Towards a new multi-modality campus: unboxing Pandora’s box

ABSTRACT

Changing times force us to rethink our academic policies in higher education institutions. Traditional narrow views on students coming to campuses might be problematic for full inclusion. In this paper, we present an innovative model for student inclusion with the goal of producing a new framework for practice in higher education. We suggest re-examining the interactions between student characteristics while taking them into account as a whole and adopting a new holistic view of their identity-derived needs. The New Multimodality Diversified Campus (NMDC) model takes into account multiculturism, multiple technological literacies, multiple identities, multilingualism, multiple religions, and multiple disabilities. This model, based on multiple pedagogies, multiple curricula, multiple evaluations and multiple policies, serves as a compass to reach our desired destination, which is a fully inclusive campus. We present new observations about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a guiding tool that can be used in higher education, contextualising it in the framework of our model.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• multiculturism
• technology
• multilingualism
• learning and evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shira Soffer-Vital

Shira Soffer-Vital is a researcher and lecturer at Ono Academic College and also is an academic manager of the Master’s Degree Program in Education. She received her Ph.D. in Education from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and completed her postdoctoral research at the I-CORE program (The Israeli Centers of Research Excellence) in education. Her research focuses on teaching, learning, and evaluation in multicultural contexts in the digital era, social interaction and argumentation in learning and instructional contexts, and the role of student motivation and social- emotional learning in educational settings.

Idit Finkelstein

Idit Finkelstein Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education and Chair of the Teaching Committee of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ono Academic College. She holds a doctorate in educational counseling from Bar-Ilan University and a bachelor's degree in law. Her area of expertise is education and regulation in the technological era. Her research focuses on multicultural academic teaching, learning, and assessment; and on the development of multicultural social-emotional learning.