ahead and start the conversation.

Okay, Liz Byron-Loya is joining me now. Liz, welcome back to the show. How are you?

Liz:

Great, thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. I’m a little tired after a day of teaching, but I’m psyched.

Tim:

Fair, fair. I’m guessing that everybody who’s listening to this is tired from their day of teaching yesterday or today as well. So that’s fair. I guess I would love to start with just an introduction. Now you’ve been on the podcast before, but I think this might be a record for a length of time between podcast appearances. Like it was what six years ago, seven years ago when you were on. But I’m very excited to have you back. But can you tell everybody about who you are, like what you do and the work that you’re doing.

Liz:

Yeah, so my name is Liz Byron-Loya. I am a Boston public school teacher and a visual art teacher. I’ve been in Boston public schools for 16 years, teaching visual art specifically for about nine. And prior to that, I taught special education, ESL. I was a push-in teacher, an inclusion specialist, and a middle school math teacher, of all things.

Since being in education and being now in my dream job of teaching visual art, I have gotten ⁓ deeply involved in universal design for learning. ⁓ Over the last 15 years or so, I began to learn about it and actually implement it in my classroom. And I saw truly incredible results in what students were able to do versus not using, not implementing instruction with UDL.

However, when I first learned about UDL, I thought this was super important because people hear about universal design for learning or UDL, and they can feel overwhelmed. It seems like another thing. I was one of those people. I really pushed back on it. I took a class in graduate school and then I ignored it. I ignored everything I learned. It felt like too much. I had a lot of misconceptions, which eventually my evaluator said, You’ve got to take a class on UDL. And I said, I already did. I’m not doing that. And she said, no, you really should.

Tim:

Yeah.

Liz:

because I was teaching special education and DSL, and to make things accessible. I did take a class again, a different one. Wow, that time around it all clicked. I could implement it in my classroom, and I got a lot of my misconceptions cleared up. So I was the biggest naysayer and then became and now a huge advocate. I’ve written a book, Art for All, Planning for Variability in the Visual Arts and the second edition was just released. And that’s why I was on the podcast the first time. Yeah, yeah. about the book.

I’ve written about how I use universal design for learning in my classroom, and I’m a huge advocate for it, but I also lead a lot of professional development for teachers on it, for districts and individual schools. I’ve taught graduate courses on it and I just feel really fortunate to be able to share what I’ve learned as an, as being an educator in the classroom who’s also writing about this and presenting on it.

Tim:

Yeah, that’s awesome. Can we dive into UDL a little bit? Because ⁓ I would say, you know, a lot of teachers know what it is, but a lot of teachers still don’t know what it is as well. Like for me personally, the first time I read your book was my introduction to Universal Design for Learning. So I would love for you to just kind of explain to everybody, like give us an overview of Universal Design for Learning, kind of what it encompasses in the beginning, how it’s kind of evolved.

over the past years, and like just an idea of what it looks like, how it can affect people’s classrooms.

Liz:

I’ll give you a very brief history and then I’ll talk about like what it could look like and what it is today. It started in 1984 ⁓ with a group of educators and neuroscientists, actually, who were looking at architecture. And it came out of universal design from architecture, where architects were already building ramps that everyone could use. They benefit everyone, but they were built for a specific population, but it benefits all. And the same with curb cuts, sidewalks, and elevators. There’s all these aspects of

a building that we use that are actually helpful for everyone, but were designed for one particular group. So the educators ⁓ realized, you know, we can apply that to education, but in the 1980s, 90s, and even early 2000s, it was heavily focused on technology and how specialized technology can help reduce and remove barriers to learning for students, especially in reading and writing. This was when text-to-speech and speech-to-text were very novel. ⁓

The Center for Applied Specialized Technology was formed in 1984. That stands for CAST. Now the organization just goes by CAST because it’s not just about technology. In fact, a large component of UDL is around how do we design instruction, forget technology, like how do we reduce and remove learning barriers in the classroom by designing instruction that provides students with multiple options for engagement, the why of learning.

multiple options for the what of learning. So what the teacher’s teaching, the representation and multiple options for action and expression or how students show what they know. And that’s, those are the three principles of UDL. Engagement, representation, action and expression. And those principles are grounded in neuroscience. So UDL has been around for a long time and it’s not going anywhere because it’s written into a lot of federal legislation. It has been around because it’s grounded in neuroscience and it has

data to back it up. It’s not a fad. But the thing is, it’s a framework. So it doesn’t come in a neat box. Educators starts with their clear, flexible, rigorous goal or their objective. And then we name the barriers that are going to come up. And teachers are so good at this. can name all the things that are going to go wrong.

Tim:

Yeah. Just think about like any lesson that you’re teaching, then you’re trying to get through to kids. Like, what are you struggling with?

Liz:

What’s gonna be hard for So the challenge with you, one of the important keys, keystones of UDLs, is that when educators think about barriers, the barrier is not that I have a student with ADHD, or I have a student who’s experienced trauma. Those are all things we’re not gonna be able to, those are within our students. We’re not changing who our students are, we’re designing the instruction to respond to them. And we’re only gonna focus on, and to make it sustainable, I say one to three big barriers.

Don’t try it. can’t reduce and remove all learning barriers in every lesson. And UDL is a snowball and we always continue to grow our snowball. So you got your objective, name barriers that are exterior to the student. So if I have a student with ADHD, I need to make sure my instruction has enough options for engagement so that they’re able to stay focused. Maybe they need options for progress monitoring or goal setting. Those are the things though, we’re not just going to offer to one student that we’re designing this for.

We offer these options to all students because what we do for a few actually is helpful for everyone. If it’s there as an option, doesn’t mean students take it, but it’s there. So yeah, it’s about designing instruction to reduce and remove learning barriers. And there’s the UDL guidelines, which once you name your barriers, you can use the guidelines, which is a one page document, a three by three grid of a very, ⁓

methodical way of thinking about those barriers and how to specifically reduce or remove barriers. Because as educators, we only know so much. So you can go to the guidelines and think through them. And the cast.org website has so much information on it. The guidelines are all hyperlinked with examples of them and ways to ⁓ implement them that you’re going to find new ideas for sure on how to reduce or remove a given barrier.

Tim:

Okay, makes sense, makes sense. I like that. And I guess I there’s a lot in that answer. But I wanted to dive into just some of the stuff that you shared in your book. So I’ve been able to read the second edition. I love it, by the way, just so much good information in there. And I especially like you, you mentioned, you know, the three different components. And I really love the part where you talk about, you know, ways for kids to show what they know. And like you said, it’s not in a box. Like, there are so many different ways to do that, but you still have so many suggestions. And I love how it’s adaptable, and you know, like teachers can make it fit their classroom. I think that works really, really well. So I love that part of it.

Liz:

Something that you can apply to any grade level, any subject. mean, higher education institutions use it. Whenever I lead a PD, I design my professional development for the adults in the room with UDL.

Tim:

That’s perfect. Now that makes a lot of sense too. But the new version of the book, the updated version, the second edition, it includes all sorts of new topics that you didn’t have last time, culturally sustaining pedagogy and AI and social and emotional learning. And so I guess what I’m curious about is how did you decide what new topics and themes to include?

Once you add those topics, how do you feel like those add to the conversation around UDL?

Liz:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So right after my first book was published in October of 2018, I realized it was like, how did I not include culturally responsive teaching? I didn’t even think that that word made it into the book. was like, can’t believe this because it was something that I had been practicing and thinking about. I hadn’t directly connected it to UDL. And now the term is often culturally sustaining pedagogy. And I won’t get into the nuances of that. But realizing very quickly. ⁓

If I ever write another edition, I will have a massive part of this. AI has emerged as an incredible tool that’s not going anywhere, and is only changing the face of education. They were really the core of what I wanted to focus on, and in addition in the new…

In addition, I wanted to include ⁓ more examples of what your day could look like in your arts classroom because I know teachers love examples. The tricky thing with examples is sometimes the options I provide for engagement representation or action and expression in my room could actually create a barrier in another room, ⁓ depending on the learner variability. But I wanted to provide more examples, more vignettes. So the other reason I included those three specifically was the guidelines.

got updated in July of 2024. CAST doesn’t refresh the guidelines often or, you know, flippantly. They spent many years in focus groups and doing research on how can we take what we have and improve it? Because there were a lot of things in the old guidelines that the first edition focused on that were implicit but never explicitly stated. And what I mean is the new guidelines have an emphasis on

how we have to be more culturally responsive to our students. And there’s an emphasis on social-emotional learning and interdependence and a move away from expert learning. So these updates to the guidelines also got infused into the new edition.

And if you’re listening and you’re like, my gosh, the guidelines change. This seems like a lot. The new, I’m you, the new guidelines are brilliant. They’re, they’re a shift. It’s not a giant step, but they’re taking what used to be implicit and making it explicit.

Tim:

Okay, okay. No, that’s a very clear explanation. So I appreciate that. Can I ask you about AI also, just because I feel like generative AI is becoming just a huge part of the discussion with education, art education in particular. And I would love to get your perspective on that. I guess lots of questions at once here. know, like, how can our teachers use AI tools to design

content that’s UDL aligned? ⁓ Should we be using AI tools? I guess like, how do we balance using artificial intelligence as a design tool, but also, you know, still be able to maintain something very important to our teachers, which is student voice and creative agency? Like, how do we find that balance with all of those?

Liz:

Yeah, and you we really don’t want the teacher to lose their voice if AI is being used all the time I think there’s two big buckets I put these AI conversations in is one is how does the teacher use it as you noted and then two is how when where do you know the students use it right? When it comes to the teacher use, I have a lot of that in I have a section in my book on this, and I’d like to compare using generative AI for lesson planning

or for unit planning as having a conversation with a thought partner. you can’t just take, we never ask a question to our colleague and they just walk away. ask an older question. So when you’re asking for support from generative AI and I use it, I will say none of my book was written with AI at all.

Tim:

Fair. No, that’s an important caveat.

Liz:

Yeah, I noted in 2018 actually used Grammarly and I acknowledge them in the acknowledgement section and I only use Grammarly to this day. So don’t I don’t want to be like, well, she just wrote this book. You could write a whole book using it. I’m sure there’s all these publishing contracts, but also I didn’t. Yeah. However, when it comes to lesson planning, I’m very open about asking AI Can you provide me with a list? I just did this. Prime me with a list of culturally responsive artists for students who are primarily from this background, representing the students in my classroom who use symbols in their art that represent their personal identity. Whoa, super specific. When I used it, you just Google that, you get a ton of blogs, you get a lot of information, you have to sift through. AI generated a list of like 10 artists, some of whom I didn’t know. Then I go and research those artists, some of whom I’m like, I don’t want to use that one because their art is not going to captivate my students and or it’s not necessarily developmentally appropriate. So you have to still engage with AI.

I compare AI to riding an electric bike. Have you ever ridden an electric bike?

Tim:

I have not. I want to, but I have not.

Liz:

I’ve only done it once and I’m in Boston right now and they’re everywhere. ⁓ And if you think, if you’ve ridden one, you know, you get on the bike, you still have to pedal, but there’s a motor. So you can use the motor to get you from point A to point B much more efficiently. And in fact, you can climb up hills you never would have been able to climb up with the electric bike, but you still can’t be passive.

You have to balance, have to pedal, you have to steer. So that’s what using an AI tool is like. AI is the pedal assist of thinking. It doesn’t replace the rider’s effort, but it extends it. It helps you climb your intellectual hills. The electric bike, can ⁓ climb those bigger physical hills. And there’s other components where we’re coming into a lot of ⁓ things with AI around.

usage and what’s appropriate and same with electric bikes. They’re going in the cities. It’s like, they in a should they be in a bike lane? Should they be on the road? There’s there’s a lot of comparisons. So when you’re thinking about I’m going to go use generative AI to help me plan one, it’s a conversation and you are the one in control and you’re asking the follow up questions, but it’s so much more efficient. And in fact, Todd, have you ever heard of Lutia L U D I A?

Tim:

Well, I know about it from reading your book.

Liz:

I actually wasn’t, I would, said, no, would have been, that’s fine. But you do know about it. Yes. So Ludi is a generative AI chat bot. Okay. And it is directly connected to the UDL guidelines created by UDL educators. So it’s very reliable. Of course, there’s always things that come up that aren’t I like necessarily perfect, but it’s continually getting better. So for the listeners, if you Google L U D I A

POE, you’re going to find the chat bot. have to briefly register and then the chat bot asks you to describe your class, describe the learning goal, describe the barriers. Sometimes I even write in like, my student hates my class. No, just to give it a challenge to like really engaging. ⁓ And then it will pull directly from the UDL guidelines and give you lots of ideas. Now here’s what happens. You get the ideas back for this lesson and you’re like,

As an art teacher, one, I’m like, I don’t have that material. I can’t do that. There’s a barrier for me. I don’t have those supplies. ⁓ there’s another thing I already am doing. Like, you should have take a break spaces to help students calm down. I do. But then eventually you’re going to get to content and ideas you either haven’t used in a long time or you’ve never used. Strategies and approaches to reducing and removing the barrier that you named and you gave to the chat bot. So you just ask the follow-up question.

I really thought this was helpful. Can you tell me more? And it is so powerful. I’ve shared it with a lot of teachers at professional developments and they come up and they’re like, wow, that was, it’s more efficient. You’re still in control. You’re still doing the peddling, but I can’t tell you how great it is. I’ve also used lots of other generative AI tools, just general chat, GPT, Gemini, perplexity, just to see what they’re different, you know, how they’re like Ludi because it’s connected to the guidelines.

does provide me with a conversation partner who knows a lot about UDL, whereas other chat bots are helpful, but not in the same way.

Tim:

Yeah, they don’t have that prior knowledge.

Liz:

Well, I think I don’t know how it works specifically. But, you know, when I ask a non-UD, you know, if I ask ChatGPT a question, they do pull from the Internet lots of information on UDL and try to create ideas and help you think through a lesson. But Ludia does it in a way that ⁓ it’s the only chatbot I know where you’re describing your class, the barrier goals and then letting it talk, you know, talk you through it.

Tim:

Yeah, no, that’s really cool. ⁓ Can I ask you about, I mean, one of the things, another one of the things that I like in the book is just sharing some lessons that have been successful for you. You have a lot of lessons, a lot of unit plans in there. ⁓ Could you share a favorite from the book, whether it was AI assisted or not, just something that you’ve put together, just a favorite lesson or a favorite unit that has been really successful or really impactful?

Liz:

Yeah, and I would say this one that I’m thinking of is hadn’t I didn’t use ⁓ AI at all. ⁓ It’s been iterative over the years. And it started with the fact that I have a barrier as a public school educator, I don’t have a lot of supplies. So I need I created a whole lengthy unit on 3d construction, where students use cardboard and hot glue. And so all I need is really I need hot glue, because I tons of receptors. And

Originally, this unit started with the goal of students will create the 3D work of art from cardboard and hot glue that’s abstract. And the key here is like, okay, I want them to use all these techniques to connect cardboard. That’s more effective, which more effective than of course, the middle schoolers just like putting down a ton of hot glue and hoping to be what they’re going to do. So the barrier is going to be they don’t know the techniques yet. So I need to make sure they have lots of representation for the techniques. So I created lots of ways for them to learn the techniques.

video demos, ⁓ I have a 3D cardboard poster where you can see the techniques. They have a rubric in the beginning of the unit showing each of the techniques that they need to demonstrate in their abstract art. And then they had a laminated sheet that had pictures of the actual techniques as well. So there’s lots of ways they can learn the what. And I did live demos. Every time we rolled out a new technique, I would demonstrate it. So that went…

the students really use the techniques really well. But what I realized was their art was not very abstract. Some kids build in great looking boats. But I’m like, ⁓ part of the goal was to be abstract and about half the class was being abstract and the other half was like, I had this great car, look at my car. You did such a good job connecting the cardboard. What’s the goal? I went back to the goal and what I realized was I layered in too many standards into one unit and I cover now abstraction differently ⁓ in a different unit. So the second time I taught it,

the goal became students will use because teaching is an iterative process, right? ⁓ reflect on it. What went well, I didn’t have a hundred percent of students attain the goal because I made the goal almost unattainable and I hadn’t fully ⁓ provided them with enough ideas for representation of abstract art. It was really on me and it was almost too much for me to do the cardboard techniques plus abstraction in a short amount of time. So

The next time we taught it, I taught, and I still do this today, this unit, create a 3D work of art using cardboard and hot glue. And it can be abstract, but I actually share with them a menu of choices of things that you could make out of hot glue, a hat, mask or crown, a small house, a room, an item of food. ⁓ And we look at different examples. have student examples in front of them. We critique those. And they also have the option of,

If you want to’s something else in here, just ask me. And of course you can, you can go for it. Kids make a good tar kids make, um, little things for their desk, uh, things for their jewelry to hang on. Like the sky’s the limit. Uh, but I give them that menu to ground some of them who aren’t immediately like, I have tons of ideas, and I still show all those techniques. And now it is an extremely successful unit because all of them are demonstrating a strong understanding of connecting cardboard in a variety of ways and also creating something that is more meaningful to them.

Tim:

No, that sounds really good. No, I like the idea of how that kind of evolves because we talk all the time on the podcast about reflective teaching and how you can improve. I think that’s ⁓

Liz:

And the engagements there now, when asking students to be abstract was especially for middle schoolers who are pretty concrete. They’re more engaged and doesn’t mean I don’t teach abstraction. I teach it in a separate unit. ⁓ And so there’s lots of options for engagement. There are many options for the content, and then the options for expression. It’s a menu of choices connected to the goal and it’s okay. That’s one students building a hat and one students building a house because they’re all demonstrating the technique. So there’s multiple paths to the goal.

If you think about like a GPS, I’m trying to get to school every morning. Some people are taking a bike. Some people are walking. Some people are driving. Some people take the bus. Some people take 20 minutes to get there. Some people take an hour. Some people take five. But we all get to school. So multiple paths to the same goal. The goal is to get to school. But we can all get there in different amounts of time in different ways.

Tim:

No, that makes a lot of sense also. I wanted to, I guess, just see also if there are any other ideas you wanted to highlight.

Liz:

I really thought a lot about since the first edition. ⁓ Teachers can be the biggest barrier in the room. we just think, you UDL ⁓ focuses on the barriers in the instruction and the curriculum. It’s not within our students. That’s what we can change as educators. And that’s what we can design with. But what I would after writing the book, I’m thinking, I designed this great UDLS in our unit. Why isn’t it going better? my gosh. Like this is driving me nuts.

I know this is UDL. And then I realized, oh my gosh, it’s me. I’m the barrier. It’s my relationships with the students. It’s my implicit biases. And implicit bias is hard because we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s implicit. And just having to unpack my own biases, my own assumptions around student learning, and then build better relationships with students so that all these lessons that I had planned went even much better than I anticipated. So I think being able to say, you know, it’s

If you’re really implementing with UDL and you’re really like, wait, why isn’t this still going? Well, sometimes it’s the barrier is us even with the best intentions. And this comes up. I write a lot about this in the book and how sometimes things we say in the classroom, we think like, like, okay, but then you realize and you had no mal intention. And then you realize, my gosh, that could totally come across the wrong way.

And it’s these little things that can build into something bigger in a negative way, or you can take it in a different direction. ⁓ I acknowledge, I invite my students to name biases that they see in me or in each other or in the curriculum so we can flush them out to talk about ⁓ stereotypes.

in that sense, students feel okay talking about these things because that culture has been built. I, since 2018, I would say I’m such a different teacher because I first think about how am I being a barrier.

so that I can better serve my students. I really, yeah.

Tim:

Yeah, I appreciate that perspective and I think that’s difficult for a lot of teachers. It takes a lot of self-awareness and a lot of self-reflection to think that way, and it can also be a little bit of a hit to your ego.

Liz:

It is. You have to drop your ego. mean, literally, I mean, when I think about my ego, was like, I did all this stuff on UDL. I know my lessons are good. Like this is published. And I’m not telling my students this, but in my head, I’m like, this should be going better. And why isn’t it like, yeah, it has to be something else. must be, it has to, it’s me. And it really truly like stopping and this was the other key. I think getting feedback directly from your students as often and as authentically as possible, at least on a daily basis.

And I share lots of ways to do that in the book. Anonymous comment box, a quick exit ticket, thumbs up, thumbs down. I have a stoplight exit ticket. I give them a survey every once in a while that’s connected to the guidelines. And I ask one-on-one, how’s it going? And genuinely want to know their feedback. And I tell them, you guys are my evaluator. I know our principal or my evaluator is going to come in the room maybe once a year. mean, you know, we don’t get evaluated very much. I need more feedback, but I…

your feet and I always say I more feedback. My feedback should come from my students. They’re the ones I’m serving and they’re the ones who are there every day. So ask your students and I love it when they say, ⁓ I love music. I love going to theater class and I say, tell me why. And so when I hear because Ms. So and so or Mr. I want to say their names, but I don’t know if they want to share their names. Mr. So and so are so amazing because, and I tell them, okay, what is it about that edgy? I love hearing that because I can work on that. I hear what you’re telling me about that teacher.

And I can, I can, I can thank you for sharing that feedback. Don’t take it personally. The other key is when you get feedback from kids, don’t ever take it personally. I mean, that’ll, that’ll end it. But, and I get some harsh feedback sometimes, but I love it. And I can grow from that. Harsher than anything my evaluator will tell me. ⁓ And I need that.

Tim:

Absolutely.

You don’t have a filter. They’re going to be.

Liz:

Get those middle schoolers to tell you what they feel in and then let them know this is the last step to getting feedback. Close that loop and say this is my action as an educator for what I’m going to do to improve on that, and this all connects to UDL to provide you with an option to be more interested in art or to understand the content more or to give you another option for showing what you know. And I’m going to do X, Y and Z and name something specific that they can hold you accountable for.

Tim:

I like that. Now I like that specificity and and yeah, just sort of the the ongoing ⁓ evolution of your teaching, you know, incorporating that feedback. That’s a really, really good idea. Final question for you. I always like to end the podcast with, you know, advice or takeaways. So I just want to ask you, like if teachers who are listening this conversation, if they walk away here with, with one big idea about UDL or, or an idea from the new edition of the book. Like what would you want that to be?

Liz:

I really think, no matter where you are in your UDL journey, if you’re just learning about it, or if you are then, you know, implementing UDL for decades, thinking about still making it sustainable. So UDL is a snowball that’s going to grow. And if it’s not sustainable, you’re not going to actually follow through with it and continue it from year to year. And you’re not going to change your mindset and your approach to designing instruction and the environment and reflecting on yourself.

if you don’t think it’s sustainable and if it’s not, which is one of the reasons why when I first learned about it, I thought I had to do all of these things. Like you don’t, you’re gonna make one change and provide one more option. Maybe you just include the take a break chair in your classroom. you already have one. ⁓ And maybe SEL is not your focus. Maybe it’s making sure you have culturally responsive artists as options for learning about the next project. It’s endless. ⁓ And that’s can see them overwhelming. So wherever you are, you’re gonna…

I think about it as a sustainable shift. It’s got to be something you can handle. And it’s got to be a small shift. It’s got to be a movement, but it doesn’t have to be a giant leap. And then we just keep making sustainable shifts. And so in my classroom today on my drive home from work, I’m reflecting on the barriers that came up and what went well. And then tomorrow how I can tweak tomorrow’s lesson that’s already planned, but to reduce and remove barriers that came up today. Yet.

knowing that 15 years ago, wow, that lesson would have not gone very, it would have gone bad very differently because I have a much bigger skill set now and I can’t wait for 15 years from now when I can look back and be like, wow, look at how much your UDL snowball has grown. ⁓

Tim:

Yeah, that’s awesome. No, I think that’s a great approach and a great way to frame it for everybody. So thank you for leaving us with that advice. So Liz, thank you so much. It’s been an awesome conversation.

Liz:

Thank you. And you can find the book on Amazon.

Tim:

I was just gonna ask, where do you want people to go to find it? And we’ll sure, yeah, we’ll make sure we put a link in the show notes.

I’ll put in the show notes.

Liz:

You can Google art for all. Liz Byron Loya, my last name. Art for all is a kind of common term. It’s art for all planning for variability in the visual art classroom. The whole title will get you right to the book on Amazon or you can get it through CAST. I think it’s the same price. ⁓ $15.

Tim:

Perfect. Perfect. Well worth it. So, all right, Liz, thank you so much.

Liz:

Thank so much. It was so great to speak with you again. And I hope we don’t have seven years go again before we get to talk.

Tim:

Yo, that can be our goal. I love it.

Liz:

That’s a good call. Thank you.

Tim:

All right, that will do it for our conversation with Liz. Thank you to her for coming on and I’m hoping that you, when listening to this conversation, found some takeaways for your classroom. Like I said in the intro, I love how approachable Liz makes universal design for learning. And just those reminders that it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can start small.

Just one or two changes and let it grow from there. And that’s the snowball effect that she mentioned. Hey, I also really appreciate the way she reframed how we think about barriers, you know, and how those barriers can be something we reflect on when we design our instruction, you know, when we’re creating multiple ways for students to engage and learn and express themselves.

You know, and those are things that don’t just help a few kids. We’re opening doors for everyone. And so if you can reflect on your teaching and think about feedback, maybe even invite student feedback, you know, listen to what our turn our learners, what our students are telling us, you know, it’s a really powerful way to build a more welcoming classroom. So we will link to the show.

link to her book in the show notes and everything else that is applicable to the conversation. So we will make sure that you can find anything you need. If you want to dive deeper again, her book is called Art for All: Planning for Variability in the Visual Arts Classroom. A new edition is out with a lot of good additions to the original. So thank you so much for listening to the conversation and just kind of keep in mind.

You know, those small shifts in our teaching can make a huge difference in how students are experiencing art in our classrooms.

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