Each November, International Education Week brings together people from across NIU’s campus to celebrate international education and the programs that prepare American students for global citizenship. I’ve always enjoyed the International Recognition Reception, which honors outstanding contributions to the field. 

This year, I’m writing from the “down under” of that picture. For nearly a year, I’ve lived in Melbourne, Australia, and worked remotely for NIU. My workday starts as yours winds down. I’ve also been exchanging ideas with colleagues at the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (yes, you read that right), or HERDSA. HERDSA brings together people who teach, research, and support teaching and learning across Australia, New Zealand, and the wider Asia-Pacific region. 

I’ve Been the International Student Before 

So, I’m the international colleague now. I’m the one in a different time zone, with another different accent, reading campus news from 10,000 miles away. It’s not the first time. More than two decades ago, I started community college in the U.S. as an ESL student. I was a new immigrant to the U.S.A. and the first in my family to go to college. I didn’t know what office hours were for. I never asked a question in class; in my Vietnamese tradition, interrupting the professor is disrespectful, and I also didn’t want the other kids to laugh at my accent. Was I labeled as one of the disengaged students? You bet. Back then, I learned the rules of US higher ed by guessing. This time, I know enough to notice them. 

Both experiences have changed how I think about the people and things we call “international” at NIU. Our international students and colleagues. Our multilingual students. Our first-generation students, many of whom come from immigrant families and grew up speaking more than one language. (Illinois tracks English learner status carefully, district by district, language by language, all the way from kindergarten through grade twelve, but stops once students graduate high school.) More than half of NIU students are first-generation; they enter universities like NIU, now a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, with unwritten rules they may or may not know. They also bring lived experiences (indigenous knowledge) and local perspectives the Eurocentric higher education systems don’t always make room for. 

Small Things with Enormous Impacts 

Living in Melbourne, I keep noticing small things with enormous impacts. Bakery shelves offer gingerbread people, not gingerbread men. People talk about their partner, not husband or wife. Schools address carers, not fathers/mothers or parents. Scholarly discussions are around first-year students, not freshmen. University and public events open with an Acknowledgment of Country, naming the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people whose land we’re gathered on. You will have one of the best Italian-style espressos in Melbourne, and you can count on finding dim sim^[1]or banh mi^[2] at pubs, school/hospital canteens, and grocery stores. These norms, except the espresso, likely start national debates in the US, but here they are ordinary. They’re everywhere, and they’re intentional.  

What surprised me is how much I’d taken for granted back home. (It took over twenty years and living 10,000 miles away for me to realize the U.S. is now my home.) Things I once saw as simply “how college works” now look like choices. Someone made them. Someone could make them differently. Guess what? On our campus, we are that someone. In your course, in your classroom, you are that someone. I am not qualified to tell you what choices we could make to bring diversity, inclusion, and global citizenship beyond a vision and into our daily lives in teaching, mentoring, organizing events, and providing support.  

So this November International Education Week, I want to share what I’ve been noticing. Not a list of what Australia gets right. Just an invitation to look at our own defaults the way I’ve had to from far away, and see what we can choose differently. 

The Chemistry Exam That Worked 

One thing did work for me back then. When a chemistry exam problem included a chemical equation or an image depicting the chemical change alongside the text, I could solve it easily with limited English. The chemical symbols and molecule models didn’t depend on English – they are a universal scientific language. Nobody planned that for me. But you can plan it for your students. When possible, include text with equations, diagrams, or images, and more students can show what they know. And that, my friends, is principle two of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in action: multiple means of representation, the “what” of learning.  

Universal Design for Learning’s name and central intuition come from Universal Design in architecture, where the premise was that physical environments could be designed from the outset to be usable by the widest possible range of people rather than retrofitted afterward.

Translated into instruction by CAST, UDL holds that curricula should be proactively designed to be flexible rather than adapted reactively once students encounter barriers. Its three principles — engagement, representation, and action and expression — are grounded in research on learning, and its nine guidelines name practices instructors already recognize: offering material in more than one format, scaffolding complex tasks, building in choice, and supporting disciplinary vocabulary and notation explicitly. 

What UDL 3.0 Adds: Culture and Systems 

Part of what makes the 2024 release of UDL 3.0 worth a look is that it widens what variability means. Earlier versions emphasized how brains differ: how learners perceive information, sustain effort, and plan and act. Version 3.0 keeps that cognitive dimension and adds two more: cultural variability, the identities, languages, and lived experiences students bring; and systemic variability, the structural barriers built into learning environments, including those rooted in bias and exclusion. The revision also shifted UDL’s objective from developing “expert learners” toward cultivating learner agency, and removed the educator-centered verb “provide” throughout, thus positioning design as something educators and learners might undertake together. Those three dimensions are also what a student encounters when they enter an unfamiliar academic culture, which is precisely the experience a globally oriented education should prepare them for. 

The evidence is suggestive rather than settled. Research with international students in the UK has found that UDL-informed design helped them navigate unfamiliar academic conventions. However, flexible design works best paired with culturally responsive teaching rather than standing on its own.  

What Inclusion Feels Like from the Start 

I presented at the HERDSA conference in Singapore this past July, and after two decades on U.S. college campuses, I felt like a student in an unfamiliar academic culture once again.

The conference opened with a lion dance. As an Asian American, I was astonished and overjoyed. Even Australasian and New Zealand colleagues who don’t share my Asian identity were in awe of the performing arts, the artists’ skills, the vibrant costumes, and the music. Over the next few days, we all enjoyed Singaporean food that reflected the region. Gluten-free and vegan options weren’t an accommodation. They’re part of the cuisine, and they’re delicious.

Keynote speakers came from Australia and Singapore, including a well-known educational colleague who recently moved from Brown University to the University of Sydney. Sessions covered a wide range of topics and formats. The organization itself was structured around morning and afternoon tea breaks, cultural immersion opportunities, various structured social events, and quiet self-reflection spaces. I had lively, productive conversations with colleagues from Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and, of course, Australia.  

Nobody stood up and announced that the conference was inclusive. There was no statement on a slide. No poster sign saying BELONGING or INCLUSION. It was simply in the design, from the start. It was Universal Design for Learning if it had a life of its own.  

Designed In, Not Added On 

In my experience in U.S. higher education, inclusion often shows up later in the process. A heritage month celebration or an ethnic-minority resource center is well-meant, but it’s added on, and students can tell the difference. 

International Education Week is about preparing students for global citizenship. But every student who walks into an unfamiliar academic culture — from Saigon, Vietnam, from a Chicagoland home where English wasn’t spoken, from a family where nobody has gone to university before — is already doing some of the things we say we’re preparing them for.

So, here’s the question I am carrying into this November International Education Week: what design choices can we make from the start, not as an add-on, in our courses, our classroom, and every interaction with students and one another? 

Notes

1. Dim sim (not dim sum) is an iconic Chinese-Australian takeaway (to-go) snack. ↩
2. Banh mi (literally means wheat bread) is the iconic Vietnamese sandwich inspired by the French baguette ↩

References 

CAST. (2024). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. https://udlguidelines.cast.org  

Connell, B. R., Jones, M., Mace, R., Mueller, J., Mullick, A., Ostroff, E., Sanford, J., Steinfeld, E., Story, M., & Vanderheiden, G. (1997). The principles of universal design. Center for Universal Design, North Carolina State University. 

Meyer, A., Rose, D. H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. CAST Professional Publishing. 

Ojeme, M., [co-authors to confirm]. (2026). The sociocultural context of international students’ experience in the UK: Exploring the merits and limits of universal design for learning. Innovations in Education and Teaching International. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2026.2665708  

Qu, X., & Cross, B. (2023). UDL for inclusive higher education—What makes group work effective for diverse international students in UK? International Journal of Educational Research, 123, Article 102277. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2023.102277  

Timuş, N., Bartlett, M. E., Bartlett, J. E., Ehrlich, S., & Babutsidze, Z. (2024). Fostering inclusive higher education through universal design for learning and inclusive pedagogy – EU and US faculty perceptions. Higher Education Research & Development, 43(2), 473–487. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2023.2234314