By  Anmol Sahni, Emory University

Last semester at the Emory writing center, I had one of those tutoring sessions that just felt… off.

It began the usual way: greeting the writer, setting an agenda, and planning to read the draft together. These practices often work well—but that day, something wasn’t clicking. The student wasn’t disengaged, but I sensed a kind of resistance, or maybe fatigue, that the standard approach wasn’t addressing.

A few minutes in, I paused and asked:

“What would actually be most helpful for you right now?”

Everything shifted. The writer didn’t want to read aloud; instead, they needed space to talk through their ideas first. The writing on the page was still forming, and what they most needed was time to think. Once we switched gears, the whole session opened up.

Walking home afterward, I kept thinking of a line often attributed to the Irish novelist James Joyce:

“In the particular is contained the universal.”

Joyce famously wrote by staying close to one city—his dear Dublin. Joyce believed that by capturing the heartbeat of one place with enough precision, he could speak to the experiences of places everywhere. Universality, for him, didn’t come from generalization but from deep attention to the particular.

Joyce wasn’t thinking about writing centers, of course, but his words helped me see what had gone wrong. I wasn’t paying attention to the particularities and specific learning sensibilities of the tutee and the human in front of me. I was following a routine I assumed worked for everyone. That, I realized, was the opposite of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

That day, UDL reminded me that the universal emerges not from one fixed method but from designing environments flexible enough for different learners to thrive.

What UDL Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)

Early in my tutoring, I made the mistake of assuming that a routine that works for most counted as “universal.” But UDL pushes us in the opposite direction.

UDL, which has roots in architecture through concepts like curb cuts, is built on a different premise: Design flexibility from the beginning, so multiple pathways exist before a learner encounters difficulty. My practice of UDL is informed by such a framework of flexibility, particularly as articulated in the post “Developing a Multimodal Toolkit for Greater Writing Center Accessibility.” (For deeper engagement, the foundational scholarship of Dembsey, Hitt, Kiedaisch and Dinitz, Zammarelli and Beebe, and Hsy and Godden is highly recommended.) Below is a snapshot of some of the UDL principles:

UDL is not:

• one practice applied the same way every time
• accommodations that appear only after a student struggles
• “consistency” that overshadows responsiveness

Instead, UDL asks us to:

• design choice from the beginning
• offer multiple options for engaging and expressing ideas
• assume diversity rather than uniformity

So, instead of starting every session by default with reading aloud, a UDL-oriented opening might sound like:

“How do you want to work with your writing today? You can read aloud, I can read, we can read silently, or we can talk through ideas first.”

In that “off” session, asking the student to read aloud wasn’t a UDL move. A UDL move would have been to offer options before settling on the method. When flexibility is the starting point—not the backup plan—sessions become richer, more collaborative, and more humane.

A Moment of Negotiation: When Universal Meets the Particular

October was one of the busiest months of the semester—deadlines piling up, last-minute appointments stacking on the schedule, everyone running on adrenaline and coffee. I was stretched thin myself, teaching, tutoring, and preparing for my PhD exams.

That morning, a student in my undergraduate course came to me with a doctor’s note and an apology. They had been struggling with severe insomnia but hadn’t yet completed the university’s formal accessibility process. Technically, the standard policy required official paperwork before extensions could be granted.

But as disability studies scholar Alison Kafer reminds us, learning sometimes happens on “crip time”—a time scale that honors the unpredictability of bodyminds. I granted the extension. It preserved dignity, compassion, and learning.

This same principle of flexible, humane response guided me later that day in the writing center while working with a visibly exhausted tutee. In the past, I might have slipped into a familiar rhythm—build rapport, set an agenda, read the draft aloud.

But familiarity is not the same as universality. UDL would have me design choice from the start.

So, I asked:

“How would you like to work with your draft today? I can read, you can read, we can skim, or we can talk through ideas first.”

The student exhaled and asked me to read. That small, flexible choice rebalanced the room. The session resumed on the ground that belonged to them.

UDL taught me that access doesn’t happen only in policy documents. It happens in the relationship between tutor and writer, between circumstance and thoughtful response.

Even the writing center itself is not a neutral space. On crowded days—with conversations overlapping, chairs moving, and keyboards clicking—the room can feel overwhelming, especially for students who need quieter environments. While policies at some writing centers, including ours at Emory, rightly keep sessions within the center, flexibility can still exist in small ways:

• choosing a quieter corner
• offering a Zoom session later
• adjusting pacing and modality

That day reminded me: accessibility is not a checklist. It is a conversation—an ongoing negotiation between universal principles and the lived realities of learners.

When the Script Doesn’t Fit

Long before I knew UDL as a theory, I experienced its necessity.

When I first arrived in the U.S. from India for graduate school, I felt disoriented. The academic culture was different: classes expected spontaneous argumentation, oral analysis, and confident participation. I kept waiting for someone to tell me the “right” answer, when the expectation was that I would formulate one.

Paul Kei Matsuda calls this classroom landscape the “myth of linguistic homogeneity”—the assumption that all students are fluent in one stable form of academic English and learning modality. For many multilingual students, this assumption can feel isolating (Price; Milu; Canagarajah)

UDL helped shift that.

In a graduate pedagogy seminar, our first assignment could be completed in several formats:

• a written lesson plan
• a short instructional video
• a brief teaching demonstration

I chose the video. It allowed me to rehearse, move at my own pace, and speak in ways that felt authentic. For the first time that semester, I felt assessed on what I knew—not on how smoothly I could perform someone else’s English and ideas of learning.

UDL wasn’t about lowering standards. It was about making learning possible.

Bringing UDL into My Teaching and Tutoring

Because of that experience, I now design flexibility from the beginning. In my writing courses, students choose the format for their final literacy reflection:

• a traditional essay
• a multimedia project
• a podcast or audio piece
• a digital story

They also have the option to code-mesh—to intentionally blend languages and rhetorics as part of their scholarly argument. One student moved between Spanish and English to narrate childhood memories and analyze them academically. The linguistic shifts themselves became part of the meaning.

If the assignment had been single-mode and single-language, that sophistication would never have emerged.

UDL makes room for students to be themselves without asking permission first.

What This Looks Like on a Tuesday Afternoon

Here are small UDL-driven changes I’ve begun adopting in tutoring:

At the start of a session, asking:

“How do you like to work with drafts? Reading aloud, silent reading, me reading, or talking first?”

During revision

Offering multiple modes:

• annotating directly
• taking notes separately
• generating ideas orally
• brainstorming examples before writing

With multilingual writers

“Are there places in the draft you’d like to keep in your home language? Let’s talk about how to make that work rhetorically while meeting your professor’s expectations.”

With space and energy

Noticing:

• lighting
• noise
• seating choice
• need for breaks
• flexibility within policies

We can’t remove every barrier. But we can shift from:

“Here’s how we do things.”

to:

“How can we make this work for you today?”

That shift matters.

The Particular and the Universal

Joyce reached the universal by giving himself fully to Dublin.

UDL is the same. We reach communal access not by finding one routine that works for everyone, but by:

• paying close attention to each writer
• designing meaningful choices
• assuming plurality rather than uniformity
• trusting that writers know something about what they need

I don’t get this right every time. My routines do tend to fall back to comfort, if truth be told. They even feel efficient for most of my sessions. But every time I pause, make space, and invite choice, the session becomes more human, more collaborative, and more real.

So, I’ll leave you with this:

• What’s one tutoring routine you’ve recently reconsidered?
• And what choice might you offer in its place to foster UDL?

I’d love to hear what you’re learning and how you are tutoring! You can reach me at: anmol.sahni@emory.edu

Works Cited

Canagarajah, Suresh. “Decolonizing Academic Writing Pedagogies for Multilingual Students.” TESOL Journal, vol. 58, 2024, pp. 280–306. Wiley, https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.3231.

Cecil-Lemkin, Ellen, and Lisa Marvel Johnson. “Developing a Multimodal Toolkit for Greater Writing Center Accessibility.” Another Word, University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center, 20 Apr. 2021, https://dept.writing.wisc.edu/blog/multimodaltoolkit/

Dembsey, J. M. “Naming Ableism in the Writing Center.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 39, no. 1, 2019, pp. 45–66.

Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1982.

Godden, Richard H., and Jonathan Hsy. “Universal Design and Its Discontents.” Disrupting the Digital Humanities, edited by Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel, Punctum Books, 2018, pp. 91–116.

Hitt, Allison. “Access for All: The Role of Dis/Ability in Multiliteracy Centers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Kiedaisch, Jean, and Sue Dinitz. “Changing Notions of Difference in the Writing Center: The Possibilities of Universal Design.” The Writing Center Journal, vol. 27, no. 2, 2007, pp. 39-59. 

Matsuda, Paul Kei. “The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition.” College English, vol. 68, no. 6, 2006, pp. 637–651.

Milu, Esther. “Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy.” College English, vol. 83, no. 6, July 2021, pp. 415–441.

Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Zammarelli, Miranda, and John Beebe. “A Physical Approach to the Writing Center: Spatial Analysis and Interface Design.” The Peer Review: A Journal for Writing Center Scholarship, vol. 8, no. 1, 2024.

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