This is a thoughtful conversation, and I appreciate Helen's pushback — she's right that the problem is poorly designed choice, not choice itself.

But I want to name something that's missing from the entire thread, including the original piece. Universal Design for Learning was not developed as a pedagogical philosophy about student preference or creative expression. It was developed as a framework for disability access. Its origins are in removing barriers for students with disabilities — cognitive, sensory, physical — so they could engage with the same rigorous content as their peers.

Somewhere along the way, UDL got unmoored from that foundation and rebranded as "offer students options." That is a real problem worth writing about. But the version of UDL being critiqued here isn't UDL — it's what happens when people adopt the language without understanding the framework. Critiquing that misapplication as though it represents the thing itself doesn't sharpen the conversation. It just gives people permission to dismiss a framework they never actually engaged with.

And when we have that debate without ever naming what UDL was actually built for and who it was built to serve, we erase disabled students and students with neurological differences from a conversation that belongs to them. Everyone here — the piece, the comments, the rebuttals — is debating pedagogy for the general classroom. The students UDL was designed to protect haven't come up once.