Marrying ‘universal’ neurodiversity and Universal Design for Learning to enhance inclusive pedagogy: A case study from the primary school geography classroom

Irene Leach, Deputy Headteacher, Weatherfield Academy, Bedfordshire, UK Dominic Griffiths, Visiting Research Fellow, Faculty of Health and Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Introduction In this article, we take forward some of the ideas presented in an earlier Impact piece (Griffiths, 2020), which presented the case for using ‘neurodiversity’ as a framework for looking beyond the (SEND) labels that some learners attract, to build a more individually responsive and flexible repertoire of teaching approaches. We recap some key points about what the term ‘neurodiversity’ can mean and look at how it might be applied as a theoretical underpinning for a ‘Universal Design for Learning’ (UDL) approach to inclusive lesson planning and teaching (Meyer et al., 2014). To illustrate this, we offer the example of a UDL-based primary school geography lesson. We hope to show how the approaches used in this case study example might be more widely applied to inclusive te