‘Belonging should not mean only that students feel welcome’

In the South Korean TV drama series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Woo Young-woo is an autistic attorney whose brilliance is visible to the viewer but consistently obscured by others’ assumptions about competence and normality. She uses the word kkakdugi to describe how others see her. Literally, kkakdugi is cubed radish kimchi. Socially, it can also mean the spare player in a game. Someone allowed in but not treated as a real participant.

Present. Peripheral. In the game but not counted.

I keep returning to that image, because universities create the educational equivalent of kkakdugi more often than we admit. A student can be enrolled, registered in the learning management system and explicitly invited to participate. But their course may still be built around narrow assumptions about how a normal student learns, speaks, writes, manages time, asks for help or shows confidence. That student is a fiction. This one is there. They are just not fully counted.

This is the gap that accessibility work, however well intentioned, does not close on its own. The language of belonging, by itself, also leaves it open. I agree with the conversations that reframe accessibility as belonging. However, we still need to ask whether the learning experience truly works for students or whether students remain expected to adapt to it. Belonging should not mean only that students feel welcome; it should mean that, whatever their ways of learning and contributing, students are positioned as legitimate participants, not merely accommodated.

The question, then, is not only who is missing from our courses; it is who is present but kkakdugi.

• Spotlight guide: Make learning accessible to all in higher education
• A university educators’ guide to universal design for learning
• Building equitable learning pathways in higher education

As a fellow and a member of the planning committee with the universal design for learning (UDL) fellows programme at the University of British Columbia, I began to understand UDL less as a set of techniques and more as a discipline of perception: a habit of noticing barriers before a student has to disclose, struggle or prove their need. That reframing changed the questions I brought to course design. Three matter most, and each names a different face of the same problem:

• Who is present but not treated as a contributor?
• Who is working hard but cannot read the course’s hidden curriculum?
• Who is given freedom but not enough structure to use it well?

Who is present but not treated as a contributor?

If participation in a live session depends on speaking quickly, some students are visible but peripheral. Silence is not always disengagement; it may reflect language confidence, processing time, anxiety, cultural norms, neurodiversity or uncertainty about what counts as a useful contribution. Any of these can make a student kkakdugi in a discussion-based course without anyone noticing.

Offering more than one route into discussion does not dilute the conversation. It stops one mode of participation from being treated as the only evidence that a student is there. Chat, shared documents, discussion boards, audio reflections and small-group preparation before full-group sharing can all serve that purpose. The goal is not to remove live discussion. The goal is to stop it functioning as the sole gate into the course.

Who is working hard but cannot read the course’s hidden curriculum?

When several students misunderstand the same assignment, the issue is rarely effort or ability. The task likely relies on expectations that were never made visible: what a critical reflection, a strong argument or an evidence-based response looks like in this specific course and discipline. In other words, it rests on a hidden curriculum. The same blindness extends to time. A student may access every video, reading and assignment but not know how to pace the work, what to prioritise or how one week’s task connects to the next.

Both problems share a cause and a fix. Some students arrive already knowing how to read academic cues and course rhythms; others are left to infer them. That gap is not a gap in intelligence. It is a gap in prior exposure. Annotated examples, success criteria and a predictable weekly structure showing what to do first and what can wait make the course’s logic legible rather than assumed. This is not administrative tidying. It is the difference between a course that teaches and a course that filters, and it is also one of the most unevenly distributed forms of help; students with stronger academic networks or prior schooling can reconstruct this logic informally. Those without that network or schooling cannot.

Who is given freedom but not enough structure to use it well?

Choice without structure can become another unspoken demand. A student told they may choose any topic, format or approach must also know how to choose well, a skill that often correlates with exactly the prior academic experience that less-represented students are less likely to have. The same is true of timing. Students who will not disclose a need until they are struggling or who will not realise they are off-track until the final submission are not poorly motivated. They are working without the checkpoints that would let them see the problem in time to fix it.

Structure resolves both. Two or three formats with clear boundaries, sample topics and an early feedback checkpoint do not reduce autonomy; they make it usable. A short topic proposal, an outline or a low-stakes draft turns support into part of the learning design rather than a rescue offered after difficulty has already become failure.

A way of noticing, not a checklist

These three questions are not a checklist. They are a way of noticing how a course distributes recognition: who is invited to speak, who understands the rules, who receives guidance early enough to use it, and who is treated as capable only when they perform in familiar ways.

I return often to Attorney Woo. Her brilliance was always there. What changed, when others began to see her more fully, was not her capacity but their perception and the conditions around her participation. 

That is the discipline higher education needs to develop, not only towards accessibility, not only towards belonging, but towards full participation. The next time we design a course, or review one, the most important question may no longer be only whether the materials are accessible. It may be who in this course is already brilliant and simply not yet counted.

Sunah Cho is the faculty liaison for the Sauder School of Business in the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology and a sessional lecturer in the Master of Educational Technology Technology programme at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

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