Course design teams often rely too heavily on academic entry requirements, inadvertently building curricula for an idealised student cohort that mirrors their own background. To address this structural problem, the Student Inclusion Model (derived from the work of Taylor and May) provides a framework for understanding the diversity of actual learners. It challenges educators to systematically analyse four critical dimensions of student preconditions: circumstantial, educational, cultural, and dispositional.
To operationalise this theory, teams can utilise The Card Game (downloadable from the Substack), a facilitated activity that surfaces implicit biases and unexamined assumptions before substantive design work begins. Evidence demonstrates that proactive, inclusive curriculum design is significantly more time- and cost-efficient than providing reactive accommodations after the fact. Ultimately, this model establishes the foundation needed to develop actionable student personas.
Read the full brief on my Substack to learn how to implement these strategies and design for your actual cohort.
