In 1945 a disabled World War II veteran named Jack Fisher petitioned the city of Kalamazoo, Mich., to make cuts in the street curbs in order to allow him and other wheelchair users to navigate the city more easily. Fortunately for Fisher, the son of Kalamazoo’s city manager also used a wheelchair, and so Fisher’s arguments found a sympathetic audience. Curb cuts were introduced around the city, and thus was born what has become a ubiquitous feature of our built environment today.
In the decades that followed Fisher’s advocacy, as curb cuts became more commonplace, it became clear they were not just for wheelchair users. They proved a welcoming feature of the environment for parents wheeling children about in strollers, for senior citizens who had trouble with stairs and steps, for people temporarily on crutches, for bike riders and skateboarders and more.
What began as an accommodation for people with disabilities became a design strategy that had almost universal appeal.
The trajectory of curb cuts — from specific accommodation to omnipresent design feature — is an oft-told story in the literature of Universal Design (UD), which seeks to create and modify physical spaces in ways that take into account the diversity of human bodies and minds. The educational equivalent of that theory is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which likewise argues that faculty members should take the diversity of learners into consideration up front as we design our courses. And if we do, we will need to make fewer accommodations at the request of specific students, because inclusive design practices help all learners succeed.
Read more: A Welcoming Classroom – The Chronicle of Higher Education