Foundations of Inclusive Design Learning Package
This ten-course professional learning package offers an accessible, story-rich introduction to inclusive education. Designed for educators, leaders, and school-based teams, Foundations for Inclusive Design focuses on building the flexible, safe, and responsive conditions needed for all students to thrive.
These modules emphasize practical strategies that strengthen universal-level practices, such as co-regulation, multimodal instruction, flexible grouping, learner voice, and more. The goal is to equip educators with tools they can use right away, while also laying the groundwork for deeper systemic transformation.
Each course is built around narrative case studies drawn from Unity Pathways School Division, a fictional, yet deeply representative learning environment. These stories introduce users to a diverse set of schools, students, and educators, offering meaningful, grounded entry points into the complexity of inclusive design. Story is not a layer added to the learning; it is the foundation through which ideas are explored, challenged, and applied.
This package represents the first formal deliverables of The Belonging Project. It is intended to be field-tested with educators in real settings, with feedback informing future development. Early stage draft outlines and story arcs are included on this prototype website, offering a transparent look into both the learning design and the evolving ecosystem that supports it.
🔍 Strength-Based Practice: Seeing Students Differently
Strength-based practice shifts the educational lens from fixing deficits to recognizing and building on student assets. This course explores how to intentionally notice, name, and nurture strengths in ways that affirm student identity and increase engagement. Educators will learn to reframe challenges, design strength-based supports, and co-create learning environments where every student’s gifts are visible and valued.
🔍 Universal Design and Beyond: Designing for Human Variability
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides a powerful framework for creating inclusive environments that anticipate and embrace learner variability. This course introduces UDL principles while also exploring complementary practices that extend inclusive design beyond access toward equity, agency, and transformation. Participants will learn to plan proactively, reduce barriers, and offer flexible pathways for success that honour the diverse ways students learn and thrive.
🔍 Understanding Access Methods and Designing Access Points
Inclusive education requires that all students can access the curriculum, not only in theory, but in daily practice. This course explores how educators can recognize and design for diverse access needs, including physical, sensory, cognitive, communicative, and cultural considerations. Participants will learn how to identify student access methods, reduce environmental and instructional barriers, and create multiple, meaningful points of entry into learning for all.
🔍 Safety, Regulation, and Connection in Classrooms
This course provides educators with a foundational understanding of the neurobiology of regulation and its relationship to classroom learning. It explores how educators can design environments, routines, and responses that foster emotional safety and co-regulation. Participants will learn how to recognize dysregulation, reduce triggers, and support students’ access to learning through consistent, compassionate, and predictable practices.
🔍 Understanding the Escalation Cycle: Inclusive Responses to Dysregulation
This course explores the stages of the escalation cycle and offers inclusive, compassionate strategies to support students through stress, dysregulation, and crisis moments. Participants will learn how to recognize early signs of escalation, design environments that prevent triggers, and respond effectively during peak and recovery phases. The course emphasizes co-regulation, emotional safety, and relational repair as foundations for long-term change. Through narrative case studies and practical tools, educators will build capacity to support all learners, especially those most impacted by trauma, anxiety, or unmet needs, within safe and connected school environments.
🔍 Visual and Multimodal Teaching Strategies
This course explores how visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile modes can be integrated into instructional design to support access, engagement, and understanding for all learners. Multimodal strategies move beyond text-based approaches, offering students multiple ways to connect with and express learning. The course emphasizes how intentionally designed visuals and sensory-rich tools can enhance inclusivity for students with diverse needs, including language learners and students with disabilities.
🔍 Flexible Grouping and Learning Pathways
This course equips educators to design learning experiences that honour student differences through intentional, flexible grouping and adaptive learning pathways. Moving beyond fixed ability groups, participants will explore structures that allow learners to collaborate, lead, and receive support in fluid ways based on task, interest, and need. The course provides strategies for co-creating goals, offering choices, and ensuring all students experience success in inclusive environments.
🔍 Learner Agency and Voice: Moving Beyond Compliance
True inclusion goes beyond meeting requirements. It empowers students to participate meaningfully in their own learning. This course explores how to foster learner agency across a range of abilities and communication modes. Participants will examine strategies to support autonomy, choice, self-expression, and voice in classroom routines, planning, and assessment. Grounded in dignity and trust, this course reimagines what it means for students to lead their learning, even in the context of significant support needs.