Teaching

This section includes the undergraduate and graduate courses I have taught, other teaching experiences I have had, provides a few selected sample syllabi, and my teaching philosophy. The Honors section includes a list of teaching honors or awards I have received.

Undergraduate Courses

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Graduate Courses

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Teaching Philosophy

Download my Teaching Philosophy as a PDF

My teaching continues to be driven by a philosophy of enabling that takes as its practical and theoretical ground "Universal Design for Learning" (UDL). Following on the principles for UDL, I endeavor in my classrooms to provide for: multiple ways of representing the course content and form so that students can access the material and knowledge in various ways; multiple means of expression so that students have viable alternatives for demonstrating what they know (to me, their instructor, as well as to peers and self); and multiple means of engagement so that they can best align what they are learning with their own interests while they make and meet not only my, but their own, challenges and motivation.

The teaching I do is also grounded in interdisciplinary approaches and content. The two fields I now do most of my teaching in-deaf studies and disability studies-are comprised of a patchwork of disciplinary approaches that seek to understand the medical, historical, linguistic, sociological, philosophical, religious, literary, and cultural experience of "being deaf" or "being disabled." All too often, however, this experience has only been explored in one of those dimensions or disciplines at a time without benefit of cross-disciplinary conversations. In my classrooms, I take up (and even make up) that conversation. Admittedly, my heart is in the humanities, and I am most at home when I am teaching about disability or deafness from a philosophical, historical, or literary perspective. Even so, I work to make myself not so comfortable at home that I forget or forego the wider experience of disability or deafness.

The six teaching goals I set for myself at the time of my tenure (in 1998) have been largely fulfilled. I wanted first to do more team-teaching or parallel teaching and I have been able to do that with colleagues here at OSU as well as in the field at large on several occasions. Second, I wanted to work more with undergraduate students on research projects and I have now published, presented, and shared research with them as well as with some of my graduate students. Third, I had wanted to continue my work in teaching and writing creative non-fiction, and I have been successful in that goal as I designed a new (computer-classroom) course on "disability autobiography and documentary" and also hosted a successful graduate workshop on "Teaching, Reading, and Writing Disability Autobiography." Fourth, I indicated my interest in creating more physically and intellectually accessible and inviting classrooms-moving toward an "entire enabling university" for "differently disabled students"-and my curricular development in both the undergraduate and graduate disability studies programs, along with the American Sign Language program, has angled toward that interest. Fifth, I documented my desire to integrate disability studies more broadly into English studies and the humanities; the new disability studies courses now offered in English (277, 597, 891), along with the "Gender and Disability" course I have offered in Women's Studies, have achieved this desire. Finally, I wanted to find more sophisticated and challenging ways of meeting students in the space between what I know and what they know; adopting UDL as a teaching philosophy has served me well in this goal.

Looking to the future yet again, I want most of all to do two things in my teaching. First, I want create even more intellectual and physical access for students with disabilities. In fact, I aim for no less than to make Ohio State the destination "research one" university for students with disabilities both nationally and internationally. Second, I aim to engage more global disability studies work and issues. I would like to teach disability studies abroad, particularly in underdeveloped nations, while I would also like to build Ohio State's reputation as a global "disability studies" center so that scholars from around the globe who are interested in teaching and researching in disability studies might come here to learn from, and with, us.

Other Teaching Experiences

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