A disability studies approach to pedagogy directly informs my teaching. This pedagogical approach stresses how acts of giving, receiving, and giving back foster mutual insight and discovery. I first began to formulate such an approach during my undergraduate education while working as a tutor for students with disabilities: this experience taught me how the uniqueness of each student opens up possibilities for discovering together. Tutoring these students required me to think carefully about the role of the body in learning and writing. If, as scholarship in the field of disability studies argues, teachers too often ignore the embodied aspects of learning and treat students as detached minds, this experience allowed me very early in my teaching career to understand by contrast that all of us are uniquely embodied learners.
I am now able in my own courses to design learning environments accessible to the various learning styles of each student by drawing on an important insight of disability studies: pedagogy must always be engaged in a process of continual revision. Making learning accessible begins for me by foregrounding the voice of my students. I ask my students at the beginning of the semester to complete questionnaires that make clear their needs and how I can best address them. All aspects of my teaching, from the physical layout of my classroom to my lesson plans to the feedback I provide on assignments, follow from my careful consideration of these questionnaires. Students are asked to update these questionnaires throughout the semester allowing for my teaching to remain attuned to their evolving needs.
My course content reflects my commitment to inclusivity by emphasizing marginalized voices that exist outside the canon. Such a commitment has led me to be hired as Humanities Faculty Advisor to develop workshops that teach faculty at Niagara University how to use a disability studies approach to pedagogy to better incorporate diversity into their courses. My commitment in my teaching to social change allows my courses to feel connected to society at large. In my “Disability and Identity in American Literature” course, I make seemingly abstract concepts like “ableism” and “identity” and “stigma” concrete by having students consider how to eliminate the barriers to accessibility in the material and social environment. My students write essays that bring the insights of the “social model” of disability to bear on issues ranging from the privatization of healthcare to the immigrant experience of medicine to the remembrance of the AIDS crisis. Students leave my courses with a greater sense of how the humanistic inquiry that takes place in my courses relate to actual problems in society.
I strive above all to be a reflective practitioner. I have developed first-year writing courses for the University at Buffalo’s Educational Opportunity Program and Niagara University’s REAC3H program that improve the college readiness of high school students of color. Working with these students enabled me to better recognize the educational and economic barriers that can prevent students from underrepresented groups from reaching their academic potential. I believe that such an eagerness to learn and challenge myself is what allowed me to become a reflective practitioner: I continue to draw on my own teaching experiences, insights from the literary practices of my students, and emerging scholarship in composition and rhetoric as well as disability studies in order to remain an effective teacher of writing and literature in courses of all types and levels. Recently, for instance, I presented research at national conferences and designed a workshop for faculty on the emerging issue of using artificial intelligence in higher education.
I am now able in my own courses to design learning environments accessible to the various learning styles of each student by drawing on an important insight of disability studies: pedagogy must always be engaged in a process of continual revision. Making learning accessible begins for me by foregrounding the voice of my students. I ask my students at the beginning of the semester to complete questionnaires that make clear their needs and how I can best address them. All aspects of my teaching, from the physical layout of my classroom to my lesson plans to the feedback I provide on assignments, follow from my careful consideration of these questionnaires. Students are asked to update these questionnaires throughout the semester allowing for my teaching to remain attuned to their evolving needs.
My course content reflects my commitment to inclusivity by emphasizing marginalized voices that exist outside the canon. Such a commitment has led me to be hired as Humanities Faculty Advisor to develop workshops that teach faculty at Niagara University how to use a disability studies approach to pedagogy to better incorporate diversity into their courses. My commitment in my teaching to social change allows my courses to feel connected to society at large. In my “Disability and Identity in American Literature” course, I make seemingly abstract concepts like “ableism” and “identity” and “stigma” concrete by having students consider how to eliminate the barriers to accessibility in the material and social environment. My students write essays that bring the insights of the “social model” of disability to bear on issues ranging from the privatization of healthcare to the immigrant experience of medicine to the remembrance of the AIDS crisis. Students leave my courses with a greater sense of how the humanistic inquiry that takes place in my courses relate to actual problems in society.
I strive above all to be a reflective practitioner. I have developed first-year writing courses for the University at Buffalo’s Educational Opportunity Program and Niagara University’s REAC3H program that improve the college readiness of high school students of color. Working with these students enabled me to better recognize the educational and economic barriers that can prevent students from underrepresented groups from reaching their academic potential. I believe that such an eagerness to learn and challenge myself is what allowed me to become a reflective practitioner: I continue to draw on my own teaching experiences, insights from the literary practices of my students, and emerging scholarship in composition and rhetoric as well as disability studies in order to remain an effective teacher of writing and literature in courses of all types and levels. Recently, for instance, I presented research at national conferences and designed a workshop for faculty on the emerging issue of using artificial intelligence in higher education.